Finding and maintaining a meaningful connection to my culture and my people is definitely one of the things that pushed me to become an organizer. Being a first-generation Filipino-American with parents who encouraged me to be Americanized when I was growing up meant that I had very little understanding of what being Filipino meant to me and my identity. As a kid, I remember my parents using Tagalog in our house very sparingly and having a hard time communicating with them because they were always more comfortable talking in their native tongue. When I asked my father why they didn’t teach me and my siblings Tagalog as kids, like so many Filipino parents do, he simply said: “We didn’t want to confuse you.” 

My parents were fairly young when they left the Philippines to work overseas so that their families could survive. When they met and started a family in America, they did what they could to make sure we were able to succeed in this country, and they believed that part of that meant sacrificing our language and traditions so that we weren’t “confused” by the differences. But my limited understanding of my heritage is what led me to find my organizing community. Since then, I’ve been able to learn so much about how Filipinos have fought for liberation both in the Philippines and in the US, and that our struggles are shared by different communities around the world. 

This project is part of my own work to reeducate myself on the true history of my people because so much of it has been lost or reinterpreted to fit a certain narrative. Even our language, our culture, and traditions are indistinguishable from what is colonial and what is native to us. But one thing that has remained constant even throughout centuries of oppression is that we have a longstanding tradition of revolutionary resistance. We have been portrayed as people who are hospitable, compliant and docile, but history says otherwise. I want to decolonize and reject the colonial values that have belittled our movements, and use this as a platform for others to begin their own path to unpacking the colonial mentality which obscures us from the truth. 

ANG TAO, ANG BAYAN, NGAYON AY LUMALABAN
(THE PEOPLE, UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED)