Sitting almost kitty-corner to the Shields Library at UC Davis and positioned next to the two-story, brick-facade Wellman Hall, Hart Hall at UC Davis is relatively unassuming by comparison.
But as the home for the university’s ethnic studies departments, it holds massive importance to students and the faculty who teach them. And up until recently, some rooms on its second floor acted as the home base for the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies — a first-of-its-kind center focused on community-engaged research about the Filipino American diasporic and transnational experience.
The center was part of the university’s department of Asian American Studies and is named for Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino American migrant worker who fought for labor rights and penned the 1946 book “America is in the Heart.”
October marks Filipino American History Month, and this year, it will also represent a month since the center continued its work — under a different umbrella.
Its founder Dr. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, the former chair of Asian American Studies at the university, retired from academia in 2022. She called the center “really a response to the fact that there has been, and continues to be, very little space for Filipino and Filipino American scholarship.”
While it’s leaving the university, the Bulosan Center is taking new shape as it’s incorporated into the Amado Khaya Foundation, named after and guided by the advocacy of Rodriguez’s late son, Amado Khaya Canham Rodriguez. During his life, he was a staunch fighter for indigenous rights, healing and environmental justice, ethnic studies, Philippine national democracy, and grassroots movements — and the foundation’s work is geared around those issues.
Bulosan Center’s founding, community impact
Planning for the center began in 2011, and one of its first initiatives was the Welga Archive project, which began in 2014. The project cataloged oral histories from Filipino farmworkers and has since expanded to include accounts from everyday Filipino Americans, along with those engaged in political engagement more broadly.
Among the models for that project was the work of the Filipino American National Historical Society, or FANHS, Rodriguez said.
“FANHS has always been about really centering community members as historians, centering individual Filipino Americans as producers of knowledge,” she added. “So much of FANHS’s work started with ordinary Filipino Americans just collecting the stories of their family members.”
The Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies officially launched on Sept. 29, 2018, at the Tumulong Tayo benefit dinner. At the time, the center solely ran on grassroots funding: It was a representation of community need and value, but also an echo of the struggle to legitimize Filipino Studies.
A sign promoting the Bulosan Center is hung at UC Davis on Sept. 29, 2018.Janelle Salanga / CapRadioRodriguez recalled grant proposals being rejected because funders saw Filipinos as “too small of a subpopulation for research.”
In the Sacramento region, according to the 2020 American Community Survey, Filipinos are the largest Asian subgroup in several counties, including Sacramento, Placer and San Joaquin, and are the second largest in others like Yolo.
“For me, the impulse of organizing the Bulosan Center was to really kind of create a space that somehow legitimizes the kind of work that we do as valuable,” Rodriguez said. “For the broader community, it was meant to be a space where the skills that we had as scholars and researchers could also be applied in support of community advocacy efforts.”
One of those efforts included a curriculum the center developed in conjunction with K-12 teachers in support of 2013 ethnic studies legislation Assembly Bill 123, based on the Welga Archive. And in the mission of research, the center’s team also published research briefs about issues impacting Filipino Americans and held a national research conference, along with workshops open to students and the broader community.
The center did eventually receive some funding from the state — a $1 million grant in 2019 thanks to then-Assembly member Rob Bonta. Bonta is now California’s Attorney General, the first Filipino to hold the role.
That funding also helped provide support for “Filipin[x]s Count!”, a wide-scale health and well-being survey of the Filipino community in California that had previously not been done to such an extent since the 1995 Filipino American Community Epidemiological Study.
When the pandemic started, the survey’s focus pivoted to focus on its impact on Filipino Americans’ mental health.
Per a brief with the data, roughly 1 out of 5 Filipinos are essential workers, and 17% of respondents lived in multi-generational households. Financial hardships, abrupt schedule changes and anxiety about potentially inadequate protection were some of the most commonly reported challenges from Filipino student and worker respondents.
“Surveys like these are so critical because oftentimes, Asian Americans — and oftentimes Filipinos — are left behind and not seen in the data,” said Sacramento City Council member Mai Vang at a press conference discussing the survey’s results, noting that specific data helps policymakers tailor solutions to best respond to community needs.
