The Poetic Life of Marcus Eros: A trouble maker in the 90?s hip-hop era of Jersey City, this Filipino American expresses his life like a rap star

In the neighborhood we grew up in, violence was the answer to many of life’s conflicts. Get rich quick schemes meant risking your freedom and your life. Walking in a city full of people, not of your race, and lived criminal values, being Filipino was dangerous, especially if you had an accent. In an era of Jersey City where A.C.K. and other gangs fought to defend the Filipino race and help bring fear to those who would try to bully us. This young Filipino American was absorbing the gangster hip hop culture of the 90’s. The music and lyrics about drugs and violence rappers were expressing and suburban kids were dancing to, you can say we were living. But it was more like surviving.

We didn’t work out so to get girls, we worked out in case anybody tries to rob us we can defend ourselves and not get killed. Going to school in this location and era was tough. The teacher’s told us straight up, that we would be nothing. Claiming statistics show, most of us would never graduate college. Because of this, most of us, never went to college or dropped out. It was a self fulfilling prophecy that they gave us. There was basically no future for us, as far as we knew. What made it worse was the obvious racism. How they said people of this race will be failures, people of the other race have diseases, and people of the other race will most likely die young. These statistics didn’t motivate us.

The question usually was “How can we get out of the ghetto?” In Jersey City, the fastest way to make money was to sell drugs or to rob somebody. There were drug addicts everywhere and everyone was smoking weed, even the teachers. So the obvious biggest business opportunity was to go down this route, which people always warn you that “You’ll either end up in jail, or get shot”. The blacks would try to rap or play ball professionally. As a Filipino American, I don’t know what’s more difficult, being accepted as a rapper or playing in the NBA. So that was out of the question. Some of us went to college, some of us went to trade school, and some of us are drug addicts and car thieves. A lot of us went to a lot of different routes, some good some bad.

The route of M.M. was different, in the most unique form. At a young age, he somehow was inspired to be a Renaissance Man. He never let that dream go. Looking at pictures in Time Magazine he would shed tears seeing people suffer throughout the world, especially in his homeland. He always had a yearning to help eliminate poverty in the Philippines because of this. Yet he wondered why Filipino’s, instead of staying and finding a way to help the country, would leave to go to other countries, work and help other economies. In a way he understands why they do this, and in a way he’s taking a totally different route then his Filipino American friends and a totally different route from the Filipino’s in the Philippines.

After years of following his passions of Renaissance, he decided to leave the hell that was once Jersey City and go to the Philippines and dedicate his life to making businesses, creating jobs, charities, scholarships, and leaders to help improve the economy of the Philippines.