The numbers—70,000 detained, 35,000 tortured, 3,200 killed—represent the victims of President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.’s era of martial law, from 1972 to 1986. They serve as a reminder of one of the darkest periods in the Philippines’ history.

That darkness is enveloping the nation and its diaspora once again. In May 2022, 38 years after his family was exiled from the Philippines in the People Power Revolution, Bongbong Marcos Jr. was elected to a six-year presidential term alongside vice president Sara Duterte, daughter of former president and authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos and Duterte supporters romanticize martial law as a “golden age,” but many Filipinos—including diasporic Filipino Americans like us—question or outright reject this distortion of history. This past year’s developments in the Philippines urge Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike to preserve and reinforce our historical memories of dictatorship. Indeed, the fight to preserve our historical memory goes hand in hand with the fight against fascism. Many Filipino activists reference the popular aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Only through a transnational movement of truth-based remembering and community organizing can we confront the present-day threat of the Marcos-Duterte administration.

When Marcos Sr. rose to power democratically in 1965, he posed as a populist—but made unpopular decisions. He supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, which allowed for the increased use of U.S. military bases in the Philippines; he devalued the peso relative to the U.S. dollar, increasing prices of basic goods and services for working Filipinos; and he violently put down student protesters who opposed his plans to run for a third term.

In 1972, under a questionable interpretation of the Philippine Constitution (ratified when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony), Marcos declared martial law to bypass the two-term presidential limit. Alongside the growing communist movement, opposition grew from multiple sectors of Philippine society exercising their right to political dissent: workers and peasants, youth and students, women, and Indigenous peoples.

Because martial law outlawed protests, activists organized underground to fight for social and political change. Their demands ranged from the restoration of civil liberties to winning a socialist revolution, but they all wanted to end the Marcos dictatorship, and they worked to end human rights abuses, such as political detention and torture, and to halt economic plunder, some of which came in the form of public works projects that violated Indigenous sovereignty.

Mass arrests, especially in the first years of martial law, caused many activists to flee the country and settle in major cities like Los Angeles. There they met like-minded Filipino Americans who were politicized by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the labor activism of Filipino farm workers who migrated as U.S. colonial subjects in the 1920s and ’30s.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Filipinos in the U.S. and their allies formed organizations such as the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino, National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in Philippines, Movement for a Free Philippines, and Friends of the Filipino People. They educated the broader U.S. public on the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship, lobbied Congress to cut military assistance to Marcos, and raised funds to free political prisoners. Our activism grows out of this tradition.

U.S. presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan supported Marcos; as part of the Mutual Defense Treaty, Marcos helped the U.S. maintain its security interests in Southeast Asia, and in return, Marcos received military aid. But eventually he became too great a liability. In 1986 hundreds of thousands of Filipinos joined the People Power Revolution, flooding the streets of EDSA Boulevard in Manila to protest Marcos’ attempt to steal the election from Corazon Aquino. Outflanked, the Marcoses fled to Hawai‘i via a U.S. Air Force transport plane.  

Now, in a blatant act of historical revisionism, President Bongbong Marcos Jr. claims that the Philippines made economic and social progress under his father. But the data shows that Marcos Sr. left the Philippine economy in shambles. Over the years since, through subsequent presidents and large-scale land and agrarian reforms, widespread distrust in government combined with widening class divisions created the perfect conditions for the return of a fascist government via Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.

Duterte took pleasure in using violence to consolidate power. During his presidency, from 2016 to 2022, he urged civilians, law enforcement, and military alike to kill an estimated 30,000 Filipinos as part of a so-called Drug War, which he alarmingly likened to the Holocaust. Victims of the Drug War are still waiting for the Philippine government to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and hold Duterte accountable, while current president Marcos has promised to continue his predecessor’s campaign of terror.

Duterte also declared martial law for 60 days in Muslim-majority Mindanao, a historically resource-rich and war-torn region with the highest rates of poverty in the Philippines and a 400-year history of resisting colonial forces. Philippine presidents continue to receive support from foreign powers for these militaristic ventures. The U.S. gave the Philippines $600 million in military aid during Duterte’s presidency.

Activists at Unidad Park in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown standing in front of the “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)” mural by Eliseo Art Silva.

