Critical Filipinx Studies Scholars & Allies Stand in Solidarity with Palestinian People and Commit to Palestinian Liberation

This statement is a response to the urgent and desperate calls from the Palestinian people to end the catastrophic violence against them. We join millions in the global community who have demonstrated and protested, calling for a ceasefire and aid to those most impacted by this genocide. 

As Filipinx scholars, educators, and organizers and our allies, we unequivocally condemn the Israeli state’s siege of Palestine and the ongoing U.S. support for its settler occupation of Palestine. The Philippines and Israel can be considered client states of the United States. Since at least the 1960s, U.S. leaders have cast the Philippines and Israel as stable anchors for regional military dominance and “counter-insurgent” security. The 21st century global “War on Terror,” fueled by settler colonial and Islamophobic logics, has only intensified U.S. military and economic support for authoritarian governments and quotidian human rights abuses in places like the Philippines and Palestine. Incalculable ecological and material devastation, alongside countless loss of life and social relations, have resulted from this U.S. investment in regional permanent war.

U.S. corporations that manufacture weapons and intelligence technologies, for instance, Elbit Systems or ELTA Systems, have greatly profited from this “aid” against “terrorism” in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Since its founding, Israel has received over USD 150 billion and has recently demanded USD 10 billion for its continued assault on Gaza. But this military aid is also rerouted into investing in researching and developing security and defense technologies for places like the Philippines. As a former U.S. colony, the “independent” Philippines has been one of the leading recipients of U.S. military aid and loans. Over the last decade, it has been the largest recipient in the Indo-Pacific region, receiving USD 1.14 billion since 2015. This money is used to purchase U.S. military technology and vehicles and, through a decades-long bilateral agreement, Israeli-made cyber security systems alongside other kinds of military planes and boats. The Armed Forces of the Philippines currently works with Israeli defense contractors to integrate Israeli military technology into its military modernization program.

In sum, Philippine “counter-terrorism” is deeply entangled with and contributes to both the U.S. global military-industrial complex and the Israel settler colonial military-industrial complex. Not only does this profoundly affect movements for self-determination in the archipelago, for example, indigenous movements or Muslim communities, but also peasants, workers, students, and land and water protectors who have been “red-tagged.” Indeed, the kinds of “counter-terrorism” tactics deployed to violently suppress, surveil, detain, and arrest any resistance to or critique of Philippine government leaders are enabled through U.S.-Israel defense and security technologies. 

At the same time, the long struggle for Philippine liberation has deep ties to the Palestinian struggle. These solidarities trace back to martial law under Ferdinand Marcos when diasporic Filipinos simultaneously demanded cuts to U.S. military aid to Marcos and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Within academia, CFSC was among the groups internal to the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) to support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions in 2013 and condemn the violent evictions of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah and attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem in 2021. Recently in Cotabato City and Quezon City, thousands of Muslim Filipinos and allies rallied against Israeli attacks on Gaza. Conversely, Palestinians have reaffirmed Philippine movements for genuine sovereignty. Freedom fighter Leila Khaled supported Filipino protests against APEC and inaugurated the Philippine-Palestine Friendship Association in 2015. In 2021, the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network denounced the Duterte regime's designation of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines as a “terrorist organization.” We continue this radical legacy of Filipino solidarity with Palestine.

CFSC follows the lead of Palestinian-led organizations in our calls to action:

1) Speak Up! 

Resist Islamophobia and coordinated silencing of protests through accusations of anti-Semitism, racism, and deployment of exceptionalism. As evidenced by many Jewish allies to the Palestinian cause, Judaism is not synonymous with the Israeli government. Amplify Palestinian calls for self-determination and shared histories of imperial occupation. 

2) Demand an Immediate Ceasefire  

There are many ways to take action. Call and email Congress to stop funding war crimes and genocide and support resolutions that demand the Biden administration call for a ceasefire. Donate to organizations providing humanitarian aid in Gaza. Join rallies, protests, teach-ins, vigils, and other activities that show your support and ensure these demands cannot be ignored.

3) Protect One Another in this Process

Support each other as we build on collective power as we fight against intimidation tactics, censorship, and punishment against people who criticize Israeli state policies of occupation or support Palestinian rights. Be wary of disinformation and Western media bias that perpetuates the dehumanization of Palestinians and enables anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim violence. We must be vigilant and attentive to the many fronts of this war. 

We call on our kababayan worldwide to decry this genocide. We have a responsibility to condemn the atrocities being committed on our Palestinian kapwa. Organize, mobilize and lend your voices and other resources to end the war machine. We must better understand how our experiences are intertwined with those of the Palestinian people. Our peoples’ freedom can only be realized in our collective fight against colonial occupation and US imperialism. Let us stand up, stand with, and shout out — freedom and liberation for Palestine. From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the U.S. war machine!

Action items:

Call Congress: Ceasefire now!

Fundraiser for Gaza’s Children

Organizations to follow:

• Palestinian Feminist Collective

• Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine

• Palestinian Youth Movement

• US Palestinian Community Network (National and Chicago Based)

• Journal of Palestine Studies

• Students for Justice in Palestine (national)

• Palestinian American Community Center

• Jewish Voice for Peace

• Critical Resistance 

• Arab Resource and Organizing Center

Teaching and Other Resources on Palestine (from the University of Illinois at Chicago Global Asian Studies)

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Signed in Solidarity, 

The Critical Filipinx Studies Collective & Community Members: 

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, San Francisco State University

Robyn Rodriguez, Professor Emirita, Asian American Studies

Lucy Burns, Associate Professor, Asian American Studies

WEJ, Brokada Men’s Healing Circle

Josen Masangkay Diaz

Allan Lumba, Filipinx Freedom School

Tracy Buenavista, Professor, Asian American Studies, California State University, Northridge

Melissa-Ann Nievera-Lozano

Trisha Remetir, UC Riverside

Deborah Hernandez

Sarita See, Professor, University of California Riverside

Amanda Solomon Amorao, UC San Diego

Faith Kares, PhD

Camille Ungco, UW-Seattle, UP-Diliman

Dr. DJ Kuttin Kandi

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD

Keith Camacho

Mark Sanchez

Tessa Winkelmann 

Jacqueline Siapno, UC San Diego 

Gary Devilles, Ateneo de Manila University 

Susette Min, UCD

Jolie Chea, UCLA Asian American Studies

Jan Padios, Associate Professor of American Studies

Ray San Diego, Northwestern University 

Nerissa S. Balce, SUNY Stony Brook

Deann Nardo 

Christine Balance, Associate Professor, Cornell University 

MJ CD

Erin Manalo-Pedro

Sherwin Mendoza, De Anza College

Gina Velasco, Associate Professor and Director, Program in Gender and Sexuality, Haverford College

T. Nguyen-vo, UCLA

gerardo colmenar, U.C. Santa Barbara

Marianne Métivier

Kimberly Alidio, Poet and Professor, Bard Prison Initiative

Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College

Patrick Peralta, University of Michigan

James Zarsadiaz 

Jackelyn Mariano, CUNY Hunter College Asian American Studies Program

Alana Bock, UNM

Rolando B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines Film Institute

Melissa Ann Canlas

Bender, Joshua, PhD Student, UCSD Ethnic Studies

Dr. Stef Lira

Vanna Nauk

Theresa N. Kenney, McMaster University 

Paul Michael L. Atienza, Cal Poly Humboldt

Michael Manalo-Pedro

alejandro t. acierto, Arizona State University 

Bernard James Remollino, San Joaquin Delta College/Mahalaya Newspaper

Teresa Naval, UCSD

CaseyAnn Carbonell

Geraldine Jorge

Johansen Pico, UC Irvine

Elaika Janin Celemen, UCLA

Joi Barrios, UC Berkeley

Jude Paul Dizon, California State University, Stanislaus

John Tolentino, MSW, RSW, Counselling Private Practice 

Marlo De Lara, PhD, University of Edinburgh

jaqs gallos aquines, cultural instigators 

Claire Valderama-Wallace 

LeRoid David

Karen Buenavista Hanna, Connecticut College

Francis Catedral, Fuller Seminary

Aisa Villarosa

Ilyan Ferrer, Carleton University 

katrina quisumbing king, Northwestern University

Anna Storti, Duke University 

Sophia Openshaw, student

Ligaya L. McGovern, Ph.D.,  Malaya USA, IPSHRS

Delia D. Aguilar

Aaron Gozum, PhD Student, UC San Diego

Kelly Callejo, Individual 

Demiliza Saramosing, MA, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Cindy C. Sangalang, University of California, Los Angeles

Shannon Cristobal, University of Hawaii

Marjorie Antonio, University of Maryland

J.T.  Miguel Acido

Elijah Punzal, PhD Student, Tufts University

Mark Villegas, Associate Professor of American Studies at Franklin & Marshall College

