“TO our invaluable founders and distinguished community guests, I want to acknowledge, [as] our student attendees, and everyone in our alumni community. Earlier, I raised the question, “What good is a revolution without a sense of purpose?” Well, I say YOU, our students, are the heartbeat of our purpose. You will always be the source of our joy, our reason to get up each morning, and our reason to embrace our calling as educators. I, for one, am proud to embrace all of you not just as comrades, but as dear friends, and members of a community family. On behalf of my colleagues, no matter what happens tomorrow or for the rest of our lives, our hearts are full of joy right now because you’re here, and we love you. Tonight we reverently honor our past as we celebrate our hopes for the future.” –Allan Aquino, California State University, Northridge (CSUN) professor.
“My gratitude goes out to the department for this award. To the faculty who have stimulated me intellectually and have challenged me to be a better student. My family also gets credit too, they’ve helped shape me into who I am today and they’ve given me purpose. To my friends / classmates / colleagues in the department, I deeply value the time I’ve spent with all of you: the good and the bad. Life wouldn’t be much good if we didn’t [have] the bad things to work out. And in my time, I’ve come to learn that there’s a lot [of] bad in this world to work out. AAS [Asian American Studies] taught me to embrace the bad as a challenge- to not let the bad define me and how I perceive others. Structural and systemic racism is quite the beast and I’ve learned that, in the pursuit of social justice, there may be fear, but there cannot be cowardice. There can only be courage.” – Lorenzo Mutia, CSUN student and recipient of the Enrique Delacruz Social Justice Award.
Provost Yi Li and Dean of Humanities Elizabeth Say attended the 25th anniversary at CSUN on April 23, along with 200 folks. Provost Li, who grew up during China’s Cultural Revolution, asserted that higher education is really a social justice issue.
Justifiably so, for without financial aid, grants, and scholarships, some working students are forced to drop out and not graduate.
Dean Say shared she was the first to go to college and obtain a graduate degree in her family. At CSUN, she “saw the department of Asian American Studies grow out of the grassroots, [where students] see themselves represented in the curriculum, faculty. [It] is one of my great joys and privileges as dean, to support the tremendous faculty and amazing students, who are more committed and so connected to the community.”
Enrique de la Cruz, Ph.D., professor emeritus and former department chair, attested to Say’s support in growing the department of Asian American Studies. He was recognized by Glen Omatsu, speaking of his journey as an expatriate, going from an immigrant from the Philippines to an Asian American leader and one of the chairs of the department who grew its faculty and curriculum during his tenure.
De la Cruz recognized the real founders of the department, who toiled before him: Kenyon Chan, George Uba, Bob Suzuki and the guidance of his mentors, Jorge Garcia and Elizabeth Say, enabling him to do two faculty searches for several years. He underscored that the “educational system is the principal socializing system of a society, and if we don’t exist in that society’s curriculum, the rest of the society thinks we don’t exist. Asian American Studies owes it to its students, parents, community, it is really everybody, faculty, deans and staff.”
The department paid tribute to its founders: Bob Suzuki, George Uba, Laura Uba, Warren Furumoto, Gary Mayeda, Enrique de la Cruz, who came. Other founders who could not be there were also recognized: Kenyon Chan, Gordon Nakagawa, Michael Ego and Emily Lawsin.
Genesis of the Asian American Studies department at CSUN
“The origins of the idea for an ad hoc committee came from Bob Suzuki. Later the ad hoc committee, composed of student leaders including Gary Mayeda, Sindy Saito, and faculty members Drs. Michael Ego, Warren Furumoto, George Uba, Laura Uba, Gordon Nakagawa, and Tim Dagodag drafted a position paper and worked to create curriculum for a new program in Asian American Studies. Typically, a program is created before a department can be instituted. But Chicana/o Studies Professor Jorge Garcia (seeing the battle Chicana/o Studies went through to establish itself) and Warren Furumoto, two faculty members, “insisted on the creation of the Department of Asian American Studies (AAS)”’, according to Professor Edith Chen, Ph.D.
Suzuki threw in his full support, as he understood its importance, from his eight years of teaching at University of Massachusetts. Four hundred Asian Americans students, out of 25,000, were enrolled. Of that, about 80 percent of Asian Americans took his class in AAS, reportedly made an impact on their “motivation, identity and education.” Faculty members then worked with CSUN’s Academic Senate, while Suzuki worked with the Office of the President.