Faced with another era of fascist rule, activists with organizations such as Bayan USA and Malaya Movement USA channel the spirit of People Power. On September 20th (September 21st in the Philippines), we held a rally at L.A.’s Unidad Park in Historic Filipinotown to mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law—to remember the activists killed under Marcos and Duterte, to decry historical revisionism and Marcos Jr.’s visit to the United Nations that very day, and to encourage more people to join the movement. It is crucial at this time to remember accurately and to speak out against censorship and share fact-based news, since Marcos Jr., following his father’s example, has taken an aggressive stance against press freedom. And it is especially important for Filipinos and our allies in the U.S. to put pressure on the Biden administration to end support of the current Marcos administration through the Philippine Human Rights Act.

The fact that the Filipino masses, with support from progressive media and the U.S. Congress, could oust Marcos Sr. in 1986 suggests that we have the power today to prevent another period of dark and bloody history.

We have seen history repeat itself in a harrowing way with the return of the Marcoses to Malacañang, but we could see it repeat favorably with another mass movement of remembrance that can hold the Marcoses and Dutertes accountable for their crimes. In doing so, we can uplift the history of activism that brought an end to martial law and, drawing on that legacy of people power, build a genuinely democratic Philippines.

The post Using Memory to Fight Fascism in the Philippines appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is now commonplace to be cared for at the bedside by a Filipino immigrant nurse. According to the 2016 Survey of California Registered Nurses, Filipinos make up the second largest group of the state’s active RN workforce, nearly 18 percent. Among younger nurses, they’re even more predominant, with Filipino nurses representing nearly a quarter of nurses between ages 35 to 44 years and more than one-fifth of RNs 45 to 54 years old.

In the process of becoming essential to California, Filipino nurses have changed the definition of what we describe as care by bringing their own cultural practices and sensibilities to the bedside. At the same time, they have contributed to the research, business, and politics of American health care as directors of research centers, as entrepreneurs of health care institutions, and as leaders of labor unions and professional organizations.

The presence of Filipino nurses in California is not new; indeed, the nurses are part of a larger and more complex story of a medical field where cultural ideas and practices are frequently exchanged.

The predominance of Filipino nurses was catalyzed by three big changes in the United States during the 1960s. First, the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid resulted in an increased need for nurses, while, in a second major change, the women’s and civil rights movements resulted in new job opportunities for American women. At around the same time, a more equitable immigration law, called the Hart-Celler Act, was passed. As the increasing demand for nursing services became difficult to fill domestically, American hospital recruiters looked abroad.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, high rates of domestic unemployment and political instability pushed Filipino nurses to emigrate overseas. The devaluation of the Philippine peso against the U.S. dollar made the United States a highly attractive destination. By the early 1970s, a Filipino nurse in the Philippines needed to work 12 years to earn what she could make in the United States in one year.

Some Philippine government officials initially criticized Filipino immigrant nurses for abandoning their home country. But, in the early 1970s, after observing the demand for Filipino nurses in the United States, then-President Ferdinand Marcos shifted the country’s development towards a labor export economy. The Philippine government began aggressively promoting the outmigration of Filipino nurses and other workers, eventually touting them as the new national heroes for the billions of dollars they remit annually in foreign currency.

There was another, more historic reason why the Philippines specifically became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States: U.S. colonization of the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 had led to the creation of Americanized professional nursing training in the archipelago. In the early twentieth century, American nurses trained Filipino students in courses such as practical nursing, the use of pharmaceuticals, and bacteriology. Philippine nursing licensure examinations included testing in the English language as well as in nursing-related subjects. Although intended to prepare Filipinos for Philippine self-government, these U.S. colonial policies inadvertently prepared Filipino nurses to work in the United States.

But change and influence don’t move in just one direction. Just as American nurses indelibly influenced Philippine nursing, so too have Filipino nurses changed the practice of health care in the United States.

In the U.S., Filipino nurses integrate Filipino cultural values and beliefs into their caregiving practices. Among these core values are a high regard for elders and authority, an emphasis on group harmony and interpersonal relationships, and the significance of modesty, sensitivity, and spirituality. Such values shape Filipino nurses’ renowned compassion and work ethic at the bedside. As one nurse stated: “I see my patients as my relatives and this influences the way I care for them. I feel that my upbringing helps me see people and care for them.”

Filipino immigrant nurses also bring experience with Philippine traditional therapies such as hilot, faith healing, and the use of medicinal plants. Hilot is a traditional form of massage therapy or chiropractic manipulation that relieves aches and pains. This knowledge of Philippine healing modalities is important not solely because the use of alternative therapies in the U.S. has become more mainstream, but also because a growing number of Americans are of Filipino heritage. Between 1980 and 2016, the Filipino immigrant population in the United States nearly quadrupled. California is home to the largest Filipino-American population in the nation with over 1.6 million of Filipino descent.

