Operation Manong at 40
Although now officially called a different term, Operation Manong’s vision to serve the underserved ethnolinguistic groups in Hawaii has remained the reason why public service in this state remains a concern today.
With forty years of service, that is more than a generation of concerted effort by a number of committed workers for a just cause.
This means that Operation Manong has nurtured a generation of people, and this generation it has nurtured is now nurturing others as well.
If we look at the list of its alumni, we have proofs of the kind of work it has done.
The list does not stop in Oahu, but goes into the other islands, thus spreading the vision for which it was founded four decades ago.
This is the kind of work that we want to see in these islands: sustained and sustaining.
We have a number of organizations like this, organizations that declare commitment to making the lives of immigrants better, but those that impacted the lives of the peoples of the Philippines and other ethnicities are few.
The reason is simple enough: this kind of work, while it is not impossible, is not at all easy.
For every resource it needed, it had to creatively figure out where to get it.
For every human resource it needed, it had to convince those who have the guts and gumption to stay and serve.
For every step of the way in these long years of engagement with the community, it has to be fired continuously by the same vision of access to the goods of public life, of access to education, of access to public life, and of access to full citizenship in this state.
A narrative of its founding in 1971 brings us to a group of students and faculty of the University of Hawaii joining hands with the community and the staff members of Immigrant Services Center in addressing the need of immigrant children from the Philippines to get back to the school system and stay there.
This act would turn into an operation—a coordinated activity—that zeroed in on the need to address head-on the issues affecting immigrant peoples in the state.
For those aware of the political issues in the Philippines in the turbulent 70s, ‘operation’ was a term in those decades that suggested activism, awareness of social issues, and the undying desire to take part in drawing up solutions to the many forms of inequities and disparities of that country, the old homeland of many of Operation Manong’s founders.
Those were energies that came from the young in search of something good—that good that is for all.
Many of those who were involved were schooled in this tradition of questing for what is just and fair in the Philippines, and its spilling over to Hawaii was a logical consequence of a sustained engagement that saw its beginnings, in some ways, in those years of activism in the homeland.
From the perspective of immigration, Operation Manong is boldness and daring defined.
It took a coalition like this one to name what social illness there was that needed addressing after more than 60 years of presence of Filipinos in the state since their coming in 1906, with the first 15 Ilokanos, and in 1909, with the Visayans.
Today, and funded by the state through the University of Hawaii, Operation Manong has metamorphosed into the Office of Multicultural Student Services since 2000.
With this transformation comes the broadening of its services to include programs that address representation, diversity, and tolerance.
We can only be thankful for this story of service of Operation Manong.
The next forty years, we are sure, will be more years of commitment to the cause of diversity and pluralism, of tolerance, of access to educational resources, and of fair representation in all aspects of public life.
A S Agcaoili/
Observer, March 2012
Showing posts with label FAO Editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FAO Editorial. Show all posts
On Migrants and Their Fundamental Rights
Editorial
Standing With The Migrants From The Margins
There are two things that have greeted us during the last few weeks—and these two things concern us all immigrants and migrants of this land.
We are not going to enter into debate on whether the more appropriate technical term that we use is that of being settlers—for we are, indeed, settlers as well, coming as we are from another land, our ways to coming to America and settling here varied and rough and unpaved at times.
The fact of the case is this: that we have been able to carve out a piece of our earth under the sun, and now trying to guard this piece of earth as fiercely as we can.
It is our prize for eking out a life here.
But the stories of our coming over—of our migrating to America, of our ‘coming to America—are not of the same beginning, not of the same middle, and certainly not of the same denouement.
Out there are the others—because Othered—migrants and immigrants, some of them branded, like herd, with that label that does not do justice to their sufferings and sacrifices: indocumentado, illegal, ‘tago-ng-tago’ (or someone who keeps on hiding, hiding away from the shadows of immigration officers who are out there to handcuff and deport them).
We have editorialized about the DREAM Act—Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors—and we have argued for the benefits it will give not only to the potential naturalized citizens who have come to this land, but to the larger American community.
We look at the same issue now, and we follow the same argument: that the Obama Administration initiative to give a chance to a number of those who can contribute to the fulfillment of that American Dream while at the same time pursuing it, is worth a try.