The center’s former director of research, RJ Taggueg, told The California Aggie in 2019 that the research process affirms the value of Filipino American experience and the need to be included in data.
“This data will also be useful for other researchers to no longer be hindered by the fact that there just isn’t any data out there beyond what you can glean off of the big national surveys like the census,” Taggueg said. “Ultimately, we wanted to pursue a project that not only speaks to the Filipinx experience, but will be used by the community moving forward.”
Just like the research it strives to produce, the center’s internal work has been a community effort. And the heart of the center is its internship program, said Angela Mariya Alejandro.
“They brought all these intelligent and curious students, and fostered their growth through radical love and acceptance,” she told CapRadio of the program.
She’s now the operations manager for the Amado Khaya Foundation, but interned under Taggueg to help analyze data from the Filipin[x]s Count survey and was one of the center’s first interns when the program began in 2018.
“I was just starting out my sophomore year at Davis and I was still an undecided major,” she said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I was deeply curious about learning more about my family’s history and how we ended up where we were.”
While initially the internship program was only open to UC Davis students, it expanded to all college students, and over a hundred students have been interns over the center’s five years. Interns were able to specialize in different parts of the center’s operations, from media-making and communications to research and event organizing.
The flexibility and numerous intern areas were also a key part of the program, Alejandro said.
“With Filipinx Studies being a widely unsupported field in academia, the Center gave folks a safe space to really delve into their interests and their own personal stories,” she added. “At the end of it, folks who went through the program left with these skills that allowed them to answer the critical questions of their identity and lead new paths for the community.”
Bulosan Center’s next chapter
After the closing banquet of the Filipino American Educators Association of California conference this month, the center officially turned the page on its work at UC Davis.
“If Carlos Bulosan served as a model for Filipino activism in the early 20th century, I believe Amado Khaya serves as a model for Filipinx [activists] in the 21st,” Rodriguez wrote in a letter announcing the transition. “Thus, the Amado Khaya Initiative feels like an especially ideal site to re-plant the seeds cultivated in the Bulosan Center.”
But she said the groundwork for the shift has been slowly germinating for a while.
Rodriguez left her position at UC Davis in March 2023, but even before then, she and her family began learning how to run the Reimagination Farm, a nonprofit located in Lake County, where they also reside in the Amado Khaya Healing House.
“We experienced loss in connection to the pandemic, and I think for me, being a professor at the time, I think that's where I really got to see the ugliness of the institution of higher education, got to see exactly how much the university can function … like a corporation that cares very little for its workers, its students,” she said. “I think for me in that moment, in a particular way, and I knew that there was no return.”
The farm is run through sustainable farming methods and has already been welcoming visitors, who get to learn about and talk through healing justice, Indigenous rights and land-based knowledge.
“There's something about being on land, where we can kind of connect in a real, genuine and authentic way, … in a space of allyship and solidarity with Native peoples, when we're kind of in rural settings, and to really kind of appreciate what the experience was collectively for our ancestors,” she said. “And their displacement from land, of course, being what even brings us to this place that we call the United States.”
Alejandro said the transition to move Bulosan Center programs to the Amado Khaya Foundation has been “challenging” at times, with “many uncertainties,” but has “received a great deal of support from community members and donors who were enthusiastic about this change.”
“We are all inspired by Amado's spirit and are committed to ensuring that his legacy and work live on,” she said. “We are also delighted to continue making our Filipinx history and stories accessible and available to those who are interested in advocacy.”
A way the foundation’s team is trying to do that is through redistributing the center’s archives to public libraries. While the Bulosan Center had a reading room in Hart Hall, Rodriguez acknowledged that space wasn’t always accessible to folks outside the UC Davis community.
“We didn’t want materials to not be available to people,” she said. “So I’m in the process of exploring, partnering with public libraries with high concentrations of Filipino Americans [to redistribute our materials].”
A previous partnership last year with the California Museum and FANHS resulted in an exhibit at the California Museum showcasing Filipino towns in California that also showcased the Bulosan Center’s research and work on a wider scale.
Part of the “California is in the Heart” exhibit, taken Oct. 29, 2022.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio
