Bringing Critical Filipinx Studies into the High School Ethnic Studies Classroom

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Bringing Critical Philippine Studies into the High School Ethnic Studies Classroom

Being able to place our lived experience in a historical continuum of not just oppression, but struggle–I think to me, that’s the message of Filipinx studies.
Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechtering

About

On October 3, 2024, the High School Ethnic Studies Initiative hosted the event “Bringing Critical Filipinx* Studies into the High School Ethnic Studies Classroom.” In this discussion, Filipinx scholars discussed how educators can incorporate Filipinx and Filipinx-American studies into the Ethnic Studies classroom. They offered reflections on the Filipinx-American diaspora’s history of forced migration, organizing against labor exploitation, and resisting co-optation. The event focused on sharing ways to help Filipinx students understand themselves, their communities, and how to fight for their collective liberation.

Event Speakers

When working not just with Filipino students at the high school level, but all students of color and all students, they need to be able to understand that they matter, that they have an identity, that they have a story.
Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

Note on language: As stated in the Sage Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies,

“There is a diverse range of terminology that Filipina/x/o Americans (FAs) have used to describe their ethnic identities. Such Terms were initially used as a way of creating a sense of belonging, desire, and affinity for people of Philippine descent adn residing in the United States. However, these terms have also been a historic source of contention within the FS community, especially when such terminology results in exclusion or isolation. Nonetheless, FA identity terms are constantly evolving and reflect creativity among FAs across various generations.”

While it is impossible to encapsulate the full breadth of history, scholarship, and culture behind the terms that Filipinos and Filipino-Americans use to refer to themselves and their communities, it is critical to note that the terms Filipino, Filipina, Filipinx, and Philippine all emerged out of unique contexts and reflect particular nuances of Filipino identity. This resource guide uses the terms Filipino, Filipina, Filipinx, and Philippine according to the language reflected in the resources or by the speakers. There is a robust body of scholarship that people can turn to to learn more about the specific meanings and context behind this terminology. 

The term “Filipino” is generally understood as a demonym used to mean the people of the Philippines, whereas “Philippine” is more often used to refer to the country or nation. According to Filipino scholar Charlie Veric, it is important to note that the terms Filipino/a and Filipinx are not mutually exclusive, with the terms Filipino and Filipina “founded on identification with the Philippine nation” whereas the term Filipinx is founded on diasporic Filipinos dis-identification from “the heteronormative and white supremacist American state.” 

For further reading on the use of language and terminology, explore the following sources:

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Community Advocacy and Social Justice

Educational Resources and Curriculum Development

Film and Arts

Event Key Takeaways

Resources

Community Advocacy and Social Justice

Grassroots organizations and educator collectives committed to advancing critical Filipinx studies, putting Ethnic Studies frameworks into practice, and connecting the fight for pro-people education to the issues of Filipino and Filipino-American communities

Tyree Scott Freedom School

The Tyree Scott Freedom School is a Black-led, youth-centered, anti-racist, multicultural organization based in King County, Seattle. The school's anti-racist curriculum empowers students to take on a structural analysis of oppression and teaches them about community organizing frameworks. The school's namesake, Tyree Scott, is remembered for his groundbreaking efforts to organize workers across racial lines and resist racial exclusion in trade unions. The school carries on Tyree's legacy of what it means to build lasting multiracial coalitions to organize communities. The school also empowers young activists to imagine a future where solidarity and intersectionality are at the forefront of movements.

Members of the Critical Filipinx Studies Collective

Critical Filipinx Studies Collective (CFSC)

The Critical Filipinx Studies Collective is a collective of educators, intellectuals, and activists that support those within the academy and beyond it to challenge ongoing legacies of neocolonial and settler colonialism. They claim their roots in the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggles of the Filipino people and the U.S. student movement of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) that gave rise to Ethnic Studies. CFSC brings together scholars and community members committed to cultivating critical Filipinx studies everywhere, including in the high school Ethnic Studies classroom. Instructors can explore CFSC’s podcast and statements to learn more about the collective efforts nationwide that Filipinx scholars are taking up to advance critical Filipinx studies. Instructors can also reach out to CFSC if they want to get in contact with experts on Filipina/x/o American Studies for media purposes, expert witnesses, or a speaking engagement on their campus.

