New York City Intermission: A Case for Samahang

An old high school friend recently commented on my journal asking if I had any white friends. While there are a few here and there, most are just acquaintances that I don't really hang out with. As I got more in depth with my response, it became a whole article, so I felt that I should post my response to everyone, and hopefully it will give you some insight on my transformation in the four years I've spent at UCLA.

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Now that I think about it, it's interesting, because I totally didn't come into UCLA thinking that I'd have mostly Pilipino friends, especially with the circle that I had at St. Joe's. But a combination of being away from family, being denied by all the performance groups I tried out for, and landing in a conservative, isolating dorm environment, I ended up doing stuff with Samahang. Things clicked from there and four years later, I'm here as President.

There were two things about Samahang that really spoke to me. Number one, Samahang wasn't just a club, but an organization that worked for social change. It had a high school outreach project, a peer counseling project to make sure students graduate, cultural education, and provided dialogue and critique of things going on in campus and around the world. It wasn't like St. Joe's Filipino Club, where people just show up for the yearbook picture, raise money for Great America, and do a weak-sauce Tinikling for World Fest. It actually questioned what it meant to be Pilipino and its effects, so being Pilipino meant something much deeper beyond the food and inside cultural jokes.

Number two, when I hung around the Pilipinos in Samahang, I found them to be incredibly diverse. Most of the Pilipinos at St. Joe's, although really nice people, I didn't really click with. They felt like the "cool" kids, the type to sport Tommy Hilfiger, drive rice rockets, hang out at basketball games, and run for ASB. I didn't fit that mold. But when I came to Samahang, it didn't feel like I needed to fit any mold because there were so many of them. Yeah, you had the rice rocket drivers, but I also met people who were into raving, punk, design majors who enjoyed trips to the museum, sports fanatics, video gamers, and a whole plethora of different interests. I'm not gonna lie and say that there weren't cliques, there are, and you could say the folks I'm with on this trip represent one of the strongest cliques in Samahang. But while the cliques existed, if you were patient and spent some time meeting the folks in Samahang, you were bound to find someone you could hang out with. Even the folks who initially detest Samahang end up finding each other, and often times find themselves in Samahang leadership trying to change things.

Befriending too many Pilipinos to count over the last four years, I've become very conscious of race and how it affects us. On one level, it means absolutely nothing. Race does not describe your preferences in music, movies, gender, politics, religion, historical awareness, or anything else. Race is an arbitrary category, an imagined social construction. Yet, despite being imagined, race has a very real impact on our lives. When a White supremacist guns down a Pilipino mailcarrier because he's "not white", that's real. When a young Black man turns on the TV and only sees images of Black men as criminals or athletes and not educated professionals, that's real. When a White woman gets second looks for being with a Latino man, that's real. Like gender or sexuality, race is something that affects us every day, so much that we often take it for granted. Does race mean everything? No. Does race mean nothing? No. It's somewhere in between, and I think being around a lot of Pilipinos helped me examine that middle ground in two ways: 1) Because we were of the same race, our interactions took race of out the equation, highlighting other aspects of our persona, and 2) my interactions with Pilipinos helped contrast my interactions with non-Pilipinos. I then got a better idea of my own racial biases and how they impact my behavior.

This issue of finding different circles between high school and college has been on my mind for some time, and finding the discussion to bridge that gap had been a challenge until now. The company you keep speaks novels about who you are, and hopefully this chapter helps you get a better idea of the story of my life.