As educators and researchers, Filipino nurses are at the vanguard of creating new knowledge relevant to Filipino Americans who have been generally underrepresented in health care-related research. For example, Felicitas dela Cruz is a professor at Azusa Pacific University’s School of Nursing and the director of its Center for the Study of Health Disparities. In her research with Carmen Galang, Dr. dela Cruz has found that, like other ethnic groups, Filipino Americans avail themselves of folk medicine as well as Western medicine to address illness. In the case of high blood pressure, they have utilized hilot and religious activities to lower their blood pressure.

Filipino nurses’ experience in health care has led to their ownership of health care businesses. The research of Jennifer Nazareno spotlights the growing number of Filipino immigrant nurses in Southern California who have become private owners and operators of small government-subsidized businesses in the long-term care industry, providing care to some of the most impoverished—as well as cognitively and physically disabled—elderly populations. While
this group of Filipino immigrant nurse entrepreneurs has created an important safety net for the most vulnerable in the American health care system, they are under tremendous stress to provide quality care within limited or fixed government-subsidized budgets.

Filipino nurses in the U.S., out of deep commitment to their profession, have also changed health care by forming organizations that provide social outlets and build political power. In the 1960s, pioneering Filipino nurses in California created professional organizations that would become known as the Philippine Nurses Association of Southern California and the Philippine Nurses Association of Northern California. Their mission is to promote the welfare of their members through community building and networking, to further their nursing knowledge and skills through professional development programs, and to contribute to health care and society.
Immigrant nurses initially created these organizations in order to address their isolation, loneliness, and educational needs, but they have also played a part in making Filipino nurses visible within the larger system.

Photo courtesy of Philippine Nurses Association of Southern California.

As Filipino immigrant nurses have taken up positions of leadership in labor unions and professional organizations, they have addressed the politics of health care in the U.S. In 2015, Zenei Cortez was the first Filipino to be elected president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurse Organizing Committee, a labor union and professional association of registered nurses that has advocated for lower nurse-patient ratios and health coverage for all. Cortez is currently a president of National Nurses United, and a prominent advocate of Medicare for All.

While research has suggested that Filipino cultural values may contribute to Filipino nurses’ reticence and submissiveness, their encounters with discrimination have motivated them to fight for justice in California workplaces. Earlier this decade, a group of Filipino nurses—who claimed that they suffered from harassment and humiliation when they spoke Filipino dialects in break rooms and in the cafeteria, and that they were ordered to speak “English only”—won a landmark settlement against a Central California hospital. Although officials at Delano Regional Medical Center insisted they did nothing wrong, the hospital had to conduct staff training on diversity as part of the settlement.

And for all the power of Filipino immigrant nurses today, the story we’ve seen so far may prove to be just a small beginning. The American population is rapidly aging. Forecasts show dire shortages in the U.S. health care workforce by 2025. As important as Filipinos have been to developing the health care system today, their contributions will become even more critical in the decades ahead.

The post Why Are There So Many Filipino Nurses in California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The impact of this era’s anti-immigrant sentiment is broad, and touches immigrants and native-born Americans in unforeseen ways. The problem is that Angelenos don’t yet recognize just how broadly this atmosphere is hurting immigrants of all backgrounds, because too many different kinds of people get left out the narrative. Some of these omissions are due to prejudice and divisions within immigrant communities themselves.

As an example of the problem, let’s look at the cases of two individuals, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Vincent Chin, and the different reactions to them among Asian Americans and U.S. residents of Asian heritage.

Vincent Chin’s name may well be familiar to you. He was bludgeoned to death 35 years ago in a Detroit suburb by two white men who mistook him for Japanese (the assailants blamed the Japanese for the decline of the U.S. auto industry). Chin’s death, followed by the lenient sentence of three years’ probation for both men, sparked outrage among Asian Americans from coast to coast, and led to protests in Los Angeles.

Vincent Chin’s death is now a rallying cry for Asian Americans to mobilize across ethnic boundaries in the face of anti-Asian prejudice and violence, and gross injustice. This is highly relevant now in Los Angeles, where the Asian American population has grown by 20 percent in the last decade.

Asian Americans collectively identified with Chin, seeing in his tragic fate our own vulnerable status, in a country that repeatedly has questioned our allegiance—a vulnerability that, among Asians, cuts across national origin, ethnicity, nativity, and class.

