Christina Verano Sornito, Ph.D, is a sociocultural anthropologist and co-director of the App State Ethnography Lab, in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, located in Cherokee lands. She writes on sorcery, auto-ethnography, ethnographic surrealism, materiality, media, and haunted landscapes in the Philippine Islands. In the time she spends doing non-alienated labor, she enjoys directing and participating in surrealist political theater. 

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One day in 2011, Christina received a call from her father’s ancestral village outside of Iloilo, asking her to “come home”. Since that calling, she has taken her training in anthropology and is working it into a conversation with “intergenerational phantoms” of her parent’s ancestral landscape, layered with the multiple voices of indigenous life, colonial histories, and non-human presences.  Her book manuscript in progress, “In the House of Santa Regla: Specters of the Postcolonial Philippines,” examines the convergence of cultural heritage, disaster management, colonial history, and the indigenous spirit world in the central Philippines.

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Christina’s family emigrated from the Philippines four days before Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. They settled in a crossroads of indigenous groups which included the Illiniwek, Miami, and Kickapoo among others, today called Chicago, Illinois. Christina is descended from an old Ilonggo-family, with a lineage that can be tracked to the founding of the visita Catmon, (today known as the municipio of Santa Barbara, Iloilo), a town know for being the second major revolutionary uprising against the Spanish outside of Luzon. She also bears ancestral ties with the Kamayo and Manobo peoples of what is today Surigao del Sur on the island of Mindanao.