“This Work is Care Work”: Filipina/x/o American Community Museums and Historical Reparative Work

• In Event: Truth-Telling and Transformation: Critical, Reparative, and Community-Engaged Historical Methods Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

Fred Cordova (1983) warned that Filipinos were forgotten in the fabric of American history, naming the dangers of invisibility and erasure. Community museums and reparative work within traditional university museums provide an opportunity to disrupt racist, gendered, and outdated stereotypical historical narratives of Filipinos in order to transform the power of community archiving. This study reflects upon a year-long research project led by a Filipina female doctoral student. The critical qualitative study represents anti-racist practices, community-based partnerships, decolonizing educational approaches, and critical historical representation. Three main research sites were selected based on their representation as museums centering Filipino history.

Theoretical Framework

This study adopted a critical race and decolonizing framework as it offers a useful synthesis rooted in Indigenous knowledge that emphasizes the experiential knowledge of Black, Indigenous, people of color, and in this case, Filipina/x/o Americans (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Viola, 2009). Using this framework, this critical qualitative study answers two main research questions: 1) how Filipino history has been archived and documented by Filipinos and non-Filipinos, and 2) how collaborative partnerships have, or have not, informed ways of learning through decolonizing and liberatory ways. To answer these questions, I quantitatively analyze data such as artifacts and archives, interviews, oral histories, and observational notes.

Methods & Data

This critical qualitative study borrows from comparative case studies and ethnographic methods. Research questions include: How have Filipino communities archived and documented their own histories for education and culture in the U.S.? How have others archived and documented Filipino histories for education in the U.S.? Two community museums located in California and one traditional university museum located in Michigan comprised the research sites. Data include three types of data collection (artifact analysis, observations, and interviews) which were all collected at each of the three research sites that spanned across Michigan and California over a year-long process. Over 500 written and visual artifacts were collected across six different repositories collectively that represented photographs, documents, material objects, digital resources, and oral histories, which all took over 300 hours of data analysis.

Findings & Significance

The results show Filipino history has historically been documented by white, educated, Christian men who have narrated harmful racial stereotypes of Filipinos that helped to justify the need for Americanizing the Philippines during the 1900s. Consequently, Filipino communities have pushed to create community museums through communal and collaborative archiving, offering a counter-narrative to the racialized and colonial history of the Philippines (DeCuir & Dixon, 2004; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2016). Findings relate to the theme Counter-narratives & Kuwento (storytelling) that offers a co-created space where Filipinos are the historians and archivists of their communities’ and they are positioned with agency to reconstruct the historical preservation process.

The significance of this work is to extend the vision of how to cultivate ways of learning that are decolonizing and liberatory by engaging with community archiving and reparative work in museums. It informs ways to center Filipino communities and other marginalized communities in the process of historical preservation and education.

Author

• Paulina Fraser, University of Michigan