But the name Srinivas Kuchibhotla is less familiar, even though he made the news more recently.

On February 22, Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old Indian engineer in Kansas, was shot and killed by a white man who mistook him and his friend, Alok Madasani, for Iranians. Witnesses said that the man yelled at Kuchibhotla and his friend to “Get out of my country!” before shooting both, and killing Kuchibhotla. The suspect has been charged with premeditated first-degree murder, and the case is being investigated as a hate crime.

Kuchibhotla’s death, compared to Chin’s older story, remains obscure, and the collective silence on the part of Asian Americans is deafening. While Indian Americans and Indians have claimed Kuchibhotla as one of ours, other Asian Americans have not done the same.

So why do Asian Americans continue to rally for Vincent Chin even 35 years after his death, but fail to do the same for Srinivas Kuchibhotla?

In part, it is because many Asian Americans do not perceive Kuchibhotla as one of us. Findings from the 2016 National Asian American Survey show that while Americans—including Asian Americans—see Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese as Asian, they view Indians differently. Among whites, 41% believe that Indians are not Asian, while 35% of Blacks and Latinos feel the same. Moreover, the other Asian ethnic groups in the survey—Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Japanese, Cambodians, and Hmong—are just as likely to perceive Indians as not Asian, despite the fact that Indians see themselves as Asian.

In short, Americans—including Asian Americans—draw a sharp boundary between Asian and non-Asian that separates East Asians (Chinese, Korean, and Japanese) from South Asians (Indians). This explains the silence.

In an era in which the president is creating fissures among Americans, and excluding groups from the American fold, the bitter irony is that many Asian Americans are doing the same within our own group. This is a mistake.

Social psychologists have shown that Asian Americans are stereotyped as competent but cold by Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Hence, despite our achievements—including obtaining graduate degrees, opening businesses, and succeeding in professional fields—Asian Americans are perceived as unsociable, and, therefore, incapable of gaining support from other groups. This makes Asian Americans an easy target for prejudice and discrimination. Interestingly, Indians are the only Asian ethnic group perceived as both competent and sociable, but this has not shielded them from nativist prejudice and violence.

Without the support from other groups—including other Asian Americans—we set ourselves up for a harder fight when another of us becomes the victim of a hate crime. If we cannot mobilize among ourselves and garner unequivocal support for Srivanis Kuchibhotla, we cannot expect that other groups will step up and back us. This is paramount in a political climate in which the current administration wields fear and unleashes prejudice to divide Americans. Asian Americans need not follow suit. For starters, we could embrace Srivanis Kuchibhotla as one of our own, rather than one of “them.”

So rather than fracturing along ethnic boundaries, Asian Americans can decide to unite across them, and coalesce on the many issues that unify us. The majority of us strongly oppose banning Muslims from entering the country, and we support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. And despite what the Department of Justice may believe about Asian Americans’ position on affirmative action, two-thirds of us support affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women, and other minorities get better access to higher education.

The current administration, however, has proposed policies that fly in the face of our values, priorities, interests, and concerns. What divides us pales in comparison to what unites us. When Asian Americans recognize this, we will become a powerful political force.

The post A Hate Crime Exposes Deeper Rifts Between Asian Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I came to Perris, a small town in Riverside County, more than two decades ago from the island province of Bohol in the Philippines. As much as I would have loved to remain in my country, in September 1994, I immigrated to America to follow my wife Agnes. On the first day, I already missed the family and friends I left behind—I didn’t know it then, but I would eventually play a role in providing support for the Filipino community in my new home.

Here in Perris, I have friends—and friends of friends—who suffer with depression. One friend’s cousin even committed suicide. I’ve struggled with how to help. As a husband and a parent myself, there are times through the years when I, too, would have benefitted from some form of support—parenting, mental health, peer-to-peer. But my wife and I were fully consumed with the responsibilities of our lives and didn’t know where to look or even who to ask for help.

In the Filipino community there can be a stigma attached to mental illness—a sense of shame that, for some of us, stems from adherence to traditional values. Some people fear that if they or relatives were diagnosed as mentally ill, they would suffer damage to their reputations and relationships, damage to how their families are regarded in the community. We feel we have to solve whatever problems we have on our own. It’s on us.

