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Let's break it down. Infuse new meanings, challenge existing ones for the words COMMUNITY and ACTIVISM. Create a common ground where our diversities/commonalties as Pilipino peoples can intertwine and interactively build upon one another as we keep on keeping on. This process of naming and situating ourselves within a historical continuum and legacy of struggle is as basic as the rice we put on our tables. For many living isolated, either physically or spiritually removed from a consciousness of these collective experiences that bind Pilipinas/os across ideologies, generations, class lines, continents, and other borders that separate us—it is time to build bridges and reclaim the parts of ourselves that have either been erased, "othered", or defined by existing power structures.
Is there a tangible Pilipino/Pilipino American community? Are we talking about the one in Daly City or Carson or Serramonte? What about in the Philippine context of people living in the same area such as Tondo, Metro Manila or of overseas overseas workers housed together in Saudi Arabia? Is it some amorphous, free-floating universal idea of one love/peoples united? Some folds who strongly believe in the Horatio Algeirs myth of "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" or the WASP ethic of individualism and meritocracy without social accountability may resist even being included in the term "Pilipino community." After all, aren't we just part of one race-the human race? Why do we need to ghettoize ourselves into distinct ethnic groups and trumpet our own brand of oppression?
Community can be defined in several ways. It could be a source of support, your roots, the place you come from and come home to - family, friends, the neighborhood, and schools you grew up in. Suburban streets or the hood. In the barrio of Laguna or Alaminos, Philippines, or by naval bases in Oxnard, California. It could be carved out by individuals who gather allies and form coalitions necessary for survival away from the place they call home.
Community could also be a government imposed term that erases all individual distinctions and lumps those defined into one faceless mass, vulnerable to the whims of public policy makers. For Pilipino/Pilipino American college students especially in the university levels, this means being subjected to admission policies that ignore important class differences.
Communities do arise from institutional racism. This was manifested in the early 1920's when discriminatory immigration and anti-miscegenation laws created a bachelor society among the manongs. Many communities formed due to political and economic policies that profit on the socio-economic degradation of certain groups for the so-called "betterment of a majority" (the ruling class and those who have internalized bourgeoisie ideals), are still in existence. Contrary to popular belief, we are not all doctors or professionals with big, suburban houses and two-car garages with a Mercedes Benz and the family van. On a local level, we have certain Pilipino farming communities in Modesto or Delano who bring neatly stacked produce for supermarkets even as they labor under harsh conditions and endanger their health through pesticide exposure, blue-collar Pinays/oys working for minimum wage in the industrial parks of Norwalk, Long Beach, or Alameda, and hotel workers in New York who are exploited as a dispensable labor force. We also see many recent immigrants who experience occupational downgrading and live just above a subsistence level, in the shadows of their richer, more established relatives.
Globally, there are communities of domestic workers and nannies in Canada or Kuwait who are disproportionately from the Philippines, prostituted women in Olongapo living along the perimeters of the now defunct bases who were forced into sexual labor for the lucrative "rest and recreation industry" that served as revenue for the city and relief for American Military personnel, and Pilipinos who work in the "sugar bowl" of Hawaii.
Community could also be a dynamic part of an ongoing struggle for self-determination and politicization of identity. It is the forging of links beyond personal differences to better the quality of life collectively and address relevant socio-economic political issues. This is where activism intersects with community, carrying the term into a deeper level of mutual responsibility and connection of a dialectical nature.
The word "activism" leaves a sour taste in many peoples' mouths. To some it may conjure up the image of a radical, bead-wearing, usually white hippy caught in the sixties mentality of fighting for some random cause. To others it might mean a frightening radical vision that threatens the very fabric and "rational" conception of their own personal lives.
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