TAYO Literary Magazine by Anna Casalme
Walking into the Ragazzi Room, a quaint little coffee shop in Los Angeles, you just might spot a group of young people deep in conversation, unable to divert their attention from their laptops, publications, and coffee. This is a diverse crew, college students, a high school student, recent college graduates, girls, and boys, all with something to contribute. These things they hold in common: their Filipino heritage, their pride for their culture, their passion for the arts, and their dedication to the TAYO Literary magazine. This is the staff of TAYO.
The mission of TAYO is in the words of executive director Kristine Co, “to give Filipino-Americans a creative voice, and to capture that voice in an annual literary magazine and online community. Since there are so many interesting facets of our culture that go undocumented, Team TAYO decided to be cultural anthropologists in a sense. We wanted to document this mosaic of different Filipino and Filipino-American perspectives.”
TAYO came to be initially with the help of the Filipino American Library, a non-profit organization based in Historic Filipinotown. With much help, co-founders Melissa Sipin and Kristine Co gathered a team of dedicated individuals to help with marketing, choosing content, fundraising, and designing the magazine. Creating this publication was no easy task. TAYO has faced challenges such as gathering funding and expanding distribution. Despite this, the staff has been working hard to obtain advertisements, donations, and sponsorships while experimenting in marketing. In eight months, they had gone from crafting the idea of the project to holding first issue.
TAYO has grown from a mere idea with a small niche market in the Los Angeles area to a sustained artistic and literary community with readership all around the world. The second issue featured contributors from all corners of the globe, including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, India, Saudi Arabia and Canada. TAYO has given our community not only a tangible product that speaks to our literary and artistic prowess as a demographic group, but also a subtle reminder that our identity is always changing. TAYO serves as a wake-up call to generations that we define who we are, and TAYO’s job is to provide the most comprehensive picture of that definition.
When asked what might be in store for TAYO in the future, Ms. Co responds with exciting goals such as becoming a full-fledged non-profit organization and increasing the breadth and depth of readership locally, nationally and internationally. Most striking of all, she intends “for TAYO to be come a treasured gem of our culture, something that future generations will look forward to reading, cherishing and collecting.” As the TAYO staff members work together diligently at the Ragazzi Room, it seems that those dreams are on their way to becoming reality.
