Religion, Violence and Marian Devotion in South and South East Asia

Being pinay (Filipina) is particularly characterised by an inferiority complex of being brown which makes them feel inferior to "white" people. To imagine a brown pinay Catholicism through devotion to Mary seems unthinkable or outside of the pinay imagination until one considers the Virgin of Balintawak of the Indigenous Philippine Christian Church, Iglesia Filipina Independiente. This paper briefly lays out the intersectional oppression of pinays and the use of Mary in Catholicism to reinforce this oppression. It turns to the Virgin of Balintawak to suggest a brown Catholicism that can not only help pinays reembrace their brownness, but also help them decolonize and reindegenize. Overall, the paper seeks to grapple with Filipin@ migrant Catholic Marian belief as a double-edged sword, a bolo, and to carve this sword from a weapon that perpetuates pinay oppression to a symbol of their resistance against their ongoing intersectional oppressions.