President Barack Obama, in his executive order, has said it right: that a path must be cleared to those people who have come here as a child, who have had no mind of their own but had been brought here involuntarily, have imbibed the ways of American life, have not known any other country but the United States, and have equipped themselves with citizenship skills by, among others, educating themselves to the ethos of America that they know as their own homeland.
The initiative is worth a try.
Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, has stated clearly what this initiative is all about, what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Memo of June 17, actually means: an initiative that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice the task to review and ‘clear out low-priority cases on a case-to-case basic and make room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk.’
Echoing the same argument for having the yet-to-be approved DREAM Act as a legislative initiative that has given some hopes to the deserving migrants, ICE Director John Norton says of the ‘prosecutorial discretion’ of his agency, that includes nineteen factors, including the coming of the potential beneficiary to the United States as a child of 15 or below, the pursuit of at least two years of college education, or service in the military.
There are criticisms to this initiative, of course, including the accusation that this is a dictatorial act on the part of the president, and that it is a categorical relief for any form of immigration violation.
Add this to the charge that this is unconstitutional.
We believe otherwise.
The initiative is at the heart of what the United States is all about.
We have much to gain when we recognize that this country of immigrants will be made greater by the influx of human resources that have much to offer—and our marginalized migrant deserve this recognition of what they can do, and the relief the magnanimous spirit of our laws can offer.
There are about more than 10 million estimated illegal immigrants in the country at the present.
Of this number, there are 300,000 cases for review in the immigration system, many of which do not fall under the category of ‘posing a serious threat’ but promising a contribution to the greatness of the United States.
Apart from the indigenous peoples and the native Hawaiians, we all have come to settle—to migrate—to this land at one point of our family narrative and history.
The United States that we know is built upon this vision of a great land and a great mix of peoples with their great mix of gifts and potentials.
We cannot now afford to watch from the sidelines and see the indocumentados, the ‘illegals,’ and the ‘tago-ng-tago’ children and young people to lose their chance at pursuing the American Dream for which they have come here through their elders, and for which dream they have been living for most of their young lives.
Our ethical duty is to stand with them—to stand with the marginalized migrants—and be counted.
There is nothing nobler than this act at this time.
FAO Editorial
Sept 2011
Standing With The Migrants From The Margins
There are two things that have greeted us during the last few weeks—and these two things concern us all immigrants and migrants of this land.
We are not going to enter into debate on whether the more appropriate technical term that we use is that of being settlers—for we are, indeed, settlers as well, coming as we are from another land, our ways to coming to America and settling here varied and rough and unpaved at times.
The fact of the case is this: that we have been able to carve out a piece of our earth under the sun, and now trying to guard this piece of earth as fiercely as we can.
It is our prize for eking out a life here.
But the stories of our coming over—of our migrating to America, of our ‘coming to America—are not of the same beginning, not of the same middle, and certainly not of the same denouement.
Out there are the others—because Othered—migrants and immigrants, some of them branded, like herd, with that label that does not do justice to their sufferings and sacrifices: indocumentado, illegal, ‘tago-ng-tago’ (or someone who keeps on hiding, hiding away from the shadows of immigration officers who are out there to handcuff and deport them).
We have editorialized about the DREAM Act—Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors—and we have argued for the benefits it will give not only to the potential naturalized citizens who have come to this land, but to the larger American community.
We look at the same issue now, and we follow the same argument: that the Obama Administration initiative to give a chance to a number of those who can contribute to the fulfillment of that American Dream while at the same time pursuing it, is worth a try.
President Barack Obama, in his executive order, has said it right: that a path must be cleared to those people who have come here as a child, who have had no mind of their own but had been brought here involuntarily, have imbibed the ways of American life, have not known any other country but the United States, and have equipped themselves with citizenship skills by, among others, educating themselves to the ethos of America that they know as their own homeland.
The initiative is worth a try.
Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs, has stated clearly what this initiative is all about, what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Memo of June 17, actually means: an initiative that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice the task to review and ‘clear out low-priority cases on a case-to-case basic and make room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk.’
Echoing the same argument for having the yet-to-be approved DREAM Act as a legislative initiative that has given some hopes to the deserving migrants, ICE Director John Norton says of the ‘prosecutorial discretion’ of his agency, that includes nineteen factors, including the coming of the potential beneficiary to the United States as a child of 15 or below, the pursuit of at least two years of college education, or service in the military.
There are criticisms to this initiative, of course, including the accusation that this is a dictatorial act on the part of the president, and that it is a categorical relief for any form of immigration violation.
Add this to the charge that this is unconstitutional.
We believe otherwise.
The initiative is at the heart of what the United States is all about.
We have much to gain when we recognize that this country of immigrants will be made greater by the influx of human resources that have much to offer—and our marginalized migrant deserve this recognition of what they can do, and the relief the magnanimous spirit of our laws can offer.
There are about more than 10 million estimated illegal immigrants in the country at the present.
Of this number, there are 300,000 cases for review in the immigration system, many of which do not fall under the category of ‘posing a serious threat’ but promising a contribution to the greatness of the United States.
Apart from the indigenous peoples and the native Hawaiians, we all have come to settle—to migrate—to this land at one point of our family narrative and history.
The United States that we know is built upon this vision of a great land and a great mix of peoples with their great mix of gifts and potentials.
We cannot now afford to watch from the sidelines and see the indocumentados, the ‘illegals,’ and the ‘tago-ng-tago’ children and young people to lose their chance at pursuing the American Dream for which they have come here through their elders, and for which dream they have been living for most of their young lives.
Our ethical duty is to stand with them—to stand with the marginalized migrants—and be counted.
There is nothing nobler than this act at this time.
FAO Editorial
Sept 2011
FAO Editorial June 2011
Making Sense of Our Freedom
The next two months for the American citizen of Philippine heritage will be one of two separate but interconnected political meditations.
One, in June, is the official celebration by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines of Philippine Independence Day.
The name of the national holiday is a giveaway: it is the landmark day, when, at the height of the struggle of the peoples of the Philippines against the abuses of the Spanish colonizers, our people finally came to their senses that from that day onwards to make sense of our freedom in the way that makes sense to us all is an ethical and moral obligation of every citizen.
Two, in July, there is going to be the Fourth of July, a sacred day for all citizens of the United States of America.
It is the day the Americans declared their independence from the colonizers, the Brits.
Both the Philippine June 12 and the American Fourth of July have parallel narratives made powerful by the fact that people had come to their realization that independence—hence, freedom—matter.
The people of the Philippines who have come to the United States are placed in a position of privilege for having become the beneficiary of this rich historical reality, a legacy, indeed, of the people before them who knew what freedom is.
It is the freedom that creates opportunities to have sufficient food on the table.
It is the freedom that relates to the respect for the fundamental liberties of people, a respect that creates opportunities for labor, and for that dignity of labor to be held sacred.
It is the freedom that relates to justice: that basic justice in the economic front that calls out to people to help in the renewal of the possibilities of the earth.
It is justice that is articulated by the providing of jobs to all able citizens so that in that act of working, there are able to real themselves.
The formula for our sense of freedom is simple enough. There is no waste of words here but a mantric transformation of our ideals into some words that refuse to remain words but word becoming worlds in the end, the word and the world one and the same.
In light of our current concerns in the Philippine and the United States, we are challenged by the contradictory realities we around us.
In Hawaii, we live by the power of the spectacular, the power of tourism, which, essentially is about the act of seeing without necessarily knowing.
In the Philippines, we live the power of the psychology of the mass, with promises for scholarship to children of the Overseas Filipino Workers when their cases of capital punishment in other countries become a sensation.
Either way are the ugly realities lurking in each utterance that we have become free, that we have become as free as a bird, that we have become as free as the early morning breeze.
While we see excess in the United States, there is much misery in the country’s hidden places, in the marginalized places, in the peripheralized places.
While we see abundance in the money enclaves of the rich in the Philippines, there is much misery in the country’s slums, streetcorners, makeshift homes and communities under bridges, and far-flung barrios.
While we see palatial homes in Hawaii, we see at the same time tarpaulin homes in places where tourists do not go.
While we see concrete homes with landscaped gardens in the big cities of the Philippines such as Cebu, Davao, and Manila, we see at the same time cardboard houses that serve us dwelling places for those who have luck but less.
But we know that in the making of a society of decent and just people, we cannot settle for less for those who less in life.
That we cannot settle for those who have less in life is the very spirit of the law that provides for the compensation of the not-so-good things that we do to make our political life more tolerable.
FAO/ June 2011
The next two months for the American citizen of Philippine heritage will be one of two separate but interconnected political meditations.
One, in June, is the official celebration by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines of Philippine Independence Day.
The name of the national holiday is a giveaway: it is the landmark day, when, at the height of the struggle of the peoples of the Philippines against the abuses of the Spanish colonizers, our people finally came to their senses that from that day onwards to make sense of our freedom in the way that makes sense to us all is an ethical and moral obligation of every citizen.
Two, in July, there is going to be the Fourth of July, a sacred day for all citizens of the United States of America.
It is the day the Americans declared their independence from the colonizers, the Brits.
Both the Philippine June 12 and the American Fourth of July have parallel narratives made powerful by the fact that people had come to their realization that independence—hence, freedom—matter.
The people of the Philippines who have come to the United States are placed in a position of privilege for having become the beneficiary of this rich historical reality, a legacy, indeed, of the people before them who knew what freedom is.
It is the freedom that creates opportunities to have sufficient food on the table.
It is the freedom that relates to the respect for the fundamental liberties of people, a respect that creates opportunities for labor, and for that dignity of labor to be held sacred.
It is the freedom that relates to justice: that basic justice in the economic front that calls out to people to help in the renewal of the possibilities of the earth.
It is justice that is articulated by the providing of jobs to all able citizens so that in that act of working, there are able to real themselves.
The formula for our sense of freedom is simple enough. There is no waste of words here but a mantric transformation of our ideals into some words that refuse to remain words but word becoming worlds in the end, the word and the world one and the same.
In light of our current concerns in the Philippine and the United States, we are challenged by the contradictory realities we around us.
In Hawaii, we live by the power of the spectacular, the power of tourism, which, essentially is about the act of seeing without necessarily knowing.
In the Philippines, we live the power of the psychology of the mass, with promises for scholarship to children of the Overseas Filipino Workers when their cases of capital punishment in other countries become a sensation.
Either way are the ugly realities lurking in each utterance that we have become free, that we have become as free as a bird, that we have become as free as the early morning breeze.
While we see excess in the United States, there is much misery in the country’s hidden places, in the marginalized places, in the peripheralized places.
While we see abundance in the money enclaves of the rich in the Philippines, there is much misery in the country’s slums, streetcorners, makeshift homes and communities under bridges, and far-flung barrios.
While we see palatial homes in Hawaii, we see at the same time tarpaulin homes in places where tourists do not go.
While we see concrete homes with landscaped gardens in the big cities of the Philippines such as Cebu, Davao, and Manila, we see at the same time cardboard houses that serve us dwelling places for those who have luck but less.
But we know that in the making of a society of decent and just people, we cannot settle for less for those who less in life.
That we cannot settle for those who have less in life is the very spirit of the law that provides for the compensation of the not-so-good things that we do to make our political life more tolerable.
FAO/ June 2011
FAO Editorial
DREAMING OF AN ACT
In consideration today at the United States Legislature is the DREAM Act, an initiative that is almost ten years old.
Its name suggests the clarity of its purpose: Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors.
It is meant to give a path to students—or former students—to become conditional permanent residents, later on to become legal permanent residents, and eventually, to become citizens of the United States.
First introduced on August 1, 2001 and reintroduced on May 11, 2011, the bill provides conditional permanent residency for “certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U. S. legally or illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior the bill’s enactment.”
Accounts from various sources speak of about 825,000 to 2.1 “illegal and deportable alien students” who could benefit from this initiative as soon as it is enacted.
Of this number, we do not know how many of them are students of Philippine descent, students who have come to live here, stayed in our classrooms, and learned the rudiments of American citizenship and the responsibilities of becoming one.
But we are certain of one thing: that a good number of them are students of Philippine descent who came with their parents or relatives to the United States in pursuit of a better life not found in the home country.
For such is the route of a number of people of the Philippines in their pursuit of one living hope: that the United States will give them a better opportunity, that given the chance, they will make it here despite the setbacks, the adjustments, the culture shock, and the numerous sacrifices that gain some credence, shape, and form only when told again and again in their rawness.
We have the story in Antonio Vargas’ narrative, a powerful testimonial to the greatness of what we can do to this potential human resource.
Vargas is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who came forward with his story of being an undocumented student—and being an undocumented writer—published at New York Times.
Vargas came into the country assuming a different identity, with a fake passport.
He was barely in his teens when he came, and did not know anything about what he was getting into.
As soon as he got into the country, he assumed his old identity, became known as himself, but with a fake Social Security number and a fake permanent residency card that he could not use when he tried to get his California driver license.
He was devastated when he found out about the limits of what he could do as an undocumented student with so much ambition, with the dream to make it here, and live a life better than what he had known at a young age in his home province in Zambales.
Vargas maybe an extraordinarily gifted “illegal and deportable alien” who went through high school and college in the United States, and learned all the ways to becoming American, even winning the much-coveted journalism award.
But his case represents the estimated 825,000 to 2.1 million students and young career professionals who will benefit from the Dream Act.
Arne Duncan, currently the Secretary of Education, says it aptly about our need for these “potential beneficiaries”: “We just need this human potential, the tremendous capacity, to contribute to society, to contribute to our economy.”
At the core of the Dream Act is our offer to provide a path to citizenship to those who have come to our shores and to share with us the blessings of American life.
It is recognizing—and admitting—that our country needs all the young people who have so much promise, so much potential, so much faith in our way of life.
Rahm Emmanuel, mayor of Chicago, says that this path to citizenship is what the dream of becoming American is all about.
It is taking part of that dream—of participating in it.
It is pursuing a dream—and realizing it—the way the first immigrants pursued, and realized, their dream of becoming a new people.
Doing the right thing for our students who have come to share our American life is the right thing to do.
It is dreaming of an act—it is pursuing the dream to become American.
And it is the right thing to do.
FAO Editorial, July 2011
In consideration today at the United States Legislature is the DREAM Act, an initiative that is almost ten years old.
Its name suggests the clarity of its purpose: Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors.
It is meant to give a path to students—or former students—to become conditional permanent residents, later on to become legal permanent residents, and eventually, to become citizens of the United States.
First introduced on August 1, 2001 and reintroduced on May 11, 2011, the bill provides conditional permanent residency for “certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U. S. legally or illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior the bill’s enactment.”
Accounts from various sources speak of about 825,000 to 2.1 “illegal and deportable alien students” who could benefit from this initiative as soon as it is enacted.
Of this number, we do not know how many of them are students of Philippine descent, students who have come to live here, stayed in our classrooms, and learned the rudiments of American citizenship and the responsibilities of becoming one.
But we are certain of one thing: that a good number of them are students of Philippine descent who came with their parents or relatives to the United States in pursuit of a better life not found in the home country.
For such is the route of a number of people of the Philippines in their pursuit of one living hope: that the United States will give them a better opportunity, that given the chance, they will make it here despite the setbacks, the adjustments, the culture shock, and the numerous sacrifices that gain some credence, shape, and form only when told again and again in their rawness.
We have the story in Antonio Vargas’ narrative, a powerful testimonial to the greatness of what we can do to this potential human resource.
Vargas is the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who came forward with his story of being an undocumented student—and being an undocumented writer—published at New York Times.
Vargas came into the country assuming a different identity, with a fake passport.
He was barely in his teens when he came, and did not know anything about what he was getting into.
As soon as he got into the country, he assumed his old identity, became known as himself, but with a fake Social Security number and a fake permanent residency card that he could not use when he tried to get his California driver license.
He was devastated when he found out about the limits of what he could do as an undocumented student with so much ambition, with the dream to make it here, and live a life better than what he had known at a young age in his home province in Zambales.
Vargas maybe an extraordinarily gifted “illegal and deportable alien” who went through high school and college in the United States, and learned all the ways to becoming American, even winning the much-coveted journalism award.
But his case represents the estimated 825,000 to 2.1 million students and young career professionals who will benefit from the Dream Act.
Arne Duncan, currently the Secretary of Education, says it aptly about our need for these “potential beneficiaries”: “We just need this human potential, the tremendous capacity, to contribute to society, to contribute to our economy.”
At the core of the Dream Act is our offer to provide a path to citizenship to those who have come to our shores and to share with us the blessings of American life.
It is recognizing—and admitting—that our country needs all the young people who have so much promise, so much potential, so much faith in our way of life.
Rahm Emmanuel, mayor of Chicago, says that this path to citizenship is what the dream of becoming American is all about.
It is taking part of that dream—of participating in it.
It is pursuing a dream—and realizing it—the way the first immigrants pursued, and realized, their dream of becoming a new people.
Doing the right thing for our students who have come to share our American life is the right thing to do.
It is dreaming of an act—it is pursuing the dream to become American.
And it is the right thing to do.
FAO Editorial, July 2011
REITERATING CHRISTMAS
What it means has been lost along the way.
The distractions are all over the place, the message has been distorted, and the messenger has been reduced to a God-of-last-resort.
When everything else fails, we come to the God-with-us, the Immanuel.
When the world crumbles down on us, we remember that we have forgotten: that there is the Creator from whom all goodness comes.
We live in a world mishmashed by the unnecessary, clouded by the accidents we do not need in order to put some substance to what makes sense because it matters most.
All over the place are the seductions of the temporary, the everyday.
All over the place are the enchantments of those that will come to pass and we forget, effectively.
In some sense, the recipient of the message is on the loose, unable to rein in himself, reining in what needs to be reined in but unsuccessfully at most.
The phantom that is the world—looming large and welcoming—is too huge to be dismissed, its offer of the deal too tempting to simply turn our back to.
Such is our lives these days.
The tentativeness is permanent, the permanence so tentative.
Not a whit do we care about the essentials without reducing our actions to essentialism.
Or even to a soap opera of the meaningless kind, produced by pop culture mindlessly, reinforced by commerce and profit and greed intentionally.
In all these, we have lost the meaning of Christmas.
In all these, Christmas has lost its sense to us.
We are here to fulfill a ritual, a ceremony of forgetting even as we troop to the vendo machines giving out all the gifts that we buy to substitute the loving that we cannot give.
We can call this the human condition, the current human condition, with all its flimsiness, its artifice, and its lack of substance.
We need to take stock of what we have got, like learning again the lessons on how to make our world more human and humane, more caring, more competent in dealing with the widespread apathy that has afflicted us.
The human condition is this: indifferent to the sufferings of the world, indifferent to the situations of others that have been reduced to wretchedness, indifferent to the impossibility of announcing what can be redeemed, indifferent to what can make us remember so that once again we can become more human, we can become more humane, we can become again the image of the created being that can rightly sport the qualification “God-with-us.”
We have forgotten this “us,” this us that is “God-with-us.”
A redeemer has been given unto us, and that redeemer is placed somewhere, like a reserved tire, like a spare part of the mechanical life that we have learned to lead and live.
The God-with-us is not needed, let that stay in the nook, in that dark corner somewhere.
The God-with-us is needed now, make the call.
It is that: transactional, business-like, negotiable, instrumental.
It is in this light that we reiterate that Christmas is not a passing season.
That Christmas is not an invention of human history.
That Christmas is not a product of human imagination with all the ugly connotations of that imagination.
Christmas is what it is: a commitment to the human community.
It is a commitment to the redemption of all peoples.
FAO/Dec 2010/Editorial
Observer Editorial-May 2009
May and Memory-Making
There is so much in the making of memories and in the telling of truth in relation to that moral act of memory.
For one, our stories, the ones that live for all time, are grounded on that capacity of memory to keep those that matter to us as peoples, as communities, as narrators.
They say that we are all stories and that if we are not stories, we are nothing.
And in this May of our recession-filled lives, there is nothing grander, there is nothing more sublime, there is nothing more redeeming than our ethical engagement with truth-telling and memory-making in that delicate dance we call ‘story-making’.
For the Filipino community in Hawai’i—and by extension, in the diaspora—the month of May is a riot of fiestas and flower offerings for the many religious rituals that give reason for the diasporic communities to gather and re-gather in celebration and collective reminiscing of the homeland.
In more ways than one, the religious, such as the Flores de Mayo festival, comes as an excuse to gather and gawk at the spectacle of ternos and tiaras that both glitter in the sun and give some measure of success for the wearers.
The month of May becomes an occasion of prayer, too, what with the santos going around as was done in the Philippines in the past when diaspora was not yet in the lexicon of everyday life of Filipinos and when leaving the homeland, whether forced or voluntary, was some form of punishment as it was also a form of banishment to the strange and the unfamiliar, to the alienating and the foreign, and to that relentless rite of rooting an re-rooting in a land not your own.
While we admit that the fiestas that we stage in our diasporic communities are sometimes far better in administration and management than the ones we have back in the homeland—and far better sometimes in terms of its popular cultural appeal, what with popular singers and popular television personalities coming to entertain and thus, coming to enthrall and make us forget in many ways the tragedy of everyday life in the home country and in the adoptive land—these fiestas need rethinking as they should be.
