When someone says that they are first generation, they generally mean that they moved to the States. But PJ Raval has a different way of looking at it.

As the U.S.-born child of immigrants, he refers to himself as first generation Filipino-American “because my parents don’t consider themselves Filipino-American. They consider themselves Filipinos who immigrated. … They have the experience of being immigrants. I have the experience of being a child of an immigrant.” As such, he added, “I have one foot in the United States and an inch towards the Philippines. … So that idea of being part of a diaspora or a diasporic community, in the last several years I’ve really wanted to embrace that.”

In his award-winning 2018 documentary Call Her Ganda, Raval explored that experience as a Filipino-American filmmaker exploring the death of Jennifer Laude, a Filipino trans woman, murdered by Joseph Scott Pemberton, a U.S. Marine stationed in the Philippines. His latest film, Who We Become, follows three young women in Texas – like him, all Filipino-American and the children of migrants – as they navigate the pandemic, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, an increasing tide of anti-Asian bigotry and violence, and dealing with their families in these strangest of times.