Luksang Bayan Edmonton - a vigil in solidarity with the Filipino community and for the victims of the Lapu Lapu Festival tragedy in Vancouver this past weekend.
April 30, 2025 at City Hall.
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#yeg #yegdt #Filipino #yvr #vigil #edmonton #vancouver #photojournalism

Dear #vancouver #Filipinocommunity

We do not see you as separate in your grief. Please know your neighbour’s hearts are broken. The loss of lives, that so many are injured, that so many witnessed this, and so many helpers who worked to save people and attend to the dead, means we have a very long road of comforting, kindness, and generosity ahead, as a city.

I am so thankful for all of the expertise and contributions that people of the #Filipino community bring to the city of Vancouver.

Suspect charged with multiple counts of second-degree murder in Vancouver vehicle incident.

@cbcnews reports: "11 people killed, aged 5 to 65, and dozens more injured" at Filipino festival.

https://flip.it/0UOX5r

TIL that Jehovah's Witnesses attached their own definition to the Tagalog word "kasakdálan" as the direct translation for the word "perfection". (e.g. "Adam was a perfect man" -> "Si Adan ay isang taong sakdal sa una")

Checked it out on kwfdiksiyonaryo and there isn't any definition recognized for such use. #Tagalog #Filipino

Today in Labor History April 27, 1521: On this day, Philippine Natives fought the battle of Mactan against Ferdinand Magellan. Lapulapu’s warriors ambushed him and overpowered the Spanish forces. They killed Magellan with a poison arrow. Their victory delayed Spanish colonization of the Philippines by forty-four years. For centuries, native Muslim Filipinos fought wars against their Spanish rulers. The Spanish saw these as a continuation of the Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. They brought in conscripts from Mexico and Latin America, including many Native Americans. Mortality was high on both sides. Many conscripts fled into the countryside, or joined with the Filipino forces. Yet, despite all the slaughter and repression of Native Filipinos, the colony was never profitable to Spain. During the 1800s, Filipino immigrants fought alongside Latin Americans in their wars for independence from Spain. In 1896, Filipinos fought their own war for independence from Spain.

When the U.S. initially landed in the Philippines, in 1898, they supported Filipinos in their uprising against Spain. However, by August, 1898, the U.S. had ended their collaboration with Native Filipinos and soon annexed the country. American rule was brutal. In 1899, American went to war against their colonial subjects. The war was far deadlier and more costly than their war against Spain. 4,200 American soldiers, up to 20,000 Philippine soldiers, and at least 200,000 civilians died.

The Japanese occupation during World War II was also brutal. In the most infamous example, 10,000 Filipino and 1,200 U.S. soldiers died in the Bataan Death March. However, during the occupation, Filipino guerillas fought an insurgency against the Japanese. Consequently, the Philippines became the costliest theatre of war for the Japanese. Nearly 500,000 Japanese died fighting in the Philippines. But it was much worse for Filipinos, with over 1 million dying during World War II. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, toward the end of World War II, was the largest naval battle in history.

Mark Twain, who was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910 said “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem… And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #philippines #colonialism #resistance #independence #Guerilla #japan #spain #uprising #WorldWarTwo #bataan #filipino #indigenous #lapulapu #islam #marktwain #author #writer #solidarity #fiction #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History April 14, 1930: Over 100 Mexican and Filipino farm workers were arrested for union activities in Imperial Valley, CA. 8 were convicted of “criminal syndicalism.”

Rogue #capitalist raised $40 million for a start-up ecommerce application, he claimed was powered by Artificial Intelligence; charged with #fraud. It was powered by the human intelligence of #Filipino workers https://decrypt.co/314469/startup-ceo-charged-ai-humans-philippines

From #Wikipedia: Internment of Japanese Americans

"During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (#WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens.

"These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following the outbreak of war with the Empire of Japan in December 1941. About 127,000 Japanese Americans then lived in the continental U.S., of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei ('second generation'; American-born Japanese with #USCitizenship) and Sansei ('third generation', the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei ('first generation') immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.

"#Internment was intended to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose. The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. Following the executive order, the entire West Coast was designated a military exclusion area, and all Japanese Americans living there were taken to assembly centers before being sent to concentration camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas. Similar actions were taken against individuals of Japanese descent in Canada. Internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many were forced to sell some or all of their property, including their homes and businesses. At the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences and patrolled by armed guards, internees often lived in overcrowded barracks with minimal furnishing."

[...]

Prior use of internment camps in the United States

"The United States Government had previously employed civilian internment policies in a variety of circumstances. During the 1830s, civilians of the indigenous #CherokeeNation were evicted from their homes and detained in 'emigration depots' in Alabama and Tennessee prior to the deportation to Oklahoma following the passage of the #IndianRemovalAct in 1830. Similar internment policies were carried out by U.S. territorial authorities against the #Dakota and #Navajo peoples during the American Indian Wars in the 1860s.