Members of Pin@y Educational Partnerships protesting for Ethnic Studies

Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP)

PEP is a service-learning/learning-service program focused on creating “triangular partnerships” between the university, public schools, and communities to cultivate barangay (community) and critical educators and culturally responsive curricula. 

PEP implements a transformative decolonizing curriculum and pedagogy, incorporating all grade levels including primary, middle, secondary, post-secondary, and graduate students. In addition to offering an experience for undergraduate, graduate, and recently graduate college students to teach Filipina/o/x studies in SFUSD, PEP also offers support for community members and instructors to learn dive deeper into Filipina/o/x studies such as the Dr. Gwen Angelica Agustin-Nodora Scholarship and their annual Community Show

Members of Community Responsive Education

Community Responsive Education (CRE)

CRE is a collective of educators, community leaders, and wellness practitioners who have been working with organizations, service providers, students/youth, families, teachers, schools, school districts, colleges, and universities to build humanizing and nurturing educational cultures for over twenty-five years. Founded by panelist Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, CRE helps leaders and their organizations develop their capacity and agency to become more responsive to the needs of the communities that they serve. Teachers, schools, and districts who are interested in deepening their ability to respond to their community’s needs can reach out to CRE for community-responsive teacher development, ethnic studies teacher and curriculum development, equity audits, trauma-informed care training, and more. 

Members of Anakbayan-USA at a protest holding a banner that says "Laban Kabataan"

Anakbayan-USA

Anakbayan-USA is the comprehensive national democratic mass organization of Filipino youth and students in the U.S. Established on November 30, 1998, Anakbayan-USA seeks to unite the youth from different sectors of society to advance the cause of national democracy. Anakbayan chapters all over the US wage campaigns based on the bread-and-butter issues of Filipino youth, such as fighting against the current US-Marcos II Regime and demanding pro-people, affordable education in the face of increasingly neoliberal education policies. Anakbayan chapters also host community educational discussions such as Philippine Society and Revolution, which offer a critical anti-colonial and anti-imperialist analysis of Filipino history. Panelist Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda discussed the formative influence of Anakbayan’s political education on his understanding of Filipinx studies and discussed how instructors can draw lessons from these grassroots political organizations’ model of teaching Filipino history that links individual experiences with a collective history of resistance. The League of Filipino Students on UC Berkeley’s campus is a member organization of Anakbayan USA. 

Educational Resources and Curriculum Development

Books, journals, and digital archives to support educators in deepening their understanding of critical Filipino American history towards developing lesson plans and course materials

Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines

Securing Paradise, a publication by panelist Dr. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, discusses how tourism and militarism have functioned together in Hawai’i and the Philippines, jointly empowering the United States to assert its geostrategic and economic interests in the Pacific. Dr. Gonzalez draws on this research when discussing narratives of gendered care labor. Examining this unique intersection of tourism and militarism can spark conversations about how the two forces operationalize care labor. When discussing the “big picture” of labor in the Filipino diaspora, it can be helpful to bring in topics of tourism, militarism, care labor, and gender as forces that have significantly shaped patterns of migration and forms of exploitation. 

American Quarterly: Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure

This special American Quarterly issue investigates the multiple ways in which tourism and militarism inform each other in the past and in the present moment. By examining these seemingly incompatible projects in tandem, editors Dr. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzales, Dr. Jana Lipman, and Dr. Teresia Teaiwa investigate how the two themes collide in high-profile controversies, ongoing occupations, historic preservation, intimate relationships, and the fabric of everyday life. Tours of Duty and Tours of Leisure offer case studies including and beyond the Philippines to help readers think about military histories and structures that have also framed tourist economies and cultures. 

Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook

The Multimedia Textbook on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will provide the most comprehensive history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders with embedded curricula for high school, college, and lifelong learners available free online. The textbook aims to help students examine Asian American and Pacific Islander history and experiences as a lens to understand American history. The textbook contains one unit on Filipinos in general, drawing on resources from the Smithsonian Institute, and one unit on Filipino farmworkers. Both units contain readings, multimedia resources, and lesson plans created by teachers. Panelist and textbook contributor Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales points to the AAPI Multimedia Textbook as an invaluable resource for Filipinx and Ethnic Studies instructors, especially those seeking to tailor a curriculum to a semester or year-long course while also keeping true to the intent and integrity of Filipinx studies. The AAPI Multimedia Textbook is set to be published in 2025.

