Kyle Beltran

I was born in 1990 in Lubao, Pampanga. My mom was working in Guam as an overseas Filipino worker, and she left my older sister, my older brother, and me with our grandparents so we would grow up with our language, our faith, and our traditions.

My grandmother got me ready for school every morning. Ironed white button-down, deep maroon Bermuda shorts, long white socks, black leather derbies, shined. We didn’t leave the house unless we looked our best. That’s where my interest in clothes started: watching someone take care with how we presented ourselves to the world.

My great-grandmother, Braulia “Julia” Diwa, helped raise us. She was strict, and she told the best stories. She said she went to the edge of the property, where it met the forest, to talk to her kapre friend. Near the end of her life, she said she would die the day she ran out of rice. She did. DIWA is named after her.

In 1999, my mom brought us all together in the United States. We spent six months in Northern California, then almost ten years in the Florida panhandle. I started working at 14, cleaning hotel rooms in Destin, a beach town near Fort Walton Beach that draws tourists from across the South. By 16, I was a merchandiser at TJMaxx.

I didn’t go back to the Philippines until 2007, at 17, for a family reunion and my grandmother’s birthday. Being home with the whole family was surreal, and it showed me how American I had become.

The day after I graduated high school in 2008, I moved to Las Vegas. I had planned to study international business and work for a humanitarian organization. Instead, I transferred my TJMaxx job, enrolled in fashion merchandising, and applied to every store on the Strip to pay for school.

I started as a visual merchandiser at Ann Taylor in Caesars Palace. When a coworker told me Burberry was expanding its team a few doors down, I bought a new outfit, redid my résumé, and took the bus to the Strip on my day off to apply. I was hired as a salesperson. Within a year I was managing the women’s runway collection, and by 2012 I was responsible for growing Burberry Private Clients into a $2 million business.

Two of those relationships changed my life: Wendy Plaster and Sandy Peltyn, philanthropists who introduced me to the Nevada Ballet Theatre and the Nevada Philharmonic. I brought those partnerships with me to every luxury house I worked for after that, including Valentino, Celine, and Canali.

When I burned out in 2013, I spent my time at the events Tony Hsieh was hosting to revive downtown Las Vegas. His idea of “collisions,” putting people in the same place so good things happen, stayed with me. Looking back, it’s the same idea behind every DIWA gathering.

That same year I started TOMASSON, a menswear concept built around a man’s diary of advice, found by his son alongside his most treasured clothes. Six months in, Valentino recruited me to build its client program, and I went back to luxury.

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Luxury led me to brand work, first as brand manager at European Bath Kitchen Tile & Stone, then with my own consultancy, VIS-À-VIS CO., and as fractional marketing director for ProAm Sports Medicine.

In 2021, my husband and I moved to Portland, a city I had wanted to live in for years. I worked in development and communications for With Love Oregon, which serves the foster care community, then joined Travel Portland, where I work today.

Through that work I met Filipino food creators and found Census data on Portland’s communities of color. There were more of us here than I expected. We’re a small community, spread out, and when we find each other, we stick together.

My mom and my grandmother have both been diagnosed with dementia. It made me want to record our family’s stories, and our community’s, while we can.

In Portland, most of our communities’ stories are told through food, which makes sense in a city like this one. I wanted a place to tell ours through fashion, the way I learned to tell stories.

In the summer of 2025, I volunteered on a photoshoot that a friend was submitting to Vogue Philippines. That’s where I met Celeste Noche. Watching that shoot come together, I knew I wanted to tell a Filipino story from my own point of view. The name DIWA came to me in a dream, and that dream became the premise of our Prologue. In October 2025, the Prologue came together in a matter of weeks, because when you find other Filipinos, they help you make it happen.

I’m building DIWA to be the cultural journal for Filipino America: a place for Filipino Americans across the country to find our stories, and each other.

See Chapter I: Islas de los Pintados