Jen Soriano, author and independent scholar

Cynthia Martínez, San Francisco State University

Jenifer Wofford, USF

Germaine Lindsay Juan, University of Minnesota American Studies

GCB, San Francisco State University

Jann Tracee C. Ko Din

Jackie Saporito

Dianne Que

Joy Sales, Malaya Movement USA

Rebecca L Starr, Educator

Kevin Nadal, City University of New York

Karlynne Ejercito, University of Southern California

Romulo Lindio

Angela Domingo, San Francisco State University

Lowell Iporac, AFSA

Ny Nourn - Co-Director of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee

Emlyn Medalla

Jesand Amodo, Music Artist & Educator

Veronica Salcedo, Georgia State University

Yumi Pak, Occidental College

Matthew, Villar Miranda

Carol Anne Almocera McChrystal, Independent Artist, Cultural Worker and Researcher

Krystle Canare, Tayo Trails

Armael Malinis

Rachelle Cruz, UC Riverside - Creative Writing

Lorenzo Perillo

Bernard Garcia

Filipina/x/o American Educators and Scholars Support Philippine Presidential Candidate Leni Robredo and VP Candidate Kiko Pangilinan

April 14, 2022
For Immediate Release

Contact: cffscollective@gmail.com

Filipina/x/o American Educators and Scholars Support Philippine

 Presidential Candidate Leni Robredo and VP Candidate Kiko Pangilinan

The Critical Filipina/o/x Studies Collective (CFSC), a network of Filipina/x/o American educators, scholars, graduate students, professors and researchers in the United States, stand with millions of Filipinos in the Philippines and across the globe that support the Presidential Candidate Leni Robredo and VP Candidate Kiko Pangilinan in the current presidential elections in the Philippines. Some of us are dual citizens of the Philippines and the United States, some of us are US citizens, but all of us are active and committed to organizing, researching, and writing about issues in the Philippines and how it impacts us in the diaspora. We continue to condemn the brutal authoritarianism of current president Rodrigo Duterte. We believe that the Filipino people, in the country and in the diaspora, deserve a system of governance that is free from political corruption and dynasties. We stand in solidarity with the millions of Filipinos who clamor and organize for a new administration, a change ensuring the welfare of the Filipino people.

In the current race, Bong Bong Marcos, son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, is running for president with vice presidential running mate, Sara Duterte, daughter of the incumbent president. Bong Bong Marcos (BBM) and Sara Duterte are running on a slate that proposes “unity” in an effort to lift the Philippines from the devastation of COVID-19. Yet,their campaign has operated on revised historical facts that claim the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted from 1972 to 1986 under Martial Law did not claim thousands of Filipino lives through forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. BBM supporters are claiming that the period of Martial Law was a “Golden Age” for the Philippines, ignoring the facts that the Marcos dictatorship was responsible for the plundering of the Filipino economy; the ballooning of the country’s national debt from $2 billion to $28 billion; and facilitating an export economy that pushes millions of Filipinos to venture abroad in order to support their families, continued to this very day.

Current VP Leni Robredo on the other hand has offered a vision of the Philippines that can unite the country.  Unlike the response to the COVID-19 pandemic of the Duterte regime, which has criminalized the poor, disrupted the education of the country’s youth, and caused greater precarity across all working sectors, Robredo’s platform is a stark contrast that promises to serve the most vulnerable and address the healthcare, economic, and educational needs of Filipino citizens. Furthermore, while Marcos has signaled his intent to expand mining in the Philippines, Robredo has signed covenants with environmental and indigenous people’s organizations to protect both the environment and safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples.  She has promised relief to farmers and indigenous peoples who have suffered from “red-tagging” by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), which incites human rights violations against those defending their rights and their claims to their ancestral lands. Crucially, Robredo has signaled that her administration would be open to dialogue and furthering peace talks toward achieving democratic reforms and a lasting peace in the Philippines.

In the past, it was the Filipino people’s power, both in the country, and all over the world, that led to the national clamor to oust the Marcos administration. As the elections approach, Filipina/x/o American communities, including educators and scholars in the CFSC, are joining the global call to end political dynasties and corruption in the Philippines. We stand against a revision of history and a return of dictatorial dynasties. We support candidates that are committed to creating a new history, one that is more democratic and peaceful, a Filipino people’s history that they rightfully deserve.

Filipina/x/o American Scholars Unite to Condemn Anti-Asian Hate and White Supremacy

The Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective (CFSC), a national network of Filipina/x/o educators, activists, and intellectuals, commits to further our organizing efforts in opposition to anti-Asian American racism in the United States. We make this declaration in light of recent events when Asian American elders, medical professionals, and women are being attacked throughout the nation. We are especially angered by the recent murders of eight people—six of those individuals being Asian women—in Atlanta, Georgia on March 16, 2021 by a white man. We refuse to isolate such violence from the right-wing media pundits and rightist politicians who continue to mobilize racist terminology for COVID-19 to direct blame, disdain, and fear upon our communities. We also refuse the liberal multicultural rhetoric that claims these attacks are “un-American.”

