19 Nov 2005 @ 00:03, by Raymond Powers
Bay Area Filipino-American authors give voice to their unique culture
By Jonathan Jones, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
FREMONT — As Teresita Bautista sees it, before Iraq, there was Vietnam.
More importantly, before Vietnam, there was the Philippines.
Bautista was referring to the war between the United States and the Philippines from 1899 through 1913, once known in the U.S. as the "Philippine Insurrection," now more accurately known as the Philippine-American War.
Sadly, few details from that war have made their way into American history, an issue predicted as early as the 1900s by the Chicago Chronicle, when it published a political cartoon called, "The Forbidden Book," showing U.S. President William McKinley refusing to give Uncle Sam the key to a padlocked book entitled, "True History of the War in the Philippines."
The cartoon, now reprinted in "The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons," is a haunting reminder that history has often been written by colonizers, who, in this case, sought to portray Filipinos in the late 19th century as savages unable to rule themselves who needed to be civilized and Christianized.
"We were the white man's burden," Bautista said. "We were were to be bathed in Christianity."
Today, Bautista said a war that saw the deployment of 127,000 U.S. troops to the Philippines and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos between 1899 and 1902 is barely mentioned in American history textbooks, if at all.
Fortunately, over the last three decades, Bautista, along with other Filipino-Americans, have worked to tell the full history.
Bautista, a member of the Filipino-American Historical National Society, was one of roughly a dozen Filipino-American writers who shared their work and told stories about their families and their history at the Filipino-American Cultural Arts Festival on Saturday at Fremont Main Library.
Fremont resident Victoria Santos, a Filipino-American writer and one of the organizers of the event, said the event seeks to highlight second- and third-generation Filipino-American authors who can serve as role models for a younger generation of Filipino-Americans.
Santos, who was born in the U.S., said the quest for identity as a Filipino-American is an on-going journey that never seems to stop for the 400,000 Filipinos living in the Bay Area.
"When I was growing up in Chicago, we read Hemingway and James Joyce," Santos said. "I never had Filipino-American authors to read. Now we have a choice of Filipino-American authors, which is essential for young people. Now they have role models who speak to their issues."
Saturday's events also included San Leandro resident Oscar Penaranda, author of "Seasons by the Bay."
When asked to talk about Filipino culture, Penaranda said three values came to mind: "loob," "kapwa," and "paninindigan."
Penaranda, who teaches Filipino to students at Logan High School, explained that "loob" means "it's what inside that counts," "kapwa" stresses the importance of shared human experiences, while "paninindigan," emphasizes the importance of personal conviction.
Other works included a vignette from "Seven Card Stud with Seven Manags Wild: An Anthology Filipino-American Writings," read by Fremont resident Gloria Bacharach, who told the story of growing up in Merced and coming to terms with her heritage through her mother.
More than 50 people attended the festival, which also included a showing of Eli Africa's, "Selling Songs in Leyte," winner of the best short-video documentary at the New York International Film Festival, as well as poetry readings by students from Logan High School.
Jonathan Jones covers religious, ethnic and cultural issues for The Argus. He can be reached at (510) 353-7005, or jjones@angnewspapers.com.
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