For unless they tell us of our duty to truth-telling particularly of that broad story of why many peoples of the Philippine have left the homeland to eke it our in other places, these fiestas will fall flat in the general scheme of things, and will end up as empty exercise of a stage show whose meaning lasts only while the spectacle lasts.
For unless these myriad of activities that highlight Philippine popular culture become themselves instruments of consciousness that make us see and hear and feel and sense and touch critically of what we need to understand about our life as a collective, in the Philippines and in the diaspora, what we do will simply turn out to be one of those endless spectacles that will leave us empty-handed in the end.
Because what we need really are cultural instruments and programs that make us remember our responsibility to tell the truth of our being members of the collective in light of our engaging and rich diversity, in light of our need to preserve the memory that will make us celebrate both our sameness and our difference—and in Hawai’i and in the diaspora, our triumphs against all odds, with both triumphs and odds equally recognized, remembered, named.
For truth-telling ought to be part of our commitment to our collective story.
For memory-making ought to make us morally engaged with our history.
Both truth-telling and memory-making are intricate parts of the same act of telling who we are as a people across time.
Published, Observer, May 2009
Hon, HI
Editorial: A difficult love, again
Observer Editorial
On practically the ‘eve’ of the celebration this February of our sometimes commercialized and commodified understanding of love and the affairs of the human heart, a death occurred: a violent death, a death that follows the route of domestic violence.
This time, the one who is stabbed to death is a man and the one who stabbed him is his girlfriend.
Let us put names to the faces—and faces to the names: John Shaniyo and Rachael Berta.
On January 5, this killing that should not happen happened—something that the larger Hawaiian community, in partnership and collaboration with other not-for-profit organizations—have always been working hard to address.
And it happened in Kahului where peace and quiet and tranquility could be its other name.
We go to Kahului from any point in Maui and the vast and calm sea greets us with its foam of waves, its fluid dance one of dynamic stillness, rhythmical in its constant teasing of the shore where the land begins.
The town’s verdant palm fronds reach out to the blue skies, and the tops and shoulders of mountains invariably remind us of spring and summer that both come in time and beyond time, with these two seasons proudly showing us the fresh flowers endlessly abloom on the town’s roadsides in that riot of colors we can only see in a land touched by human hands, true, but the touching suggests care, concern, and commitment to what is alive, to what makes life, to what sustains life.
But this death in Kahului rattles us off from our grace-filled tranquility. We simply cannot be still, not when domestic violence has that haunting presence in our midst.
While it is so that by the quantities, women outnumber men in that sad tale of women taking the beating and men doing the beating, we cannot take domestic violence as a simple case of men against women. It is much more than that.
While it is that in past, the pattern tells us of women dying—being killed—by the very men who have vowed to love and protect them, we cannot take domestic violence as a simple case of women going to the grave and men going to jail and repenting after committing the deed.
There is something awfully wrong somewhere in every phenomenon of domestic violence. Some people have called it power and control—a circle that is vicious: who wields, who yields, who can up the ante, who loses beyond loss, who is maimed, who dies, who threatens, who scares, who blackmails in the name of love or its substitutes.
It is February and it is the month of love—but how can we enter into a celebration when out there, so much of the loving has yet to be defined for what it is in the light of fundamental human justice, and defended for what it is in the light of our commitment for another human being?
Many of us will go through the familiar annual rite: the bunch of pink roses on hand, the chocolates in red beribboned boxes, and the candles with their dancing light giving off that glow that can only reveal the texture of romantic moments.
Let it be.
At the end of the day is that one difficult question we need to ask: what is love in this time of difficulty, in this time of extreme need, in this time of crises, in this time of recession, in this time of financial want and burden?
What is love when the jigsaw puzzle of life seems not to fall into the right places so that we are left wondering which are the pieces that need to be worked out?
What is love when worries come knocking on the door? When the world is turning upside down, when all our cares do not make sense any longer? When instability of all kinds makes us go haywire?
Domestic violence is a difficult text of our life—one text that needs to be eradicated totally. We do not need another death whether man, woman, child, parent, friend, neighbor.
Every death diminishes us.
Every death of this kind makes us loving less and less.
Every death of this kind invalidates what The Day of the Hearts means.
A. Solver Agcaoili
Published, FAO Editorial, Feb 09
Hawai'i
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