Community Education: Student Empowerment

Assignment 1: History and Autobiography

Essay Assignment (Autobiography & History): According to sociologist C. Wright Mills, we can always discover an intersection between autobiography and history. Each person’s life unfolds within a particular historical period, and an individual can understand their own experience by locating their life within history. Each person’s life is shaped by historic events such as war, immigration, racism, oppression of women, economic recession, civil unrest, etc. As C. Wright Mills states, this discovery "in many ways is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one." For this Essay Assignment, each student will write a three-to-five page autobiography linking their life to history. Students should provide some background information about themselves (where they were born, where they live, what are the important things in their life, what are their life aspirations, etc.). However, they should focus their essays on three main questions: 1) How does their life intersect with history? (Have certain historical events, such as war, immigration, etc. shaped their lives or influenced their life plans?) 2) Why is the discovery of the intersection of autobiography and history "in many ways a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one"? 3) Once a person has discovered this intersection, what meaning does this discovery have for that person’s life? This assignment is due by Friday, Oct. 5.

A First Generation’s Pinay Experience: Transformation and Responsibility

By Cheryl Samson

Born on September 26, 1979, at 10:30pm, in Kaiser Permanente Hospital, Bellflower, California, I entered this world. Daughter of two immigrant Pilipina/o parents, Cosmelita and Francisco Samson, my parents arrived through the 1960-1970 immigration waves, allowing those with professional degrees and occupations to enter the U.S. Both my parents were professors at a trade university in the Philippines prior to their departure for the States. At the height of martial law in the Philippines, under Ferdinand Marcos’s infamous regime, like many Pilipina/o immigrants, my parents fled the poor economic and military conditions hoping to seek better economic, political and social conditions for our family. My mom was also pregnant with my older brother at the time. The year was 1972, and anti-Vietnam protests continued in the U.S. post civil rights era.

I lived the first three years of my life with my older brother, who was six years old at the time, in Huntington Park, CA. Huntington Park is a small city in LA County, in the middle of Lynwood, Bell, South Gate and Vernon. At the time of my birth, my father was attending night school pursuing a master’s degree at West Coast University on Wilshire, while working a day job in Los Alamitos, as an electrician on an army base. My mother was a chemist working in the City of Industry. Due to the locations of their jobs, my parents decided to search for a house that would shorten their commute and accommodate all four of us. We moved to a developing city, Duarte, neighboring the cities of Azusa, El Monte, and Monrovia. I have lived in this city from the age of three and this is where my parents continue to live.

I lived the bulk of my childhood years through the 1980s, coined the "conservative years" of Reaganomics, the Iran-Contra Scandal, and anti-aparteid movements in South Africa. Republicans dominated the White House, with Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. serving as presidents, while drugs and covert military operations occurred in Central American countries. The "People’s Power Revolution" reached its height in the Philippines, while millions of people watched Cory Aquino defeat President Marcos in elections. We watched as the American public mourned the televised explosion and loss of American astronauts on another space mission, while AIDS, young welfare mothers, gang violence, and crack was on a rise in American inner cities throughout the nation. This was the historical period that I spent most of my childhood and adolescent years in, attending a Catholic private high school from 1st grade up until my senior year of high school. My parents were devout Catholics and felt that they worked hard in order for my brother and I to receive a "quality" education. So they placed us both in private schools to receive the quality education they lacked, growing up in the Philippines.

Growing up in an immigrant Pilipina/o family, I was blessed learning the values of hard work, struggle, family, and community. My parents were involved in Pilipina/o associations making sure that their connection to the Philippines continued, and that my brother and I grew up in an environment in which we would be culturally aware and proud of being Pilipina/o. Constant family gatherings and parties, with tons of titas/os (aunts and uncles) and ninangs/ongs (godparents) helped us to understand and appreciate the role of the extended family and definition of community. At the same time, growing up I witnessed and experienced the effects of barriers and discrimination my parents faced as immigrants in this country. They did not teach my brother and I the Tagalog language, due to fears of humiliation and embarrassment from our peers whom they felt would taunt us for our accents. They also felt that English was needed to survive in America and not Tagalog. Living with immigrant parents from a Third World Country, I learned to be resourceful with anything, taught not to waste, and always reminded that people were suffering from hunger and poverty in other places. My parents recycled and reused anything they could get their hands on and never believed in throwing anything away. Any extra money earned they would send back to the Philippines to financially support our family there as well.