“It [AAS] did not come without struggles… it was a dark history and there was a lot of overt discrimination on [CSUN] campus, hateful messages and flyers were placed in our cars, it existed in the mid-80’s and it still continues today. We thought we just needed to do more education and raise awareness. With luck, skill, happenstance, and with cultural awareness weeks, food festivals, people understood us better, it became easier to pave the way for Asian American studies,” Gary Mayeda said , who was the first president and co-founder of the Asian Pacific Student Alliance, now project manager of Infrastructure Factor Consulting Vision, Inc. He shared his vision on volunteerism, “that when you keep contributing, something big will grow.”
Folks came to “honor our past, as we reverently celebrate our hopes for the future,” as Allan Aquino said, to the 25 years of the Department of Asian American Studies, second to gain departmental status, the first was San Francisco State University.
Many years ago, ethnic studies came from the struggles of a generation of activists who were “linking their lives to the tradition of militancy of earlier generations of Pilipino farmworkers, Chinese immigrant garment and restaurant workers, and Japanese American concentration camp resisters. Moreover, these Asian American students – and their community supporters—liberated themselves from the prisons [imposed on us by history and geography, of history, society’s social and class structure, and self] surrounding their lives and forged a new vision for their communities, creating numerous grassroots projects and empowering previously ignored and disenfranchised sectors of society, “ Glenn Omatsu wrote in his published essay, “The Four Prisons and The Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s.”
Today, the students are learning not just to live for themselves, but to contribute to help others grow, to be a peer mentor, a tutor, a teaching assistant, a group leader, an educational researcher, and where at CSUN, they become “deep, cogent, critical” artists and intellectuals, organically grown by faculty and mentors, peers and study cohorts, from the community.
Like Joyce Kim, who cares about mentoring another student, tutoring Korean-speaking students who utilized the writing program, while still active as a church leader, and finding more time to volunteer at Orange County Asian Pacific Islander Community Alliance (OCAPICA) for Professor Lai’s social movements senior capstone seminar.
Lorenzo Mutia, who is both an Asian American and journalism major, found time to do Summer Activist Training, so he can volunteer more effectively. He is a tutor and peer mentor, plays in the pep band, volunteers at St. Genevieve, CSUN Young Democrats and Filipino Cultural School. Both Mutia and Kim were recipients of the Enrique de la Cruz Social Justice Award.
Raymond Bascal, who has a GPA of 3.97, and did not take his studies seriously until he got to CSUN, said “where he saw the light, became an Asian American studies major. I had professors who encouraged me and taught me the beauty of mentoring, the likes of Glenn Omatsu, Maria Tummeyer, Allan Aquino.” He received the Laura Uba Academic Achievement Award.
Cielito Fernandez, who received the Kenyon Chan Leadership Award, had this to say, “I don’t really think of myself as a leader. In reality, I’m just a student that’s trying to preserve the communities that empower me so others can feel empowered too! I’m so proud to be amongst these students who are working towards rectifying the injustices our communities face daily. One of the most resonant lessons I’ve learned from Profs. Fong, Masequesmay, Lai, Uba, Buenavista and Omatsu is that the privileges we have as Asian Americans are conditional and ephemeral. Thank you Asian Am for reminding me to continue fighting for my community.”
All in all, 34 students were recognized as promising freshmen, sophomores, transfer students, teachers, special achievement, academic achievement, social justice and leadership awardees.
An ascending crescendo of applauses and “Isang Bagsak” were given to honor of the father of Asian American Studies in the US, Prof. Don Nakanishi, Ph.D., and Jose Luis Vargas, the director of the Educational Opportunity Program at CSUN. They passed away two days of each other — Jose on March 19 and Don on March 21.
As John Dewey said in 1895, “It is…advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered. He is lot like a private soldier in an army, expected merely to obey, or like a cog in a wheel, expected merely to respond to and transmit external energy; he must be an intelligent medium of action.”
In learning, we “remove our blindfolds,” and that evening, a very bright light came from Department Chair Gina Masequesmay, Ph.D. to join with other bright lights, all 200 strong from all over Los Angeles.
Congratulations and such great hopes for a better world, as we find this thriving department of caring scholars, teachers, learners who are student-centered!
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Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz, J.D. writes a weekly column for Asian Journal, called “Rhizomes.” She has been writing for AJ Press for 9 years now. She contributes to Balikbayan Magazine. Her training and experiences are in science, food technology, law and community volunteerism for 4 decades. She holds a B.S. degree from the University of the Philippines, a law degree from Whittier College School of Law in California and a certificate on 21st Century Leadership from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has been a participant in NVM Writing Workshops taught by Prof. Peter Bacho for 4 years and Prof. Russell Leong. She has travelled to France, Holland, Belgium, Japan, Mexico and 22 national parks in the US, in pursuit of her love for arts.