Filipinos may be the largest single Asian population in the Inland Empire, but we are dispersed, and some among us face emotional and behavioral challenges rooted in our own history. Having been under Spanish rule for 400 years followed by 50 years of American colonialism, our sense of our culture is not always as strong or as cohesive as other ethnic groups. We come from scattered islands with different native dialects. Here in Southern California, there’s a shortage of information and resources available to Filipinos, with our diverse mixture of culture, beliefs, and practices. Add to that the demands of working and living in a new country and you can see why working together for a common cause—especially getting the care we need when it comes to mental health issues—has its innate difficulties.

I’m a longtime member and past president of the Perris Valley Filipino-American Association. Right now the association’s focus is on opening a Filipino-American resource center. We want to create a safe and accessible place where people can get the services they need, in an environment where they can communicate in English or Tagalog. Where conversations are welcome, where you feel comfortable inquiring about mental health.

The Perris Valley Filipino-American Association’s booth at a community health fair.

 
We also hope to help new immigrants, to get them started in the most basic of ways, such as applying for a driver’s license or a credit card, finding a school district for their kids, helping them find proper legal advice and health care. The Riverside University Health System, a public teaching hospital in the Moreno Valley, is helping us with the funding, and the association’s president, Hermie Abrigo, a State Farm agent, is providing us space in his office building in Moreno Valley to house the center.

Before I left the Philippines I graduated with a degree in philosophy and political science from the Holy Name University in Tagbilaran City, in Bohol. I then went to work for the Social Action Center for the local Catholic Diocese for five years. My colleagues from the center and I traveled to small towns where we offered a wide range of support and training, everything from team-building to leadership to life skills and income-building; from how to run a cooperative to how to make soap. The center financed their efforts with small start-up capital. It was meaningful work. People were empowered, the difference in their lives was immediate. It was an idealist’s career, where I felt I made a significance albeit small contribution.

My American experience has not been as meaningful, career-wise. The whole journey has been humbling in many respects. When my wife and I had our first child, I stayed home and took care of my daughter, Meghan. Fatherhood took on a deeper meaning than going out there and trying to change the world. I was the stay-at-home dad. I was lucky that she was not a fussy child. She has always been calm and independent.

Back when she was just two years old, I got a job in downtown Los Angeles as a paralegal, doing civil litigation, immigration, bankruptcy cases, and personal injury. Every Monday I would leave Perris at 4 a.m. to drive into L.A. where I would stay with a relative for the work week, and then return home for the weekend. I did this for 15 years, and my daughter got sad every time I left the house. It was not the most ideal living arrangement. It was hard on me, on my children, on my family. Circumstances dictated that we had to tough it out if we were to eke out a living and chase the American dream.

The Filipino Association—formed in 1997 by my tennis partner, Eddie Init, my father-in-law, Billy Culpa, and others—has given us a platform to try and provide support for families like ours. Initially the focus was social networking and promoting camaraderie among local Filipinos. Then, the vision expanded to include the promotion of Filipino arts, culture, and traditions. We bring together parents and grandparents, kids and grandkids for picnics, dances, festivals, camping trips, and sporting events.

Traditional Filipino costumes at the annual Lunar Festival in Riverside.

 
Eventually we partnered with the Asian American Task Force, part of Riverside County’s behavioral health program. The aim of the task force is to bring the Asian American Pacific Islander community together for networking, education, advocacy, and community building. Beyond that, the task force’s mission is to help us achieve overall wellbeing, in both our bodies and our minds.

In July, our association partnered with the county health department on a workshop on parenting, examining some of the traditional ways of parenting, and encouraging dialogues to help bridge gaps between generations. I’d like to think that my family and I are well-adjusted. My son is an 8th grader at the California Military Institute in Perris. And my daughter is now in college. Not too long ago, she told that she is unafraid to pursue typical male roles because I had no qualms taking on female responsibilities at home. This was perhaps my proudest moment. Can you believe, we even let her take the Metrolink train from Riverside to L.A.’s Union Station alone at 9 years old? Our extended family is very close, and my wife and I almost gave the entire clan a heart attack!

Everyday demands of parenting will always be there, but now we are better equipped to meet them. Good parenting is not a talent you are born with. It takes practice and unending learning because there is no-cookie cutter formula that works from one child to the next. It is a challenge, a responsibility. Parents are but stewards of God’s gift of a child. The parenting workshop not only afforded us the training to be better parents, but better and relevant Asian parents. This is one of the many ways the association is building a healthy community, an effort I’m proud to be a part of.

The post Creating a Center for Culture, Tradition—and Mental Health Care appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.