Unfortunately, we also had our economic struggles and hardships to face. I witnessed both my mother and father bouncing from job to job, with possibilities of selling our house due to financial difficulties. I watched as my mother spent long nights studying for American tests, to teach or work in hospitals, and listened to her stories of discrimination due to her foreign accent. I continued to watch my father’s pride shrink, as he took legal actions on an employment discrimination case due to a promotion given to someone who was white, male, younger, and less qualified. The socioeconomic conditions of the 1980s had a great affect on my closest family members and friends. I watched as all around me, those close to me died from gang violence, went to jail, got shot, got caught up in drugs, or had babies at the age of 16. I found myself also consumed in these social changes, running away at the age of 14, associating with various Asian, Latina/o, and Pilipina/o gangs of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley, and even thinking and attempting suicide. The world was so confusing as an adolescent and with everyone reacting to societal changes, I found myself often struggling for breath amidst all the chaos. During my adolescent years, the future seemed so far away. I was easily consumed in the lifestyle of my friends and the activities in the environment around me. Their hardships became my hardships, and our experiences were one.

On the other end, I listened to my classmates at school discuss their college plans, and their latest relationship crises. Attending a Catholic private school, yet living in a working, middle-class family and environment, I often found myself stuck in two worlds. Constantly questioning my privileged educational background while simultaneously being placed in an immigrant and socioeconomic world of constant struggle and systematic discrimination, I realized that I learned more and was affected greater from the experiences I faced outside of the academic setting. These were the people that mattered the most to me and I felt an inner responsibility to do something to alter the conditions that we all had to endure. You can only take so many stories of hearing who was pregnant, who was in jail, who was the new drug addict, or who passed away. Our communities were slowly falling a part and in most ways, they still are.

In this sense, it is both tragic yet empowering. It is a terrible lesson to have to witness all these negative conditions, acts of discrimination, and barriers that inflict mostly working class, immigrant communities of color. The WASP, capitalistic, elitist institution that we live in continues to benefit from the hard labor of the working class minority just as it has always been throughout history. On a more personal level, the problems still continue and instead of being at a Catholic, private high school, I am now a part of a public, elitist institution funded by corporations, supporting their interests. Some of the people I grew up with have no career or academic goals past the local community college and are still having more children. The cycles and patterns continue without individuals aware of social services and alternative options available for any type of mobility. Discrimination has always been present in the occupational arena and my parents still struggle searching for the next job that will acknowledge their educational background.

At the same time, it can be magnificent when one transforms these battles and hardships into an empowering experience, an inner desire to seek change and a way to rise from these conditions in their community and own families. It is when we acknowledge these struggles and take responsibility to alter our lives and those close to us that the experience can be an empowering one. Of course, the steps are never as simple as they sound and in many instances they can take a long time before you can actually see the fruits of your labor. Everyone has a skill and talent in this world to use. In knowing and understanding where we came from, we can decide whether we want to change what we have seen or let it continue.

I feel that because of the various areas of hardship that I have experienced in my family and those around me, I have a responsibility to help alter the socioeconomic environment around me, so that future generations would not have to face worse or equal conditions that we had to face growing up. We still continue to face the negative repercussions of an elite capitalist society, as we see even local policies affect working class, and immigrant communities of color. The passage of California state propositions including 187, 209, 227, 21, and 22 are political statements that there is still a lot of work to be done, and that is just California alone. The September 11 tragedy shows that locally, nationally, and internationally there is a lot of work to be done. Personally, I feel that the conditions I have endured in my life continue to serve as motivational points to help the community I came out of. It is recently that I have discovered to fulfill that responsibility as a youth counselor for middle school and/or high school youth, with the hopes that I can one day establish a center that will engage youth in art-related activities, maybe as after-school programs, cultural awareness/empowerment, job placement, who knows? I know one thing, being complacent and ignoring my responsibilities does nothing to change the conditions of society and the communities I grew up in. In looking to the past, one discovers their responsibility and their mission, and like Franz Fanon states, has the "mission to fulfill or betray it."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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