Originally posted as #SistoryLessons newsletter, May 1, 2026
We are going to kick off AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Month with a serious interrogation. While I'm genuinely delighted that we set aside time each year to appreciate, learn about, and uplift Asian and Pacific Islander people, cultures, and histories, we also have to ask how and why such a vast and diverse geographic region gets lumped together under this "AAPI" label.
I often wonder: what do we lose when we lean on this kind of shorthand—what happens to people's actual identities, cultures, and histories when they're squeezed under a term this broad, and whose ease of understanding is it really designed to serve?
So I suggest a bit of caution when using labels like "AAPI." Even when the intent is inclusive and celebratory, homogenizing in this way can flatten difference and obscure culture; it can actually reinforce a generic western (white) gaze by smoothing over power and making rich, specific communities more "manageable" to the dominant culture rather than more authentically seen.
And yet, May is AAPI Heritage Month, and I do want to honor the cultures. And while we're at it: what is "culture," actually? Is it your downtime, leisure activity or a hobby? Doubtful. Anyone whose community has ever been targeted for erasure probably concurs that culture is how folks stay alive. Culture is the language they refuse to let disappear. It is the history people write down when nobody else bothers to get it right. I would add that it is also the care and keeping some wonderful community members undertake by preserving and building inside of systems that were never constructed with them in mind. Culture is people daring to say "we matter."
This week, we're uplifting three Pacific Rim She-Roes who carried culture forward in three distinct but yet connected ways: Bernadita Camacho Dungca, Felicisima "Ping" Serafica, and Dr. Dawn Mabalon. They remind us that when dominant systems try to flatten folks into silence or caricature, culture-keepers engage in radical acts! They keep speaking, they keep documenting, they keep building.
Bernadita Camacho Dungca: Language and Culture-Keeper
A force in Micronesian education and public service, Bernadita Camacho Dungca spent her life insisting that Chamoru language and culture were not artifacts, but a core element of the everyday reality of those living in the U.S. territories of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. Her life's work sought to protect what colonization and militarization had tried, and almost succeeded, in erasing.
The thing about culture-keeping is that it is rarely neat, tidy, or simple. To be a culture keeper means tending to those elements of a people that you cherish while simultaneously diminishing the antagonisms: colonialist pressure, imposed "norms," political and social invisibility, English as the default or at least highly privileged language—all the quiet insistences that your language, culture, and life ways are "less useful," or somewhat illegitimate. This sometimes leads not just outsiders, but the people themselves to consider their history as being "too minor," or "too complicated to deal with."
Such harm is acute in Guåhan (Guam). Since World War II, the island has been saturated with U.S. military bases, English-dominant schools, imported media, and consumer culture, which has pushed indigenous language and practices to the margins of daily life. Many young people grow up more fluent in mainland television, fast food, and English than in the stories, foods, and rituals of their elders, while militarization has taken land, damaged sacred and ecological sites, and made families economically dependent on the base economy.
As a linguist and educator, Dungca refused to accept this reality. She treated language as portal, container, and living archive all at once. She helped create a Chamoru reference grammar and dictionary, trained teachers to actually teach in Chamoru, and pressed for school policies that made the language visible and legitimate.
She is the writer of the Inifresi, the Chamoru pledge of allegiance, composed in 1991 and later adopted as Guam's official pledge in 1998. It is still recited in classrooms and public gatherings today, calling people to defend Chamoru beliefs, language, waters, and lands—not as a fluffy feel-good recitation, but as a daily, spoken promise and validation. Here is a beautiful sung version provided by the Guam Visitors' Bureau.
"From the highest of my thoughts, from the deepest of my heart, and with the utmost of my strength, I offer myself to protect and to defend the beliefs, the culture, the language, the air, the water and the land of the Chamorro…" — Inifresi (translated)
Reflection: How do you uplift your roots while working inside dominant systems?
Felicisima "Ping" Serafica: Building Bridges in Care
Felicisima "Ping" Serafica was a Filipino American nurse, psychologist, and cross-cultural researcher whose work reshaped how health professionals think about care across languages, traditions, and belief systems.
