THE HISTORY OF TAGALOG ON SITE

I Have a Dream :: THE LONG JOURNEY HOME*
Bringing Filipino Americans Closer to their Roots
By ROFEL G. BRION

SUSAN QUIMPO HAD BEEN an educator, activist, community organizer and freelance writer/editor in Manila when she joined her fiancé George Chiu in Athens, Ohio in 1987. They married there and completed graduate degrees at Ohio University. In 1990, they moved to New York City to work. There Susan organized Filipino American youths, and eventually co-founded Arkipelago, a New York City-based arts and advocacy group. The couple came home to the Philippines in 1996 and began Tagalog On Site (TOS), a program that brings second- and third-generation Filipino Americans to the Philippines to learn Tagalog (Filipino), participate in lectures and discussions on Philippine history, politics, culture and contempo-rary issues, and interact with local communities. On the afternoon before this year's TOS batch climbed Mount Banahaw, Susan talks about the long journey home.

How did your work with Filipino-Americans begin?

Soon after I joined George in New York in 1990, a group called Youth for Philippine Action (YPA) asked me and a friend to facili-tate a Philippine history workshop. That was the first time I heard the term "Filipino American." And I was shocked at the sight of the participants who were high school and college stu-dents from ages 14 to 26 – they had shaved heads, tattoos, nose piercing, tongue piercing. Only three spoke Tagalog. They were very serious, and very angry. For them, the system, mainstream America –- was the enemy. They wanted a history workshop because they were looking towards being "more" Filipino. It was the only thing they could call their own. And yet, they were not quite sure of what that really meant.

How did you feel after that? Did you work with them again?

I was very bothered and I didn't know if I was able to help. But YPA contacted me again and asked me and other Filipino cultural workers to help them make a float and a presentation for the Philippine Independence Day celebration on Madison Avenue in New York City. They wanted to re-enact the Cry of Pugadlawin. The group was composed of the same young people in the previous workshop -–- sons and daughters of drivers, domestic helpers, nurses, United Nations guides –- and we worked in the evenings in the home of one of the nurses in midtown Manhattan. This time, they were less defensive, less angry. I heard stories like, "My sister, she's in North Carolina right now. Last week, her teacher called her a monkey without tail." While we sewed the Katipunan flags, they talked about the big wooden spoons forks, and rosaries in their homes and their parents not under-standing them. They talked about going high school in New Jersey and being so scared each time they passed a street corner on their way home where a gang of white kids waited to beat them up for no reason except that they wore a brown face. And they laughed as they told these stories. They were hardened youth whose motto was: "I got your back," meaning "I got your back covered. It was gang language. They were promising to protect each other. As I listened to these stories, I kept excusing myself to go to the bathroom. They thought I was sick, but I was crying. I asked myself, "What has happened to this generation?”

What happened on June 12?

We marched with our float. We sang "Alerta Katipunan," shouted "Mabuhay ang Katipunan!" tore our fake cedullas* and threw the pieces up the air. We won the contest, and the YPA members were asked to perform on stage. One by one they stood on center stage and declared their answer to the question, "What does being Filipino mean to me?” For a few minutes the crowd was quiet, listening to these young people say how proud they were to be Filipino. People in the audience began to cry. That day, about 40 young people asked to join YPA.

And how did Arkipelago begin?

In December 1993, we older Filipino activists and the YPA put up a one-night show of songs, poetry, and dances for a Filipino and Filipino American audience We called the night “Arkipelago.” Before the show, we asked people as they came in to cut pieces of cloth into an anting-anting and paste it on the part where they, or their family, were from, on a big map of the Philippines that we had painted on a stolen hospital bed sheet. The Filipino Americans did not know where the towns and provinces were, and the Filipinos from home taught them where. Three hundred people came and it turned out to be a very long program. The community was hungry for anything Filipino.