America is in the Heart

America is in the Heart is a Filipino American social classic about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream. The novel serves as a critical entry point for understanding Filipino labor migration during the period, offering insight into the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism and the experiences of Filipino migrants experiencing criminalization and discrimination in America. Panelist Dr. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez suggests engaging students with this text to start conversations about the relationship between historical, contemporary, individual, and collective migration histories. Instructors can draw from Bulosan’s classic text to teach students about the relationship between mobility and empire and to inspire discussion about the root causes of migration. 

A Different Asian American Timeline

A project of the experimental hub CHANGELAB, this timeline covers nearly 600 years of history starting with the early Atlantic slave trade in the 15th Century. The timeline traces the vast and diverse history of Asian Americans taking into account the dynamics of power that demand to be studied: imperialism, racial domination, gender oppression, labor exploitation, war, and social movements. Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechetering Castañeda cites to the timeline as a helpful resource for students and instructors alike to rethink the ways that chronological histories of Asian Americans oftentimes reinforce confining boundaries of what Asian American identity is, divorcing it from the essential contexts of enslavement, racial capitalism, US militarism, and settler colonialism. Instructors can draw on counter-mapping projects such as these to help their students gain a fuller understanding of Asian American history, including Filipinx American history, in connection with the larger systems of domination and resistance movements that have shaped it.

Strangers from a Different Shore

In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, & oral testimony, late author and former UC Berkeley professor Ron Takaki presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. During his more than 40 years at UC Berkeley, Takaki helped to establish the nation's first ethnic studies Ph.D. program as well as UC Berkeley's American Cultures requirement. Panelist Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales reflects on the formative influence of Ron Takaki’s scholarship in encouraging her to explore Asian American epistemology—otherwise defined as “how you know you know what you know.” Drawing on these foundational texts that trace multicultural histories of the Asian American diaspora can serve as an entry point for students to contemplate their own epistemologies, and thus develop a deeper understanding of why their personal and collective stories matter. 

Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement

This oral history of Philip Vera Cruz’s life and contributions to the Filipino farmworkers movement discusses the experiences of the manong generation, an enormous wave of Filipino immigrants who came to the United States between 1910 and 1930. Instead of better opportunities, they found racial discrimination, deplorable living conditions, and oppressive labor practices. Philip Vera Cruz’s life story and radicalism can serve as a powerful complement to other texts like America is in the Heart for the way that he offers a glimpse into Filipino American activism under the Marcos dictatorship. This personal history can help introduce students to the anti-Martial Law and anti-Marcos activism of Filipino American communities. Panelist Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechtering suggests using the personal histories of organizers like Philip Vera Cruz to start conversations about the various contradictions and struggles that defined these local and transnational movements. Instructors can also draw on Vera Cruz’s poems such as "Profits Enslave the World" to engage students in the history of labor exploitation from the perspective of Filipino migrants.

KDP protest agains Marcos's visit

Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) - Union of Democratic Filipinos: Ang Katipunan Issues

The KDP (Union of Democratic Filipinos) published a national newspaper, the Ang Katipunan (AK),  in the United States from 1974 to 1987. AK articles covered developments in the Philippines, exposing the injustices of the Marcos dictatorship during martial law. It covered the resistance of the national democratic movement and the New People’s Army along with other democratic opposition activities. The AK documented the extensive anti-Marcos opposition movement in the United States and efforts of the anti-Marcos forces to oppose US support for the dictator. It also covered organizing against discrimination against Filipinos and other minorities in the U.S. The AK carried on-going coverage of liberation movements across the globe. Finally, the AK published cultural work of poets and photographers of the time, in its VOICES columns. 

The AK covered major events within the farmworkers movement, such as Cesar Chavez’s controversial decision to visit the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. This primary source is a valuable archive of how Filipino American organizers in the 70s and 80s navigated multiracial labor struggles in the US, connecting them to resistance against dictatorship in the homeland.

Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong

Dawn Mabalon, Gayle Romasanta, and Andre Sibayan’s Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong is a children’s book that tells the story of labor organizer Larry Itliong, an incredibly important figure in Filipino American history. The book highlights his struggles and triumphs to a generation born decades after his time but continues to be impacted by his work to this day. Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales highlights the power of this book to bring all ages into conversations about Filipino-American history when discussing her Art of Work project with Filipino American hip-hop dancers. 

Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California

In Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California,Author Dawn Mabalon draws on oral histories, newspapers, photographs, personal archives, and her own family's history in Stockton. She reveals how Filipina/o immigrants created a community and ethnic culture shaped by their identities as colonial subjects of the United States, their racialization in Stockton as brown people, and their collective experiences in the fields and in the Little Manila neighborhood. This scholarly analysis of the Filipino American experience in Stockton can help students (both within and outside of the classroom) engage with the ideas of historical labor as work, counterstorytelling, and healing. Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales’s reflected on her use of this text in the Art of Work project, revealing how educators can use these personal and community histories to open up reflection about students' relationships to labor, art, migration, and work. 

The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age

In this book, author Valerie Francisco-Menchavez looks at the sacrifices, emotional and material consequences, and recasting of roles that emerge from family separation. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video open up transformative ways of bridging distances while supporting traditional family dynamics. This text’s investigation into the persistence of forced migration alongside the implications for Filipino families and particularly migrant women makes it an invaluable resource for discussions around labor, gender, and technology. Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales also incorporated this text into her curriculum for the Art of Work project.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies

The first encyclopedia on Filipino American Studies, this resource offers a comprehensive survey of an emerging field, focusing on the Filipino diaspora in the United States and highlighting issues facing immigrant groups in general. It covers a broad range of topics and disciplines including activism and education, arts and humanities, health, history and historical figures, immigration, psychology, regional trends, and sociology and social issues. The encyclopedia represents a counter-hegemonic project meant to serve as a helpful resource for key terms in Filipino American Studies. The encyclopedia was edited by panelist Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Dr. Kevin Nadal, and Dr. E. J. R. David

Welga Digital Archive

Hosted by the Bulosan Center for Filipino American Studies, the Welga Digital Archive aims to provide access to documentary and ephemera material regarding the Filipino and Filipino American experience. The Welga Project was originally founded to promote Filipino American labor history, specifically the history of Filipino American involvement with the UFW movement and the Delano Grape Strikes. Since then, it has expanded to include collections focusing on Filipino American political and social activism. The Archive is an invaluable hub for instructors to digitally access primary sources surrounding Filipino American labor and social movements. Through the website, instructors can also access a AB 123 Sample Curriculum, which offers lesson plans for teaching about Filipino American immigration and labor organizing at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. 

Film and Arts Pedagogy

Creative and documentary pieces that both engage with and explore beyond popular mediums and genres to tell the stories of Filipino migrants’ relationships with art, history, exploitation, and resistance

Larry The Musical

Larry The Musical follows the story of Larry Itliong and the Filipino American farmworkers who started the 1965 Great Delano Grape Strike, one of the most significant social justice movements in history that led to the creation of the multiracial United Farm Workers in 1966. Based on the book Journey for Justice, the musical uplifts the narrative of a pivotal figure within the Filipino agricultural laborer movement while showcasing Filipino artistic excellence. Larry the Musical ran from March 16, 2024 to April 14, 2024 in San Francisco, debuting to critical acclaim for bringing Itliong’s life story to a new generation of Filipino Americans. Larry the Musical continues to bring the Filipino American Community together by highlighting the importance of uplifting stories by, for, and about Filipinos. Community members can engage with the musical’s lasting impact through the production’s press and videos

Art of Work

Through a choreographic mentorship process, Art of Work explores the intersections between hip-hop dance, Filipino identities, colonial trauma, somatic healing, and work. This project culminates in a dance film that tackles the work and works of art of Filipinos. The creative project, which features seven choreographers from The Company, centered three conversations about work as it pertains to historical labor, counterstorytelling and healing, and dance. Art of Work transcends the boundaries of traditional dance films by turning choreographers and dancers into historians and storytellers.

Paper Dolls

Paper Dolls is a documentary that explores changing patterns of global immigration and expanding notions of family through the prism of a community of undocumented Filipino trans and gender-nonconforming people in apartheid Israel. Instructors can use the film’s examination of these complex global intersections to start conversations among students about the gendered nature of care within the Filipino diaspora, bringing in a queer lens that is often left out. 