Last Tuesday evening, six Asian women were working low-wage, precarious and gendered jobs in massage parlors when a white supremacist man killed them. We link his gender-based violence to anti-Asian racism. This violence has a throughline in Asian American history beginning with the Page Act in 1875 that codified Chinese women as criminal sex workers, to the killing of Susan Remerata in a courtroom in Seattle in 1995, a “mail order bride” shot to death by her white husband. This history is not separate from the racism and discrimination Asian frontline health workers experience on a daily basis as their care is refused on the basis of their perceived race or ethnicity. We understand that race, gender, sexuality and economic status varies the experience of anti-Asian violence, and more importantly, they are inextricable.

The U.S. has a long history of anti-Asian, anti-Filipino, and anti-immigrant violence. Such barbarism has expressed itself in differing tempos and volatilities that range from white mob terrorism to federal policies like the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934. This federal law restricted Filipino immigration to the U.S. and reclassified Filipinos already here as “aliens.” Throughout history, Filipino Americans have been actively made into “alien” threats or invisibilized as “model minorities.” Such casting indicates that racialization is never a passive process as the powerful seek to perpetuate hierarchical logics to maintain an economic system that renders the necessities of our lives, such as our labor and land, as property to be possessed for the desires of a few.

“Such casting indicates that racialization is never a passive process as the powerful seek to perpetuate hierarchical logics to maintain an economic system that renders the necessities of our lives, such as our labor and land, as property to be possessed for the desires of a few.”

Racial and gendered discrimination against Asian Americans cannot be separated from U.S. imperialism in Asia. The United States colonized the Philippines and waged war and bombing campaigns on the Korean peninsula and throughout Southeast Asia during the Cold War. U.S. military bases in Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Thailand, Hawaiʻi, Guåhan, and others across the Asia-Pacific have created conditions where local and indigenous communities have been occupied and made dependent on the U.S. military. Through this militarization, Asian women have been hyper-sexualized, exoticized, and transformed into objects of desire for U.S. soldiers and ex-pats, with some Asian women turning to sex work as means of survival and livelihood. The U.S. pivot to Asia under Obama and contemporary anti-China rhetoric and policy are only the latest examples of U.S. aggression. Anti-Asian racism must be analyzed with a global lens addressing the relationship between U.S. empire and the ongoing constructions of Asian Americans as the exotic Other, the “perpetual foreigner” and “enemy aliens.” These tropes are not mere byproducts of U.S. empire, they sanctify U.S. interventions overseas.

“Anti-Asian racism must be analyzed with a global lens addressing the relationship between U.S. empire and the ongoing constructions of Asian Americans as the exotic Other, the “perpetual foreigner” and “enemy aliens.” These tropes are not mere byproducts of U.S. empire, they sanctify U.S. interventions overseas.”

Consequently, this same history also equips us with a means to inform our contemporary resistance struggles. Building upon the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a coalition of racialized youth and student activists, we will continue to fight for Ethnic Studies in our schools and academic institutions. Renewing the popular and labor education of Philip Vera Cruz, we will use our scholarship, teaching, and artistic skills to build bridges with a wider public in sharpening analysis of the root causes that threaten our shared humanity. Honoring the legacy of Yuri Kochiyama, whose interracial organizing with Malcolm X is an example of centering the experiences of Asian American women and their visionary leadership to further abolitionist movements. We recognize that our liberation has always been connected to the struggle for Black Lives. This point was further clarified on December 23, 2020 when Angelo Quinto, a Filipino American veteran was murdered by the police in Antioch, California with the same knee-to-neck hold that killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In this way, CFSC commits to abolitionist movements to defend Black lives, defeat anti-Asian hate, and dismantle white supremacy.

The constellation of recent events has affirmed for us that we must continue to teach, write, and organize against the brutalities of the system that we inhabit, while at the same time envision new possibilities for society made anew. We recognize that if we are to realize the society that we dare to dream of, Filipina/x/o American educators, scholars and students (as well as our allies) must continue to organize. The CFSC embraces the fact that as educators we will always have a crucial role to play in the movements to transform the basic features of this country.

To conclude, in this moment of rising anti-Asian violence, CFSC condemns the hate crimes cropping up across the U.S. and we join the call to #StopAsianHate, while refusing increase of police presence in our communities that often lead to the criminalization and brutality against Black, Latinx, and Asian Pacific Islander peoples. We unite with scholars across the country to incorporate Critical Ethnic Studies that interrogates race and racism, capitalism, empire, settler colonialism, cisheterosexism with an abolitionist lens. We commit to incorporating the history and analysis of anti-Asian violence, and its specific intersections with gender and sexuality, in our work and programming, which includes our podcast series, websites, and events. We are dedicated to uplifting organizations in our various locations that seek to build Asian American power in coalition with people’s organizations.