"In 1901, during the Philippine–American War, General J. Franklin Bell ordered the detainment of #Filipino civilians in the provinces of Batangas and Laguna into U.S. Army-run #ConcentrationCamps in order to prevent them from collaborating with #Filipino General Miguel Malvar's guerrillas; over 11,000 people died in the camps from malnutrition and disease."

Read more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
#ICEDetention #IllegalDeportations #SecretPolice #HumanRightsViolations #ConstitutionalRights #HumanRights #SCOTUSIsCompromised #SCOTUSIsCorrupt #USPol #ForcedDisappearances #MemoryHoled #1798AlienEnemiesAct #PrivatePrisons

Spreckels sugar factory and sugar beet field with Mexican and Filipino workers thinning sugar beets. Monterey County, California

#Spreckels #Mexican #Filipino #MontereyCounty #California #America #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017771832/

Today in Labor History March 31, 1927: Birth of Cesar Chavez. In 1965, Chavez led farm workers in California on their first grape boycott. The nationwide protest lasted five years and ended with the first union contract for U.S. farm workers outside of Hawaii. In 1966, Chavez’s organization officially became the United Farm Workers. Chavez was inspired by the nonviolent civil disobedience of Gandhi. In addition to strikes, boycotts and pickets, he was famous for going on hunger strikes. Later he became infatuated with the religious cult, Synanon. He used Synanon’s “game” to punish union members and enforce conformity. Chavez also supported the brutal Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. This alienated Filipino members of the union, as well as many of the religious organizations that had supported the UFW.

I wonder what Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF) is doing to encourage #Filipino kids to speak Filipino or at least local languages instead of English being their mother tongue.

I'm not saying they're not doing anything, because as far as I'm aware, this commission is really engaged with their mandate. But I'm not aware of any project they're doing to address this. #Philippines

#LGBTQ related #Wikipedia article created 13 hours ago

Keb Cuevas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keb_Cuevas
Kevin "Keb" San Miguel Cuevas (; born October 6, 1995) is a Filipino environmentalist, agriculturist, and former journalist. He is the former Chief Agriculturist and CEO of Tagani, an agri-tech startup in the Philippines that focused on digital agriculture

I tweeted below five years ago, when there was a noisy discourse in the Philippines regarding the word Filipinx:

The Philippines adopted gendered nouns from Spanish (e.g., doktor/doktora, abogado/abogada), but the precolonial versions of our languages had no gender (e.g., manggagamot, manananggol). And since the word Filipina exists today, one can't completely claim that Filipino is a gender-neutral term.

That said, I don’t think I have the right to object to the term Filipinx, as (1) I’m not part of the Filipino-American diaspora, and (2) I have no personal insight into the struggles of minorities, women, or LGBT people in the U.S. context — much less the gender debates among academics and activists there.

When I moved to Australia, I didn’t like the word Filo at all. It didn’t mean anything to me, and it sounded pretentious. Filipino is just as easy to pronounce and understand. But I learned that the term has been embraced for many years by Australians with Filipino ancestry.

The Filipino-Australian community has every right to claim the word, especially if it fosters a sense of identity and inclusivity. I’m now part of this community, and even though I still avoid using the word Filo myself, I respect others’ choice to use it as they please.

I don’t know the struggles of minorities in the U.S. who are misgendered or discriminated against. And instead of dismissing a term that wasn’t really created for me or my feelings in the first place, I would rather hear them out. #language #gender #filo #filipino #filipinx

Words of the day:

bambán (n.)
- Placenta

lamad (n.)
- Membrane

"Nagpanting" (v.),
- an outburst of anger (e.g. "Nagpanting ang tainga niya sa kaniyang narinig")

"Nagpantig" (v.)
- syllabified (e.g "Nagpantig ng mahahabang salita ang guro at isinulat ang mga iyon sa pisara")

Pahabol sa grammar pet peeves chenelyn nung international grammar day #Tagalog #Filipino #Philippines

Today in Labor History March 17, 1966: 100 striking Mexican American and Filipino farmworkers marched from Delano, California to Sacramento to pressure the growers and the state government to answer their demands for better working conditions and higher wages, which were, at the time, below the federal minimum wage. By the time the marchers arrived, on Easter Sunday, April 11, the crowd had grown to 10,000 protesters and their supporters. A few months later, the two unions that represented them, the National Farm Workers Association, led by César Chávez, and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, joined to form the United Farm Workers. The strike was launched on September 8, 1965, by Filipino grape pickers. Mexicans were initially hired as scabs. So, Filipino strike leader Larry Itliong approached Cesar Chavez to get the support of the National Farm Workers Association, and on September 16, 1965, the Mexican farm workers joined the strike. During the strike, the growers and their vigilantes would physically assault the workers and drive their cars and trucks into the picket lines. They also sprayed strikers with pesticides. The strikers persevered nonviolently. They went to the Oakland docks and convinced the longshore workers to support them by refusing to load grapes. This resulted in the spoilage of 1,000 ten-ton cases of grapes. The success of this tactic led to the decision to launch a national grape boycott, which would ultimately help them win the struggle against the growers.