Caretakers: Filipino Nurses and Care Workers in the United States

 A four-part docuseries from PBS, Caretakers looks at the history of Filipinos in care work and profiles Filipino Americans on the front lines today. This documentary series investigates the alarming disparity when it comes to Filipino care workers who bore the brunt of COVID-19. Despite representing only 4% of the total U.S. nursing workforce, Filipinos constitute over 30% of total COVID-related deaths among registered nurses. Caretakers can serve as an entry point into teaching students about the labor exploitation facing Filipino care workers today, as well as the ways that care workers continue to organize against exploitative working conditions.

Event Key Takeaways

Critically Analyzing Forced Migration and the Diasporic Experience with Students

  • (00:14:20) The simple question, “Why are we here?” can generate valuable classroom conversations about why it is important to trace historical and personal migration histories. Teachers can use texts from Filipino migrant writers like Carlos Bulosan to encourage students to think about and trace migrants’ precarious mobility. Examining these narratives helps students reflect on the conditions, structures, and desires that facilitate mobility–specifically empire. From there, instructors can turn the question back on their students and ask them to trace their own migration and mobility. – Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

  • (00:16:38) Grassroots political youth organizations offer valuable lessons on how to teach Filipino history in a way that encourages students to think of themselves not just within a history of colonization, but within a history of resistance to colonization. In the classroom, this can look like creating a timeline with key moments in Philippine history and then asking students to think about these dates in their family history. Drawing from grassroots organizations in this way can also help Filipinx scholars acknowledge how Ethnic Studies existed as a social movement practice outside of the university before movements like the Third World Liberation Front. Further, drawing on lessons from grassroots community organizing reinforces solidarity—intergenerational, multiracial, transnational—as a defining feature of Filipinx history. — Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

  • (00:23:04) Developing a critical understanding of one’s positionality often starts with recognizing your epistemology, or “how you know you know what you know.” When working with students at all levels, students need to understand that they matter, that they have an identity, and that they have a story, especially if instructors are trying to get them to listen to the stories they are trying to tell. It is essential to have students trace the good and bad experiences that brought them to the place they are today. It is important to remember that history, research, and data are based on stories. — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

Educating on Labor, Exploitation, and Resistance

  • (00:28:53) Teaching about labor movements and labor migration can be an important entry point into Filipinx studies, especially because many Filipino-American families originally migrated to the US to work in exploitative and extractive industries. The context of Philippine American history has always been about a material relationship to labor. Examining the history of Philippine labor migration also requires understanding that major transnational industries (from Hawai’ian sugarcane plantations to California agribusinesses) are all founded on settler colonialism, migrant labor exploitation, and Indigenous dispossession. Under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, many of these major industries also extended their operations to the Philippines, further demonstrating how these systems of exploitation linked the US to the homeland. However, because these industries also had multiracial workforces, students can also learn about the role of solidarity in labor organizing. The contradictions that students have to grapple with when studying this complicated history of exploitation can help them better understand how Philippine-American history has been largely shaped by Filipino-American material relationship to labor. — Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

  • (00:37:59) When discussing Filipino labor, the labor of care is often left out of the picture because of its gendered nature. These forms of labor are critical to address because both historically and in the present moment, care laborers, nurses, and teachers comprise a huge portion of laborers leaving the Philippines. Instructors can encourage students to think about how care work is operationalized through militarism, tourism, entertainment, and more. Forced migration leads many Filipinos to leave their homeland to take up care work in other countries, depriving them of the ability to care for their parents or children. There are also many ways that queerness and gender nonconformity can compound labor and racial exploitation. When teaching and learning about this type of labor, educators must ask the question of who gets to care, for whom, and why. The example of politicians lauding Filipino nurses dying on the frontlines of the pandemic as “heroes” instead of addressing the egregious working conditions that made them vulnerable highlights the unique intersection of oppression that Filipino care workers (who are often women) face. – Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