As we've seen in past editions of #SistoryLessons, inequity and discrimination are common injuries within the healthcare sector. When healthcare is offered with little curiosity about or regard of cultural relativism, non-majority culture and group norms are treated as neutral at best, but more often than not, condemned as a problem to manage, or "accommodate"—or ignore.
Ping insisted that cultural awareness and even cultural humility were not nice-to-haves; they were absolutes if a society is serious about healing. She explored how values, language, and concepts of "self" can impact the way people experience illness and caregiving alike. She even went further, considering how, in the case of Filipino people, ideas of relationship, belonging, and mutual responsibility affected the circle of care and wellness. She showed that when providers and patients are not "aligned," the outcome is often distance, distrust, and community erosion.
As a scholarship student in the United States, Ping encountered both welcoming opportunity and its predictable opposite: hostility, segregation, and discrimination. In the early 1950s, she and other international students were barred from local facilities and physically threatened, but their response was to organize! They helped start a local NAACP chapter—mind you, she was Filipina, not Black, but these students understood the concept of solidarity, and linked their struggles to the wider racial justice movement. Later, she helped establish one of the first hospitals for children with developmental or learning disabilities in the Philippines, then returned to the U.S. for advanced study and became the first tenured Filipino American professor of psychology there, shaping intercultural psychology and nursing education.
Reflection: How do you build bridges between bodies and belief systems?
Dr. Dawn Mabalon: Little Manila Is Our Home
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, a third-generation Filipina from Stockton, California, was a historian, writer, and activist who refused to let Filipino American history be treated as a footnote. She co-founded Little Manila Rising and authored Little Manila Is in the Heart, documenting one of the most important Filipino American communities in the United States and the workers, families, and organizers who built it.
Many people would like to comfortably relegate the past to something that is over and done with, and not worth examining. We certainly are all experiencing how dangerous and destructive such a mindset can be. Dawn knew then what more and more of us have come to know these days: if communities do not protect their stories and legacies, others (usually hostile agents) will swoop in and rewrite them, distort them, or erase them altogether.
Her research centered farmworkers, laborers, and families in Central California whose lives had been pushed to the margins of mainstream histories. She showed how Filipino migrants faced racist immigration laws, violent attacks, and exclusion—and still organized for labor rights, built dense cultural networks, and shaped the region's political life.
Dawn taught history at San Francisco State University, mentored students, developed public history projects, and fought to protect the last surviving blocks of Stockton's Little Manila from demolition. Her scholarship combined rigorous archival work with deep accountability to elders and community memory.
"History is inclusive of heritage and culture, but it's also about the ways we have built and changed this nation—our stories, political struggles, transformations, labor, migration, activism, impact of imperialism and war, victories—whereas 'heritage' is more limited to what we pass down in terms of culture, tradition, legacies." — Dawn Mabalon
Reflection: What stories in your family or community deserve to be preserved?
Reflection and Action
In honor of Bernadita Camacho Dungca: Why is language preservation important? What words or phrases from your heritage are especially charged with meaning for you?
Thinking about Felicisima "Ping" Serafica: How does caring for others shape a community's inner life? Write about a time you supported someone through a challenge and what you learned about both of you.
Reflecting upon the legacy of Dr. Dawn Mabalon: What stories in your family or community deserve to be preserved? Who told you your story mattered—and how do you keep telling it?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In solidarity with Bernadita's people: Learn about Pacific Islander women leaders, past and present, and support movements that defend their sovereignty and lands. I recommend Cultural Survival.
In response to Ping's example: Support nursing, social work, and medical programs that center cultural humility and community-led care.
In acknowledgment of Dawn's legacy: Support historical preservation projects led by communities of color, and share Filipino American scholarship in your own networks—crediting the people who did the work.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
There are many "AAPI" women in my book I could have chosen to celebrate in this month of May, but I selected Bernadita and Ping because their legacy and work, along with Dawn's, really exemplify how, when a community loses control of its stories, it loses part of its soul. They said nope to that! Culture-keepers do not take the blows and whimper in private; they found institutions and movements, they build clinics and classrooms, they designate archives and pledges. I hope this first May edition of #SistoryLessons gives you a little spark around the concept of resistance and insistence: that our lives, values, and cultures will never be relegated to footnotes, caricatures, or silence.
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.