In struggle and solidarity,
The Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective

Read on Medium

Defend Ethnic Studies at SFSU

Dear President Wong and Provost Rosser:

As members and allies of the Critical Filipina/x/o Studies Collective (CFSC), we stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and community members who gathered on February 25, 2016 to protest the structural dismantling of the College of Ethnic Studies program at San Francisco State University.

CFSC is an activist-scholar group that seeks to organize educators and scholars to interrogate and challenge histories of Western imperialisms, ongoing neocolonial relations in the Philippines, and their relationship to past and present Filipina/x/o migrations through our research and teaching both within the university and beyond it. Aligned with our mission, we celebrate the mobilization of the committed activists and scholars who will continue to gather to “defend and deepen” Ethnic Studies as an important field of study to theorize the diverse experiences of immigrant and historically marginalized communities in the United States.

We cannot underscore the importance of Ethnic Studies as an academic discipline. Knowledge that foregrounds the lives and experiences of people of color in this country and the mobilization of diverse ways of knowing toward the realization of a society grounded in justice, equity, and human freedom must be defended and deepened. Ethnic Studies provides a space, both intellectually and physically, for students to understand that the history of this country is intertwined with the settler colonization and occupation of Native American lands, the enslavement of Africans and their generations after, and the labor of Latino and Asian migrant men and women. Ethnic Studies also offers students an opportunity to connect such histories to the issues they face today in racialized labor markets, politically diverse publics and an increasingly multicultural and global society.

As faculty and graduate students around the nation, we are in solidarity with the demands articulated by your committed student population to resolve the current crisis and advance Ethnic Studies at SFSU. We look forward to hearing from you by April 15, 2016 regarding the state of the historic and esteemed College of Ethnic Studies.We cannot underscore the importance of Ethnic Studies as an academic discipline. Knowledge that foregrounds the lives and experiences of people of color in this country and the mobilization of diverse ways of knowing toward the realization of a society grounded in justice, equity, and human freedom must be defended and deepened. Ethnic Studies provides a space, both intellectually and physically, for students to understand that the history of this country is intertwined with the settler colonization and occupation of Native American lands, the enslavement of Africans and their generations after, and the labor of Latino and Asian migrant men and women. Ethnic Studies also offers students an opportunity to connect such histories to the issues they face today in racialized labor markets, politically diverse publics and an increasingly multicultural and global society. As faculty and graduate students around the nation, we are in solidarity with the demands articulated by your committed student population to resolve the current crisis and advance Ethnic Studies at SFSU. We look forward to hearing from you by April 15, 2016 regarding the state of the historic and esteemed College of Ethnic Studies.

In Support of Sarah Raymundo

Dr. Emerlinda R. Roman
President, University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon City Philippines

Dear Dr. Roman:

As academic scholars in the U.S. with long-lasting commitments to the Philippines and important connections to the University of the Philippines in particular, we write to urge a redress and reversal of the denial of tenure to one of your most exemplary faculty members, Sarah Raymundo. We feel there has been an egregious breach in the integrity of the tenure process and in the principles of academic freedom that our international scholarly community upholds and vigorously defends. Moreover, as a result of this breach, we feel the University of the Philippines has done a grave injustice to an outstanding scholar, teacher and public intellectual, standing to lose one of its most valuable young faculty and setting an alarming precedent that is sure to erode the ideals, quality and principled practices of higher education.

Along with our colleagues in the Philippines, we were appalled and dismayed to hear of U.P. Diliman Chancellor Cao’s decision to overturn the original recommendations for Sarah Raymundo’s tenure made by, respectively, the Sociology Department, the College Executive Board and the Academic Personnel and Fellowship Committee. We have reviewed the documents in Professor Raymundo’s case and find the irregularities in the tenure review process to be insupportable. It is clear from the paper trail that while Professor Raymundo’s excellent academic accomplishments have been recognized at all the above institutional levels as meritorious and deserving of tenure, she has been punitively judged, in the most unilateral and arbitrary fashion at the behest of a redbaiting minority bloc, for her radical political commitments and involvements. We find this egregious violation of the codes of academic integrity and freedom and dismissal of scholarly achievement in favor of political ideology to be a huge mar on the University of the Philippines’ well-known and longstanding record of commitment to the principles of intellectual freedom and justice.

