Bayan Scholars Reflect on History & Heritage

October is Filipino American History Month, a commemoration instituted in 1991 by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) to preserve, disseminate, and celebrate the history of Filipinos and Filipinas in the United States. To mark the event, we spent time in our English class considering what we know about our experiences in the USA. 

To get started, we used our writer’s notebook to generate and organize our ideas. The following questions focused our thinking:

• What do you think you know about Filipina/Filipino American history? How did you acquire that knowledge? 
• What's the difference between "history" and "heritage"?

After writing, we held a discussion. Only two or three students had formal education regarding Filipinos in America, and for those that did, it was typically in an extracurricular setting. If exposure happened in class, the coverage was minimal. To be sure, the students who were educated in the Philippines, about one third of the class, had plenty of knowledge about Filipino History. And even then, that knowledge failed to cover migration of Filipinos to the USA.  When it came to the stories of Pinoys and Pinays in the United States, our collective knowledge was thin. 

Still, students identified cultural artifacts and practices that reflected heritage and traditions, items like values,  dances, language, and food ways. Still, our knowledge was often superficial, lacking in deeper understanding of the significance or origins of cultural practices. And as students spoke, they shared a sense of loss or emptiness about only having a surface understanding and appreciation of our contributions and culture, how their knowledge of heritage was shallow, unanchored to history, disconnected from their own sense of selves.

At this point, we read a quote by the late Dr. Dawn Mabalon, a historian and a past board member of FANHS where she distinguishes between history and heritage: 

"History is about the events, experiences, and lives of people in the community and their impact on society and the political, cultural, and economic events and moments that shape their lives. "Heritage" is solely about cultural traditions handed down from the past."

Our purpose here was to not judge one concept as more important or valuable. Rather, we wanted to consider how favoring one over the other constrains a deeper understanding of Filipino American experience, de-couples culture from history in ways that reduce or minimize both concepts. 

That evening, students revised their writer’s notebook entries, developing and elaborating on their ideas, attempting to make a personal and intellectual connection to these two interrelated but distinct concepts. 

These “mini-compositions” were meant for students to test out their ideas, to think like a historians, and to complicate their understanding of their own lack of knowledge about Filipino/a American history. Our ideas are tentative, evolving, serving as a jumping off point for reading several sections from Dr. Dawn Mabalon’s book Little Manila is in the Heart, passages that sketch out how personal memory and cultural heritage reflect and are conditioned by historical conditions. The writing, reading, and discussion were meant prepare us for our annual trip to Agbayani Village, an important figure in Filipino American and the labor movement.

The Padlet bulletin board below captures students' reflections on the relationship between heritage and history as well as the significance of that relationship. We welcome your comments, too. Let us know what you think about the difference between heritage and history. What do we gain or lose if we decouple those concepts? What happens when we pry those concepts loose from each other? Who or what benefits from disconnecting history from heritage?