Philippine history is rich, layered, and deeply human — but much of it lives only in memory. It is carried in the stories our elders tell, in the experiences our families lived through, and in the details of Philippine life that many Filipino Americans still remember even after decades away from their birth country. These memories are precious, but they are slowly and surely fading away.
For Filipino Americans who have lived far from the Philippines for many years, remembering the past becomes more challenging as time passes. Every year that goes by, details soften. Names blur. Places become harder to picture. Oftentimes, only fragments remain — a moment, a feeling, a scene, a name or two; days and dates are unsure; one may start a narrative but is unable to supply the end. The details come exceedingly slowly. Sometimes the storytelling suddenly stops and the mind begins to wander away.
The past can be so fragile. A meticulously documented record can be manipulated, replacing facts with a whiplash of sugary coating to hide the ugly truth –the ones that are deeply repulsive for today’s senses or otherwise powerful but flawed strategic moves that present-day assessment would never have condoned.
As elders age and younger generations grow up farther away from the Philippines, entire chapters of our shared history risk vanishing. Important events that shaped the country’s fate eventually diminish in significance as facts unravel, logic collapses, and everyone is left blinking into the fog.
The threat of historical revisionism is real. Efforts to rewrite what transpired during the Martial Law years in the Philippines, for example, are happening now and are disturbing. Efforts of the Marcos family for a “revision of Philippine textbooks where the martial law president’s repressive regime is retold as a grim part of Philippine history ” were reported by ” ABS-CBN News (Dec. 20, 2020). “Akbayan: Don’t allow Marcos kin to ‘steal’ history.”
The report cited Marcos Jr., now president and son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, claiming it was his family that was a “victim” of historical revisionism, asserting that accusations against them have been unproven. The report, however, stressed that “Marcos’ family and supporters have been criticized for painting a rosy picture of the strongman rule, even as killings, human rights abuses and plunder during that time have been proven in courts.”
Over time, the Marcos dictatorship’s propaganda appears to be gaining a patina of legitimacy for those who never lived through the violence. This more than justifies the late Primitivo Mijares, author of the book ” Conjugal Dictatorship,” that exposes the
excesses of the Marcos couple when he decided to finish his book, ”lest the frailty of human memory…consign to oblivion …the vital parts of this book.” He added that Marcos might unduly benefit from a “Laurelian statement, that, when a man dies, the virtues of his past are magnified and his faults are reduced to molehills.”
Personal accounts do more than simply chronicle events, like the individual stories of the many Filipinos who fought, were tortured and killed by the Marcos regime and whose names and respective claims for reparations were once displayed online and have since been taken down when the website was closed. Their stories carried vivid details — the sights, sounds, and emotions of the moment. They explained why events happened and what they meant to the people who lived through them. They captured the social environment — how communities behaved, how the government responded, how society felt at that time.
Personal narratives are primary sources. They contain descriptive memories of the days and hours when events unfolded. They hold context that textbooks often miss. They preserve the human side of history — the part that makes it real, relatable, and alive. They keep us connected.
Without these stories, future generations inherit a thinner version of Philippine life and history, missing the nuance, the conflict, the tension, the characters, and the truth that are now hiding behind deleted pages of textbooks.
This is why recalling and preserving important historical highlights of Philippine life is essential
The Quiet Disappearance of History
Every community faces the danger of forgetting. But for Filipino Americans, the danger is sharper because so much of our history has already been erased, minimized, or mislabeled. These are small details of life that shaped who we are today; not just sentimental; they are historical. Some details are fake and never corrected. Present-day Filipinos ought to understand the truth behind those events. They are evidence of lived experiences that rarely make it into official records. And unless we actively preserve them, they risk disappearing forever.
Some of them are:
-The 300-year colonization by Spain and the atrocities committed by the Catholic church that thankfully are recorded in Jose Rizal’s Noli and Fili novels. – The 40 years under the US when Spain ceded the Philippines for $20M and which, upon the entry of a new colonizer, triggered the Philippine-American War of 1899- 1902. Let’s not forget the economic benefits the US wangled for itself in exchange for the early grant of Philippine independence in 1946.
-Why the Philippines was dragged into Japan’s fury in WWII: Japan was targeting American power. The Philippines appeared “beholden” to the US when it liberated the country from Japanese forces in 1944, made dramatic by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I have returned” broadcast.
– After fighting bravely in WWII, Filipinos bore the cost of global powers’ decision when Japan under the Japan–Philippines Reparations Agreement (1956) paid a total $570 million in war reparations as a state-to-state remittance, not including payment for those forced to serve as sexual comfort women for Japanese soldiers.
-Greater pain and injustice were hurled against WWII Filipino veterans who served under the US flag when the Recission Act (1946) stripped 200,000 Filipino soldiers of U.S. veterans’ benefits to save money after the war. The Act maintained that Philippine Army soldiers were not considered US soldiers even if the Philippines was still a US colony at that time. The Recission Act created one of the largest veterans’ injustices in U.S. history and softened only in 2009, after almost six decades of legislative struggle, when some alive Filipino veterans received “pakonsuwelo” payments of $15,000 (U.S. citizen Filipino veterans) and $9,000 for non-U.S. citizen Filipino veterans. (https://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/filipino-veterans-equity-compensation-act-of-2009
The saga of Filipinos as global domestic workers serving monied families abroad and its social repercussions that wreak havoc on Filipino families due to abject poverty, parental absence and ensuing spousal infidelities. Also, the brutal onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world, the pain and suffering brought by typhoons, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods that occur with relentless frequency year-round.
The early record of widespread discrimination against Filipino Sakada workers in Hawaii; the heroic acts of coalition-building in American labor history led by Larry Itliong, who worked with the Mexican workers led by Cesar Chavez during the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. They formed United Farm Workers and won higher wages and better working conditions for the group. What had been erased: Filipino workers were foundation leaders but Cesar Chavez eventually emerged as lead authority and was perceived to have been the group that initiated the action. A PBS documentary screening explained that Itliong had to give way to Chavez because he spoke better English than the Filipino leaders. Later remembrances, however, have practically erased the role of Itliong and Filipino farmers in the movement given the massive participation of the Latino community in the process.
In the local scene, Chicago Filipino Americans navigate several issues: heritage language loss and recovery, mixed-race identity, intergenerational gaps, mental health stigma, anti-Asian racism and hatred, an “invisible” electorate, and the trauma faced by the undocumented kababayans whose dollar remittances support families back home.
Like the farm workers in California, Filipino workers joined the Black workers in forming the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), a union at the Pullman Company in Chicago in 1925. Don Villar highlighted in his article, “How Black and Filipino Unity Was Forged in the Pullman Workers Union,“ the impact of the unity of Black and Filipino workers — “A year after the BSCP won its first contract and formal recognition by the American Federation of Labor, and 13 years after Pullman used Filipinos to hobble the organizing drive, solidarity between Blacks and Filipinos was sealed.”
Memory as a Form of Resistance
Preserving what we remember is not just nostalgia. It is an act of resistance against erasure. Filipino Americans carry memories that historians cannot recreate: the sound of barangay folks waking up at dawn, the sharp, echoing roosters’ tilaok, persistent and cutting through the quiet and answered by other roosters from across the rice fields. The way families gathered at Christmas and Todos los Santos, the excitement
of a college graduation or of receiving a US visa or boarding a plane for the first time, the chaotic local Philippine elections, the unfamiliar concept of a nursing home for the elderly, Filipinos’ remarkable diligence at work, clinging to faith during stressful times, the birth of a new baby and the shared grief of illnesses and untimely deaths in the family.
How We Can Preserve Our Histories
The small cultural details — food, language, humor, faith that shaped identity are not “small stories.” They are the threads that make our collective existence whole. Each of us can contribute, regardless of age or background. Here are practical ways to begin:
-Record oral histories with parents, grandparents, titos, and titas.
-Write down memories of life in the Philippines or early life in America. -Share stories at community events, cultural celebrations, church gatherings, family reunions; create digital archives of photos, letters, recipes, songs, and traditions. -Teach younger generations the histories that shaped your family.
-Support community organizations that document Filipino American experiences. – Use and preserve language, because it carries memory.
A Call to Action to the Filipino American Community
Filipino Americans have always been storytellers — through music, food, humor, faith, and family. Now we must become story-keepers. Each action, no matter how small, strengthens the historical record. Let us preserve the stories we remember: the ones that textbooks forgot, the ones that shaped our identities, the ones that deserve to be told. Get in touch with Rizal Center’s “Lest we Forget” history keepers to participate: info@rizalcenter.org.
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