Many of us are familiar with Professor Raymundo’s brilliant scholarly writings on Filipino popular culture in the context of the global economy, Philippine national politics and social movements. We have been impressed by and learned enormously from her astute and illuminating sociological analyses of the conditions of lived life in the Philippines, the insights of which have been honed precisely through her long-time activist involvement and experiences substantiated through more formal research and study. Indeed, in our estimation, Professor Raymundo’s activist work in the areas of human rights and global social struggles is undoubtedly both a key source and form of expression of her research and theoretical approach, and as such should also be understood as a significant intellectual and professional contribution in its own right.

Professor Raymundo’s combination of theoretical erudition (her fluency in sociological theory, critical social theory, as well as cultural studies) and empirical knowledge is an inspiring example to all of us, as it has been an invaluable instruction to the many students who have had the privilege of taking her classes. In addition to her achievements as a scholar and a teacher, Professor Raymundo has also been an exemplary colleague in the international academic community. She has not only been an active participant in international conferences but has also been central to the vital intellectual exchanges between students and scholars in the U.S. and in the Philippines, arranging talks and seminars at the University of the Philippines that have brought U.S. academics in important dialogue with our colleagues and with students at U.P. as well as at other universities in the Philippines. We cannot overemphasize the importance of Professor Raymundo in fostering these intellectual exchanges, in which many of us first came to know and appreciate her brilliance as a scholar of Philippine society and culture.

We can say with confidence that Professor Raymundo’s scholarly contributions to the interdisciplinary fields of Global Studies, Philippine studies, and Cultural Studies as well as Sociology, her strong teaching record, and her exceptional record of service to the intellectual community at large are well beyond the requirements for tenure. It is our hope that you will redress the grave injustice of the arbitrary denial of her tenure. Along with our colleagues in the Philippines and at the University of the Philippines, we understand the importance of her intellectual work to the critical work we undertake in multiple fields and urge you, as the President of this prestigious university, to recognize the broad respect she has gained as a scholar, teacher and public intellectual and to grant her the tenured position that she greatly deserves.

Camp Bagong Diwa Massacre: A Reflection of U.S. Prison, Criminal Justice Systems

The Bagong Diwa massacre has exposed the extreme overcrowding, institutionalized corruption, administrative and staff incompetence and insufficient facilities that permeate the fledgling postmartial law Philippine national prison system. The treatment of prisoners at Camp Bagong Diwa is also comparable to that of prison facilities in the U.S.

By Dylan Rodriguez
Contributed to Bulatlat

Last March 15, the Philippine National Police (PNP) reportedly killed 22 Muslim captives of Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan (15 kms from Manila).

Aided by US-trained Philippine paramilitary and SWAT-style units, the PNP responded quickly and fatally to a day-old prison rebellion with tear gas and machine gun fire, snuffing out an uprising of over 100 prisoners. According to Philippine officials, Alhamzer Manatad Limbong and Kair Abdul Gapar (both well-known political prisoners and leaders of the Abu Sayyaf) disarmed and killed three prison guards last March 14.

This particular rebellion reflects a profound—and arguably unprecedented—political opposition to the institutionalized dehumanization of the Philippine prison regime in the “post-martial law” period.

Resonating a recent and global lineage of anti-authoritarian and counter-state prison insurrections from Attica, New York, to Robben Island, South Africa, the Bagong Diwa uprising quickly swelled beyond the immediate proclamations of Limbong and Gapar.

The more than 100 prisoners revised Limbong’s and Gapar’s original demand of a speedy trial and a cessation of hostilities in Sulu and reissued four demands: freedom from bodily harm in the resolution of the standoff; timely and fair hearings of their collective cases; respect for human rights; and access to media in order to air long-standing grievances with the prison administration.

Recent historical context gives credence to these demands. In 2004, the Commission on Human Rights (an independent office established by the 1987 Constitution) named the PNP as the nation’s most consistent and flagrant abuser of human and civil rights. The November 2004 slaughter of a dozen striking sugar plantation workers in Tarlac province (central Luzon, north of Manila) capped a touchstone year of state-conducted and state-sanctioned political killings, including the open assassination of several progressive and radical activists, human rights workers and journalists.

Moreover, the Philippine government’s intensified campaign against drug users has resulted in a dramatic increase in the jail and prison population, as only 3.5 percent of those detained can afford to post bail, and most are forced to wait extremely long periods for their day in court.

Recent assessments by a number of state and non-governmental organizations have resoundingly revealed that Philippine prisons and jails lack basic infrastructure, and are extremely overcrowded. Manila jails are operating at more than 300 percent capacity, while the nation’s primary prison in Muntinlupa is nearing 500 percent of operating capacity. These institutions consistently fail to provide imprisoned people with basic nutritional sustenance. Most facilities lack potable water, and poor ventilation spreads sickness, causing an unknown number of preventable deaths.

According to a 2005 report issued by the US Department of State, people imprisoned in the Philippines are most often forced to depend on their families for food because of “the insufficient subsistence allowance and the need to bribe guards to receive food rations.” Finally, as implied by the demands of the Bagong Diwa rebels, the Philippine judicial process is inordinately slow and inefficient, and contributes greatly to the endemic possibility of prison and jail insurrections as well as individual escape attempts.

In the light of such a veritable state of emergency, the four-point Bagong Diwa platform is rather sober and tame. The insurrection itself, which refrained from a large-scale killing of prison guards in exchange for a short-lived negotiation with the state, is most appropriately understood as a collective and politically principled response to the daily atrocities that have been normalized in such profoundly dehumanizing fashion by the Philippine prison system.

Further, the substance of the Bagong Diwa demands shatters the state’s claim that this rebellion was concocted by Bin Laden- affiliated terrorists in cahoots with simple (and apparently, incorrigibly Muslim) criminals. In fact, for those of us in the US informed by the recent domestic historical record, the Bagong Diwa demands echo the seminal communiqués penned and voiced by imprisoned liberationists (overwhelmingly of African, Mexican, Native American, and Puerto Rican descent) in the Folsom Manifesto (1970) and Attica Rebellion (1971), as well as the current generation of political discourse emerging from such places as the Lexington (KY) Women’s High Security Unit (1988-1989), Central California Women’s Facility (1997), Pelican Bay (CA) Security Housing Unit (2001), and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility (2002-present), among other sites of human captivity.

We must recognize, in other words, that the Bagong Diwa rebels are part of a contemporary, living history of rebellions by imprisoned women, men, and children against prison regimes—including that of the Philippines—that have been formed, inspired, and otherwise influenced by the expansive institutionalized violence of the US state.

Human expendability and Philippine prison expansion

The Philippine national government has apparently learned valuable lessons from the contemporary emergence and astronomical expansion of the US prison industrial complex. Most important among these is that prison rebellion is not the furtive and illicit violence of the “prisoners,” but rather the self-justifying deadliness of a militarized domestic force acting under full state sanction.

The strong advisory and supervisory roles exerted by US military and government officials, along with the increasingly international presence of American prison administrators and “correctional officers” (prison guards) in and beyond the Philippines suggests a particular historical accounting last March 15. This massacre implicates far more than the contained violence of the PNP or even the Philippine national government (although both must be indicted as co-conspirators in this atrocity).

I am suggesting that the emergence, expansion, and everyday functioning of the US prison apparatus, in other words, offers both a historical and institutional framework through which other national governments—in particular those in (neocolonial) political alliance with American global hegemony—may conceive, modify, and deploy new modes of political repression, social control, and domestic warfare.

There are thus several, tightly entwined common threads that link Bagong Diwa to the emergence of the US prison regime as the preeminent global matrix for large-scale human immobilization and punishment.

First, Bagong Diwa entailed a coordinated and public slaughter of imprisoned human beings by a domestic police force under the open sanction of a national government. President Arroyo minced no words when she averred in the hours after the killings that the dead Muslims (“terrorists”) deserved their fate, and that the massacre “exemplified the best of the criminal justice system.” While the scenario of the prison massacre is neither new nor unique in the Philippines, what happened in Bagong Diwa showed that the state-proctored slaughter of prisoners is neither cause for scandal nor is it concealed from public view. In fact, it introduced the collaboration and corroboration of the mass media as well as the mobilization of a popular (and global) consensus that draws from the sturdy ideological toolboxes of “law and order,” “national/Homeland security,” and “anti-terrorism.” Such is the common language of the US prison regime writ global.

Second, Bagong Diwa demonstrates how the state’s organized killing of its own captives—whether by siege, individual assassination, medical neglect, or other means—can pronounce and perform a logic of human expendability, often defined through the overlapping categories of “race,” region, and religion. In the case of Philippine prison and criminal justice system, the poor are clearly primed for social liquidation, while in the US, poor people of African, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Native American descent are most frequently targeted for group-based punishment and periodic elimination.

Third, Muslims constitute a captive political bloc, often taking the lead in challenging prison guards and administrators in moments of crisis or insurrection. In the Philippines, a complex and mass-based struggle for religious freedom, national democracy, and sovereignty has been thriving among Muslims in the southern islands for at least several decades. Thus, there is all the more reason for imprisoned Muslims (including and beyond members and affiliates of the Abu Sayyaf) to embody the leading edge of insurgency against proliferating state terror and institutionalized dehumanization.

