The Filipino American community in the United States and the Echo Park Community Coalition (EPCC) in Los Angeles is united with our compatriots in our motherland in their grief and their celebration of the life the 11th President of our republic, Mrs. Corazon “Tita Cory” Aquino. Today, as the Filipino people sends off Mrs. Aquino to her grave and pays their last respects, her spirit of resistance against tyrannty continues. Mrs. Aquino, a simple housewife, was reluctantly thrust into the center-stage of history with the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. in August 21, 1983.
Mrs. Corazon C, Aquino, 76-11th President of the Philippines (tags)
The Filipino American community in the United States and the Echo Park Community Coalition (EPCC) in Los Angeles is united with our compatriots in our motherland in their grief and their celebration of the life the 11th President of our republic, Mrs. Corazon “Tita Cory” Aquino. Mrs. Aquino, a simple housewife, was reluctantly thrust into the center-stage of history with the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. in August 21, 1983 and made her mark as an opposition leader and then as a president of the Republic after the dictator was deposed in a people’s power uprising in 1986. Before that, for three significant years, from 1980-83 the Filipino American community was lucky enough to have the Aquino family in exile in Boston, in the east coast until Senator Aquino decided to come home to his martyrdom at the hands of the much hated dictatorship. Then rest is history.
APPROACHING THE FILIPINO EXODUS & DIASPORA (tags)
Two new books by noted Filipino author E. SAN JUAN, Jr. explore the predicament of millions of Filipinos leaving the Philippines and working or settling in other countries around the world--an unprecedented 9-10 milllion of 85 million Filipinos are scattered around the planet. Their huge remittance props up a sharply divided class society where a tiny oligarchy (supported by Washington/Pentagon) exploits and oppresses the majority. Over 830 victims of extrajudicial killings occured from 2001 up to the present under Arroyo's corrupt, illegitimate regime. Why is this happening?
In the light of the profound economic and political crisis in the Philippines today, what could be the significance of celebrating the one-hundred year anniversary of the coming of Filipino contract labor to Hawaii? Are Filipinos the new compradors for the militarist U.S. Empire? Or are they harbingers of a new generation of combatants from the oppressed communities? At the turn of the century, the revolutionary organizer Rosa Luxemburg elegized the dismal plight of the subjugated natives. Today, US Special Forces are back to reconquer the neocolony, with the natives no longer smiling, now up in arms, united with people of color in Venezuela, Palestine, Hawaii, Nepal, Mexico, and other battlefronts of our beleaguered planet. Whither the Filipino diaspora?