Arkipelago became an advocacy group and put up other events. Once, three visual artists showed slides of their work. One of them was Paul Pfeiffer, a Filipino American AIDS activist. He spoke of the AIDS ward at Bellevue, the largest public hospital in New York, and said that of the Asians in the AIDS ward Filipinos numbered the most. The parents and grandparents in the audience gasped at the facts. The event became a venue for young Filipino Americans to speak to the old. The show that began at three, and was supposed to end at five in the afternoon, but ended at 11 in the evening. People talked about issues in the community: immigrant rights, AIDS, problems between the two generations, racism. I thought, "This is how community organizing should be done in New York City!"

And how did this lead to Tagalog on Site?

In 1994, a Filipino-American friend took me to the Filipino Inter-Collegiate Network Dialogue (FIND) at Rutgers University in New Jersey. When we got to the place, I saw 1500 young Filipino Americans pack an auditorium. I entered and literally tripped. I cursed in Tagalog. At least four people turned around to ask me, “You know the language?” I said, “Yes, don’t you?” They all shook their heads. I was baffled, how could they look me like me and not know the language? The conference had workshops on Philippine history, the Alibata, and Filipino American issues. At the final plenary, things were going in my head. I turned around and saw this guy talking, and I asked him, “What do you think of a program that would bring Filipino Americans to the Philippines so that they can learn the language and rediscover their roots?” He said, “Yeah lady, good luck!”

I couldn’t sleep after that conference. I thought, “How can this entire generation exist in these numbers, without my generation knowing anything about them?" And so I started toying with the idea of such a program. George and I attended the next FIND conference at Binghamton in 1994, and passed out a questionnaire asking Filipino-Americans what they would want in a study-abroad program in the Philippines. Their response was univocal: teach us Tagalog, history from a Filipino perspective, and Philippine culture. At that point, we were already making plans to head home in 1996. I began talking to people, and worked on a language curriculum with a language instructor. In the Fall of 1995, we attended another conference and passed out application forms for what was to be known as Tagalog On Site. We got sixteen applicants and nine came to the first program in 1996.

What was the impact of the program on the students?

I was surprised at how the TOS participants reacted to people, places and events in the Philippines. Discussions on history, identity and, social problems lasted until the wee hours of the morning.They were deeply affected by the stories of the average Filipino-how people coped with everyday struggles for food and the most basic needs.

We were in Banaue at dusk, and one of the students was outside our inn, watching the rice terraces. I told him he would need his jacket soon. When he turned to face me, I saw that he was on the verge of tears. He said to me, "You mean to tell me that the people who built this had the same blood that runs through my veins? How come no one told me about all this before?" And weeks later, as we were boarding the superferry to Manila, a stevedore carried, all our luggage for P150. When we got on the boat, I saw one of the students crying I asked her why and she said, "The porter." I thought she lost her luggage. Later, she told me that she had seen the stevedore wearing nothing on his feet but cardboard pieces glued together. She said, “My father grew up a poor peasant in Quezon and he told me that he could not go to school because he had no shoes to wear. I never believed the ‘shoe story’ until today.”

What happened after that first program?

In the end, I realized that the program worked, but it needed fine tuning. A lot of things came to the fore that I had never thought we would face –- for instance, explaining poverty and contextualizing corruption. I never intended for TOS to continue after the pilot batch but applications kept coming in every year. By 1998, George and I decided to turn TOS into a non-profit organization with the goal of assisting young Filipino-Americans to rediscover, reclaim, and draw empowerment from their culture and heritage. It continues today; to date we've had 144 participants. Some TOS alumni have returned to work with non-government organization here to assist in community project s in Pampanga, Olongapo, Palawan Laguna and Manila. Quite a number have become community organizers in the US, fighting for immigrant rights. Still others have become teachers in schools with sizeable Filipino-American populations. They claim that they are in these professions because of the impact of TOS in their lives.

* Cedullas were government-issued tax identification cards issued during the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines

"The Long Journey Home" by Dr. Rofel Brion was published in the October 2003 issue of Me magazine, a Manila-based publication. Dr. Brion interviews Susan F. Quimpo, Tagalog On Site director, on how TOS evolved.

TOP >>