  • (00:42:54) There are also a lot of intersections between art and labor that can give insight into the nature of work, especially for Filipino migrant workers and those descended from migrant workers. The journey of Filipino-American hip-hop dancers to learn about the “art of work” illustrates the complex and critical interaction between culture and labor. Unpacking the “art of work” is a process that weaves together conversations about historical labor, the difference between labor and work, counter-storytelling, the idea of healing as work, and dance as an art form. Creative projects in which cultural workers bring in the narratives and voices of their own family’s migration and labor stories allow both performers and audiences to reflect on the role of art in illuminating the narratives of migrant communities and those in the Filipino diaspora. These narratives can also highlight the critical role that failure plays in understanding both art and labor. — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

Challenges in Advocating for Pro-People Filipino-American Studies

  • (00:49:29) Educators advocating for the importance of teaching about Palestine have always faced intense backlash. There is an urgent need at this moment to teach about Palestine within Filipino studies. People must recognize that educational institutions, especially the university, fundamentally reinforce the carceral system and are wedded to the state. These interests are further reflected on university campuses, where restrictions around free speech are increasing and instructors' ability to teach about settler colonialism is increasingly limited. It is also important to recognize that the Philippines has served as a critical hub of the US war machine in terms of its location, its personnel, and its political alliances. The Philippine government is increasing its support for Philippine studies in the US, which is a kind of recognition that the Filipino community cannot afford because of the state’s explicit support for the US war machine. Despite the challenges of the current political moment, students are taking the lead. The job of teachers, researchers, and scholars is to provide intellectual and political cover in the form of legitimate, rigorous scholarship and solidarity. – Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

  • (00:53:03) Despite the rise of policies like “Time, Place, and Manner” on university campuses, the current political moment is a time of dynamic student organizing. The way that communities have rallied around our right to education despite repression is ultimately core to the mission and vision of Ethnic Studies. It can be helpful to remember that the best way to defend Ethnic Studies is to constantly practice it. Tactics of repression ultimately aim to divert organizers’ energy away from the work that students and educators are meant to do. — Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

Developing Comprehensive Filipino Studies in a Single Course

  • (01:09:20) It can be helpful to focus on the history of labor as the major starting point. There are a lot of resources, and instructors have to make choices about what to focus on. Resources such as The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies and UCLA’s Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook can provide instructors with outlines and key concepts for creating their own Filipino American Studies courses, especially when it comes to only semester-long courses. Focusing on labor—not just repression but resistance—can be an important way to structure a Philippine Studies course, especially when time is limited. — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

  • (01:14:30) Instructors should not feel like they have to be comprehensive in terms of coverage because it’s impossible to cover everything in one semester, or even in a year. When designing a class, instructors should think about the concepts that they want students to walk away with. Concepts are portable–students can use them as critical analytical lenses when approaching any set of materials. Engaging the students themselves in the production of the class’s material is one concrete way to teach students to become owners and producers of the knowledge themselves. For example, instructors can engage students in creative projects like zine-making. – Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Organizing Against the Co-Optation of Filipino-American Studies

  • (01:00:55) Ever since Ethnic Studies became institutionalized, it has always been engaged in a struggle for funding. When contending with issues where funding is linked to political compromise, it can be important to study the history of Ethnic Studies co-optation. This history shows that students always lead the way in terms of determining what Ethnic Studies should be. Students will ultimately lead the understanding and analysis of what a pro-people Filipinx studies should look like. — Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda

  • (01:02:55) Learn how to ask the right questions from the right people; taking a stand is key. Student organizers can determine what kinds of topics and ideas they would want to have covered in a critical Philippine studies curriculum. Study Ethnic Studies frameworks and create questions about what the curriculum may become through an Ethnic Studies framework. Students can also reach out to Filipino faculty members who can help them in their efforts. — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

  • (01:05:22) It can be hard for students to recognize that the institution is never going to love them, but they can also take comfort in the fact that they can build new things in community with the students and teachers like them. Even if the university or the state is not willing to fund pro-people Philippine studies, look into the alternative structures that can be built to support critical Philippine-American studies. The best things that have emerged in the university have usually been started by students and have usually been rooted in the community. Students have the power to legitimize or delegitimize new programs with their presence, their votes, and their support. – Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

  • (01:07:41) Student organizers can also draw from recent organizing around divestment. When organizing for pro-people Filipino studies, it will not be enough for Filipino communities to advocate for it; they will need allies to be in solidarity with them to be able to get their voices heard. — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales