Share Your Story
Share Your Story
Every Filipino American journey is a brick in our collective history. This is how you add yours.
PinoyBuilt is an independent Filipino American publication and a permanent archive — from California to Chicago, from Texas to Hawaii, and everywhere Filipinos have built something. It is edited by one person in Vallejo, California, and one person cannot tell 4.6 million stories. That is why we publish contributors — first-person essays, community histories, family stories, photo essays, and diaspora perspectives from Filipino Americans here and around the world.
You do not need to be a professional writer. You need a story that matters and the willingness to tell it honestly. The editor will work with you to shape it.
Before you pitch, read the two sections that actually bind you — who can write and rights and payment. They are short, they are plain, and they are the whole deal. Nothing on this page is a formality.
Who Can Write
Anyone in the diaspora, anywhere in the world, at any stage of their family's migration. First generation, 1.5, second, third. Manila-born or Vallejo-born. You do not have to have a Filipino last name and you do not have to speak Tagalog.
Contributors must be 18 or over at the time of publication. The pitch form asks. This is not a formality we can waive for a strong piece.
PinoyBuilt is building a student correspondent track with a proper parent and guardian permission process: first name and last initial only, a photo that is always optional, both the student and the parent reading the final version before it runs, and the right to take the piece down at any time until the writer turns 25.
That process is not finished, so the track is closed and we do not accept pitches from writers under 18. An archive is permanent, and a sixteen-year-old cannot fully weigh what permanent means. Until we can protect that properly, we would rather publish nothing.
Teachers, advisers, and parents who want to know when it opens: write to info@pinoybuilt.com.
What We Publish
Stories that document the history, identity, and lived experience of the Filipino diaspora. These are the shapes that work best.
How your family got here. The flight. The sponsor. The first apartment. The culture shock. The balikbayan box. Whether your family arrived in 1965 or 2015, the migration story is the foundation of the Fil-Am experience — and no two are the same.
Are you a Filipino nurse? The child of one? Did your family come through the healthcare pipeline? The Filipino nurse story is one of the most consequential and least told chapters of American healthcare. We want yours.
If your family's American story started with the Navy — stewards, sailors, officers — or with any branch of service, it belongs in the archive. From Mare Island to San Diego to Virginia Beach, the military pipeline built Filipino America.
Do you know the story of Filipinos in your city or town? A neighborhood, a parish, a cultural organization, a festival? Local histories are the foundation of our pillar pages. We want the places nobody covers, not just California and Hawaii.
Filipinos in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, London, Toronto, Sydney — the story does not stop at the U.S. border. If you are part of the global diaspora, your perspective belongs here.
Have you run for office, organized your neighborhood, worked a campaign, or been on the receiving end of immigration policy? These are the stories the mainstream press almost never carries.
Do you document Filipino American life with a camera? We publish photo essays — community events, family milestones, neighborhood portraits, cultural celebrations. Your images are the record.
What does it mean to be Fil-Am right now? Mixed heritage, generational distance, Tagalog at home and English everywhere else, the model minority myth, the invisibility. These are the essays that start arguments worth having.
How It Works
Two ways in. Take whichever fits where you are.
Option A: Pitch first (recommended)
A pitch is two or three sentences about the story you want to tell. You do not need a finished draft, an outline, or a writing sample.
Option B: Send a finished draft
info@pinoybuilt.com — subject line: PinoyBuilt Submission, then your title.
Include your full name, your city and state or country, a two or three sentence bio, and the piece itself as a Google Doc link or an attached Word or PDF file. Original photos welcome — JPG, at least 1200 pixels wide, with captions. Reply within fourteen days.
The pitch form and info@pinoybuilt.com are the only two intake channels. Please do not pitch by direct message on Instagram, Facebook, or X. A submission thread that lives in a DM is a record that does not survive, and a piece we publish in 2026 needs a paper trail that still makes sense in 2070.
Guidelines
Length. 800 to 1,500 words. Photo essays can run shorter with five or more images.
Voice. First person encouraged. Be specific — names, streets, dates, the make of the car. The best Fil-Am stories are the ones only you could write.
Tone. Honest, grounded, proud. PinoyBuilt is opinionated and historically informed. It is not tabloid, not clickbait, and not a rant.
Photos. Original photography strongly preferred, with captions. At least 1200 pixels wide. You keep ownership.
Language. English, with Tagalog, Bisaya, Ilocano, Bikol, Kapampangan and any other Philippine language woven in freely. Give a short gloss the first time if a reader would need it.
We do not italicize Philippine-language words. Not in body copy, not in captions, not in vocabulary boxes. Italics mark a word as foreign, and on this site kapwa and balikbayan and lola are not foreign. Write them plain. If your draft italicizes them, we will take the italics out.
Press releases and promotional content. Plagiarized or unattributed work. Content promoting hate or discrimination. Fabricated or unverifiable claims, names, dates, or numbers. Partisan personal attacks — we go hard at power and policy, but we do not name-call.
A generated draft passed off as original reporting or as lived memoir, and any AI-produced quotation, statistic, or source. See below.
For research, outlining, translation help, or copy-editing — fine, and the form asks you to say so. An honest yes does not count against your pitch.
What cannot run is a machine-written memory. This site is an archive that people's grandchildren will read as fact. A fabricated detail in it is not a style problem; it is a hole in someone's family record.
Your lived experience is yours and we do not audit it. The dates, places, laws, statistics, and quotations around it get checked before we build, every time.
If you have a financial, professional, or family stake in what you are writing about, say so in the pitch. Disclosed, it almost always still runs with a one-line note. Concealed, it does not run at all. That is the entire difference.
Rights & Payment
You keep the copyright. To your words and to your photographs. PinoyBuilt does not take ownership of anyone's work.
You give us a permanent, non-exclusive license to publish the piece, keep it in the archive, and share it on our own channels with your name on it. Permanent matters because this is an archive — a license that expires leaves a hole in the record twenty years from now.
Non-exclusive means you can republish it anywhere, any time, without asking. We ask for a credit line and a link back. We ask; we do not require.
You are not paid. PinoyBuilt is an independent one-person desk and does not pay contributors. There is no rate coming, and we will not dress that up with traffic numbers.
You can take it down. If a published piece affects your safety, your job, your family, or your immigration situation, tell us and it comes down — no explanation needed. If it is a reported piece involving other named people, we talk it through first, because pulling it can affect someone else who agreed to be in the record.
Published before? Tell us where and when, in the pitch. Prior publication is not a disqualifier. Finding out later is grounds to take the piece down.
We delete the page, retire the link, clean the labels, and pull the piece from every index that points to it. We do not control search engine caches or copies made by other sites, and we will not promise an erasure we cannot deliver.
Submit a Pitch
Two minutes. Tell us what you want to write about.
Form not loading? Email your pitch to info@pinoybuilt.com instead — same fourteen-day reply.
After You Submit
Fourteen days is the commitment. If you have not heard anything by then, write to info@pinoybuilt.com and ask. Silence is a mistake on our end, not a quiet no.
What the community looks like
Questions
No. Most of what PinoyBuilt publishes comes from people who have never written for a publication. What matters is that the story is yours and that you tell it honestly. The editor works with you on structure and line edits before anything runs.
No. PinoyBuilt is an independent, one-person desk and does not pay for contributions. There is no rate coming and we will not pretend otherwise. What you get is a byline, a contributor page entry, real editing, and your work held in an archive built to outlast everyone in it.
You do. You keep the copyright to your words and your photographs. You give PinoyBuilt a permanent, non-exclusive license to publish and keep the piece in the archive. Non-exclusive means you can republish it anywhere you like, any time. We ask for a credit line and a link back, and we ask rather than require.
Yes. If the piece affects your safety, your job, your family, or your immigration situation, tell us and it comes down with no explanation required. If it is a reported piece involving other named people, we will talk it through first, because pulling it can affect someone else who agreed to be in the record. When a piece is removed we delete the page and retire the link. We cannot control search engine caches or copies made by other sites, and we will not promise otherwise.
Not yet. Contributors must be 18 or over. A student track with a parent and guardian permission process is being finalized and is not open. Until it is, we do not accept pitches from writers under 18. If you are a teacher, an adviser, or a parent who wants to be told when it opens, email info@pinoybuilt.com.
Fourteen days. That is one editor reading every pitch, not an auto-reply, and fourteen days is what the desk can actually hold. If you have not heard from us in fourteen days, write to info@pinoybuilt.com and ask. Not hearing back is a mistake on our end, not a quiet no.
For research, outlining, or copy-editing, yes, and the pitch form asks you to say so. An honest yes does not count against you. What we will not publish is a generated draft passed off as original reporting or as lived memoir, or any AI-produced quotation, statistic, or source. A fabricated memory in a permanent family archive is the one thing this site cannot absorb.
Tell us where and when, in the pitch. Previously published work is not disqualified, but we need to know before we build so we can handle the search and credit side properly. An undisclosed prior publication found later is grounds for us to take the piece down.
Mainstream media has overlooked Filipino American stories for decades. PinoyBuilt exists to fix that, one piece at a time. Your story might be the one somebody in San Diego, or Houston, or Vallejo, or Dubai reads and recognizes as their own.
That is what an archive is for. Not traffic. Recognition — and a record that is still there when the people in it are not.
Laban Pilipinas. Laban Fil-Am.
Together, we archive the strength of our people.
