A Filipino American History Month Reflection
Something is tempting about believing that the times in which we live are entirely new.
Our problems are different. Our technology is different. Our children face a different world. Surely, we sometimes think, those who came before us could not fully understand the challenges of our time.
Yet an ancient piece of wisdom offers another way of looking at the present:
“Remember the days of old. Understand the years across generations. Ask your father and he will tell you; your elders, and they will tell you.”
Three simple instructions emerge:
Remember. Ask. Listen.
As we celebrate Filipino American History Month, we would add one more:
Preserve.
That invitation runs through this October edition of the Bayanihan Newsletter. The articles and community activities gathered here remind us that history does not survive simply because something important happened. History survives because someone remembers, someone asks, someone listens—and someone takes the trouble to preserve and pass the story on.
That responsibility becomes more urgent as our elders age. Memories fade. Names and dates become uncertain. Photographs lose their identifying notes. Family stories become fragments. And experiences never written down can disappear with the people who lived them.
Our history can also be forgotten in another way: through omission, marginalization, or the rewriting of uncomfortable truths. Personal narratives therefore matter. They give history a human face and preserve details that official records and textbooks may overlook. They tell us not only what happened, but how events were experienced by ordinary people.
This issue offers powerful examples.
We travel back to 1587, when three men identified only as “Luzon Indios” became the first documented Filipinos to set foot on what is now the United States. Their individual names disappeared from the historical record, but their presence did not. Remembering them restores Filipinos to a chapter of American history written centuries before either the United States or the modern Philippine nation existed.
We also encounter history through the memories of people who lived it. Reflections on Martial Law remind us why the testimony of elders matters, particularly when later generations encounter competing versions of the past. Their memories are not merely interesting stories. They are witnesses to history.
In “BAKIT Amerika?”, history enters the intimacy of a family breakfast table. A question—Why America?—opens into a story of political uncertainty, migration, family separation, and the difficult choices parents made for their children. Such stories help younger generations understand that immigration did not begin at an airport. Behind the journey were circumstances, conversations, fears, hopes, and sacrifices.
The story of money remittances continues that lesson. The dollars sent home by Filipinos abroad represent far more than a financial transaction. Behind them are long hours of work, postponed comforts, separation from loved ones, and a deeply Filipino sense of responsibility to family. Even something as ordinary as sending money home becomes part of our social history.
And “Manang’s Memories” asks us to consider memory from another direction. Not everything lost can be completely recovered. Some memories survive only in fragments. Yet even those fragments tell us something about identity, loss, belonging, resilience, and our shared humanity.
Together with the community events and flyers featured in this edition—exhibitions, performances, workshops, historical programs, cultural gatherings, and intergenerational conversations—these stories remind us that Filipino American history is not confined to museums or textbooks. It lives in our families, organizations, churches, community centers, art, language, food, photographs, letters, and everyday conversations.
And it lives here in Chicago and the Midwest.
The experiences of Filipino nurses, workers, immigrants, artists, activists, families, students, elders, and community builders are all part of a larger history. Some stories are well documented. Others remain at the margins, waiting for someone to ask the right question.
Filipino American History Month therefore asks more of us than celebration.
Ask your parents and grandparents why they came—or why they stayed.
Ask what life was like when they were young.
Ask about Martial Law, migration, work, discrimination, organizing, courtship, food, faith, celebrations, disappointments, and dreams.
Ask who built the organizations and institutions our community enjoys today.
And perhaps most importantly, ask about the stories no one has thought to ask before.
Then write them down. Record them. Preserve the photographs. Identify the people in them. Save the letters and recipes. Keep the language alive. Share the stories with our children.
The world did not begin with us. Neither did the Filipino American story.
But whether much of that story reaches the generations after us may depend on what we choose to preserve today.
So as you read this Filipino American History Month edition of Bayanihan, we invite you to do more than look backward.
Remember. Ask. Listen. Preserve.
Because understanding where we came from can help us recognize where we are going—and because remembering our history is itself an act of bayanihan: carrying our collective story together so that those who come after us will know that they, too, belong to it.
Happy Filipino American History Month!
— Editorial Staff
Bayanihan Newsletter
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