The aftermath of March 15 entwines the fourth thread connecting Bagong Diwa to the global expansion of the American prison regime. It is wholly possible that the legacy of this rebellion and state-conducted massacre will be a new era of Philippine “prison reform” and prison expansion, both of which will undoubtedly be informed, assisted and politically supported by the US government and military, as well as its expansive prison establishment.

There is a clear historical precedent for this possibility. In the immediate aftermath of the Folsom Manifesto, Attica rebellion, and a number of other early 1970s insurrections by politicized imprisoned people in the U.S., the foundation was laid for the industrialization and astronomical multiplication of the prison apparatus as a primary method of political repression and social (dis)organization. Reformist calls for institutional change resonated through the mid-to-late 1970s, as a fragile alliance of imprisoned activists, “prisoner’s rights” supporters, attorneys, liberal policymakers, criminologists, judges, elected officials and prison administrators enacted a broad agenda that would ostensibly improve prison living conditions (for example, alleviating the overcrowding and undernourishment of “inmates”), stamp out the most heinous forms of institutional corruption, and “professionalize” (and multiply) prison staff.

This generally well-intentioned reformist agenda, however, was quickly absorbed into the political impetus and economic drive for more and “better” prisons. In concert with the racist and anti-poor mobilization of the reactionary “War on Drugs” in the 1980s, the United States increased its total incarcerated population almost tenfold in less than a generation. By 1990, more than a million people were held in American jails and prisons and shortly thereafter the US became the world’s per capita leader in human warehousing. The rapid growth of women’s prisons through the 1990s, and the more recent transformation of US “immigrant detention” facilities (through the militarization of the US-Mexico border and domestic War on Terror), have further extended the scope of this apparatus.

The current yield of the putative 1970s prison reform movement in the U.S. has thus been the criminalization and astronomical imprisonment of more than a million Black people (who compose 12 percent of the “free” American polity and more than 50 percent of its imprisoned population), and the disproportionate incarceration of Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, and other racially pathologized and poor populations. Immigrants of color—both “legal” and “illegal”—are increasingly and strategically subsumed under rubrics of “criminality” (including that of the “suspected terrorist”), and their very presence in the US is frequently challenged as a fundamental threat to Homeland Security.

The Bagong Diwa massacre has now, at the beginning of the 21st century, brought fleeting attention to the extreme overcrowding, institutionalized corruption, administrative and staff incompetence, and insufficient facilities that permeate the fledgling post-martial law Philippine national prison system. As such, the Philippines is poised for a dramatic prison and jail expansion, buttressed by a state and popular mandate to “reform” the institutional methods and enhance the bureaucratic scale of its capacities to mass-incarcerate.

The Arroyo administration will likely justify a commitment to Philippine “law and order” by pointing to the Bagong Diwa insurrection as the unfortunate (and perhaps inevitable) outcome of prison overcrowding, understaffing, and institutional underdevelopment. These alleged insufficiencies of the prison system will then be portrayed as an imminent threat to national and local “security,” particularly in the long cast shadow of the globalized “War on Terror” (which in the Philippines, is little more than an elaboration of the decades long civil war against Muslims). In the midst of the US prison juggernaut, which now holds about 2.5 million people captive (including children), we must anticipate and prepare for the reform, transformation, and expansion of the Philippine police and prison apparatuses.

Political possibilities and Philippine diaspora

The final and most important strand linking the Bagong Diwa massacre to the global presence of the US prison industrial complex is the political onus it bears upon the global Left generally—and diasporic Filipinos specifically—who are committed to struggle for human liberation and freedom in the face of such overwhelming state violence.

The tragedy of 15 March 2005 is an allegory of the everyday for the increasing numbers of ordinary people who must suffer and die at the hands of the PNP, the Philippine jail and prison apparatus, and the U.S. prison regime writ large. There is, in other words, a kinship of captivity that is shared by ever-increasing numbers of people in localities across the world that are somehow touched by the virus of American-style imprisonment, an unholy matrimony of mass-based human immobilization and acute bodily punishment.

A mounting movement for the fundamental transformation of the American prison, policing, and criminal justice systems has taken flight since the late 1990s, and has begun to blossom as the resurgence of the late-19th century US abolitionist movement. The nightmare of the American prison is now bleeding into our very pores, as its violence is literally becoming the way of the world—even and especially in our ancestral “homeland.”

Bagong Diwa has abruptly called us forth as protagonists in this state of emergency. As the soil hardens on the mass graves of the 22 prisoners killed at Bagong Diwa, the question remains as to whether and how we will muster a response. Bulatlat

Dylan Rodríguez works with the Critical Filipino and Filipina Studies Collective (http://cffsc.focusnow.org) and Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex (http://criticalresistance.org). He is also an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.