In Filipino, kapwa refers to a cultural value of a collective well-being or togetherness in which Filipinos construct their selfhood, families and communities. In my work with conducting research about Filipino American lives with Filipino American undergraduate students at San Francisco State University, kapwa has been a driving force in uncovering Filipino immigrant and Fil-Am stories as intellectual resources towards producing knowledge.

Together with Jessa delos Reyes, Tiff Mendoza, Katrina Liwanag, Stephanie Ancheta, Jeannel Poyaoan, my experience of building kapwa with undergraduate students is an ongoing experience of democratizing the research process. These folks helped to recruit staff members working in community-based orgs in San Francisco serving Filipino community members. We all interviewed staff members, transcribed and analyzed their narratives. And we came up with different products!

As a group, my team and I were able to write one co-authored academic publication, “Claiming Kapwa: Filipino Immigrants, Community Based Organizations and Community Citizenship in San Francisco” in New Political Science. My collaborators assisted in proofreading a needs assessment I wrote for the city of San Francisco’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs entitled, “Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Filipino Language Access in San Francisco.”

A few weeks ago, Filipino organizations in San Francisco, community workers and city advocates including Supervisor Matt Haney and Sandra Fewer came together for the release of a report about the lack of language access Filipinos have to basic services in the city of San Francisco. In the report, I argue that if Filipinos in San Francisco do not receive information, applications and materials in language (which the city is mandated by under the Language Access Ordinance), they are not only excluded from the basic services they need, they are also excluded from the political life of San Francisco.

The truth of the matter is San Francisco has been a geography of Filipino American and Filipino immigrant life for well over a century. And its about time that Filipinos are seen as part of San Francisco, especially through language access. When students, community members and academics collaborate, we demonstrate that immigrants, the folks that work tirelessly to serve them, the young people that come from those families, those neighborhoods belong in San Francisco.

The basis for organizing Filipino caregivers in the US is so astoundingly apparent. Stories about caregivers being overworked and underpaid are commonplace in Filipino communities. Many family members, community organizers, even popular films, understand that even if care homes are ways to get work, people gamble with the work being hard and the pay might not come through.

A recent LA Times article called, “An 87-hour work week for $4” recounts the horrible abuses Filipino caregivers and the victory that 66 workers achieved in their $1.1 million settlement. The protracted struggle of a 3 year legal battle has and was backed with supportive officials in the CA Department of Labor, who have issued rightful citations to wrongful carehome owners.

Still, this group of workers are often isolated. Working in care homes owned and visited frequently by the owners. Where camaraderie with one another is often facilitated by owners in the veil of benevolence. Where contact with one another is limited to the shift your on. Where families in the Philippines are quite dependent on whatever wages one makes.

Yet, the workers are in need of collective power. The CA DoL is apparently paying attention. And if the crisis of elder care in this country is not resolved (it won’t be in the next few years), this group of workers will be come essential to caring for your/our loved ones in their golden years. The need is obvious.

As I watch my children play and laugh, I can’t help but think of the thousands of children suffering in detention at the US-Mexico border. In their days, do they have a chance to run and jump? Do they chuckle and laugh? Do they play?

For the motivating logic of deterring unauthorized crossing of the US-Mexico border, the current US administration has been trying to lift the “Flores Agreement” that limits the time children can spend in detention and upholds standards for migrant families in holding facilities. The repeal of the agreement would make detention for migrant children and families indefinite. The children held in subhuman detention facilities would grow up without room to run, without a possibility to play, without a possibility to reunite with their family members. The vilification of migrants, children and parents, erases the systems of power that induced forced migration from Central and Latin America and the broken immigration system in the US.

In the wake of youth leading global strikes to bring the world’s climate crisis to an end and a landmark lawsuit that follows, I’ve been racking my brain on how to include my kids, my friends’ kids, my friends who don’t have kids towards organizing and actions that connect us to a common experience of familial relations, both biological and chosen.

In response to continued migrant family separation, the Bay Area Families Solidarity Network initiated playdate protests to bring attention to this issue and, specifically to demand Amazon and Whole Foods to stop storing information to aid the detention and deportation of immigrant families.

Connie, the care provider and educator at Carabao Kids, a social-justice oriented daycare, which both my children have been and are enrolled in, was inspired to gather parents, families and community members to create solidarity around this issue. Over the span of a month, we planned and organized a child-focused, family-friendly action.

In an effort to connect the humanity of children and families separated by ICE to our own families, and also to explain this urgent issue to our children, Connie crafted songs and a puppet show to explain the issue of detention and separation to children and families. Katrina and Isabella played guitars and sang remixed lyrics to nursery rhymes. Volunteers puppeteer hand crafted puppets that featured a orange-haired dinosaur, Amazon alien and an ICE penguin.

We asked amazing speakers to offer speeches in poem and story to address the children and their families. Irman Arcibal, a local high school teacher, shared a beautiful poem about brown skins and the types of exclusion brown people experience. Joan Salvador from GABRIELA Philippines shared a story about the ICE monster and its connection to the Imperialism Monster that has taken the lands and rivers of indigenous peoples in the Philippines forcing them to be separated from their ancestral lands and families.

After our circle time, we held a Children’s Parade to deliver a letter to the Whole Foods store we organized a play date protest around informing them of the collusion of Amazon/Whole Foods with Palantir to profile immigrants for deportation. Youth and students from SFSU helped with providing a community safety plan for our play date and chaperoning us on our parade.

At the end of our play date, we sang songs, colored posters, parading and chanting, in hopes that our solidarity, be heard in the neighborhood we were in, and perhaps across the border.

I often wonder how to explain this complicated situation to my young children. I know and understand that parents wonder that too. This action, this form, this insistence on centering our children is one way to do it. And I’m so proud to have been part of it.

It behooves us all to think about increasing the opportunities for our children, and families, to be involved in inspiring future generations to make this world better. This play date brought together our families in play and also in protest. It is the beginning of dreaming up and envisioning new ways to organize with families and children!

Photos by La Raine Gonzalez