Watch: Happy Birthday, Marites — Santa Monica Beach, August 16, 2005
Watch: Happy Birthday, Marites — Santa Monica Beach, August 16, 2005
Home video from an August afternoon on the sand: Tess turns 33 with Tita Gigi and our three kids by her side.
We got to Santa Monica Beach just after noon. By 3:15 that afternoon we were packing up the towels and heading home — a short window, the kind that doesn't feel like an occasion while it's happening. It was Tess turning 33 that day, and Tita Gigi came along, and so did the whole crew: Nica, not yet five; JianCarlo, three; Chesca, barely past her first birthday, still new enough to the world that the sand itself was the main event.
This video is what's left of that afternoon. No plan, no party favors, just a family on a beach in Southern California doing what Filipino families in the diaspora have always done with a birthday and a free Saturday: show up for each other, camera rolling almost as an afterthought.
Santa Monica Beach has long been a gathering point for Southern California's Filipino-American families — close enough to Los Angeles' Historic Filipinotown and the South Bay's Filipino communities that a birthday afternoon on that sand is its own small diaspora tradition, repeated across thousands of families who never met each other.
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Kapamilya — kah-pah-MEEL-yah
Literally "one who is family" — ka- (shared identity) plus pamilya (family). It's the word for the people who show up on an ordinary Saturday because you're theirs, no invitation required.
Marites, Atet — Tess by Any Name
Tess answered to a few names inside the family. Her mother, Mama Helen, called her Marites sometimes — short for Maria Theresa, her given name — and to others she was Atet. Different names, same person, same birthday: August 16, which she shared with Mama Helen herself.
By 2005, Tess and I had been married five years. Nica was our oldest, JianCarlo our second, and Chesca had arrived the year before, that July. A Santa Monica afternoon was a small thing to plan around three kids under five, but it happened, and Tita Gigi — Diana Perseveranda, my aunt — was there for it too.
Three Hours on the Sand
The video doesn't run long, and neither did the outing. In and out in a little over three hours — enough time for the kids to get properly sandy, for Tess to get properly celebrated, and for Tita Gigi to be exactly the extra pair of hands three kids under five require. Watching it back now, the ordinariness is the whole point. Nobody in that footage knew what they had. That's usually how it works.
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Founder & Editor
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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