Once again, Bayan Scholars made our way to Agbayani Village in Delano; it's become a yearly tradition for our learning community. This year, we visited this historic site on November 7th and 8th, a few weeks after Filipino American History month. To prepare for the trip, we devoted class time to begin untangling the difference between history and heritage. We also studied sections from Dawn Mabalon's Little Manila is in the Heart to familiarize ourselves with the plight of Filipino farm workers and the significance of Delano.
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"?
