Filipinos in Hawaii are just about half-way home, whether you look East or West.
Do you feel closer to the Philippines, or the U.S.A.?
I’m wondering about that when I heard the State of the Nation address of the Philippines delivered recently by Bong-Bong Marcos. The Second coming of what exactly?
And should we as Americans care? Of course, we should.
We aren’t totally divorced from the ancestral homeland.
Filipino Americans are constantly reminded that the Philippines isn’t some faraway place we visit on vacation. It’s where our parents were born. Where our cousins still live. Where grandparents are buried. Where every phone call home can begin with, “We’re okay,” or, just as easily, “We need help.”
Where I am in the Bay Area is home to one of the nation’s largest Filipino communities. California alone has nearly two million Filipinos—roughly half of all Filipino Americans in the United States.
If your Filipino co-worker seems to pick up every overtime shift, chances are they aren’t just paying a mortgage in Oakland or Daly City. They’re helping support a family in Quezon City, Cebu, Iloilo, or Negros.
Every year, Filipino Americans send an estimated $17 billion from the United States to the Philippines. Those remittances account for roughly a tenth of the Philippine economy. One wire transfer may keep children in school, put food on the table, pay hospital bills, or help elderly parents make it another month.
When the average full-time worker in the Philippines earns less than $400 a month, dollars stretch a long way in a peso economy.
That’s why some Filipino Americans were paying attention to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s State of the Nation Address last month.
Not because they expected a soaring speech. Because they were listening for justice. They were listening for Lyle Prijoles.
If you’ve never heard his name, that’s part of the problem.
Prijoles, a 40-year-old Filipino American from Hayward, was killed on April 19 during a Philippine military operation in Negros Occidental. Also killed was Kai Sorem, a 26-year-old activist from Seattle.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines say those killed were connected to the Communist Party’s New People’s Army.
Their families say otherwise.
Human-rights advocates describe Prijoles and Sorem as labor organizers and peaceful activists working alongside sugar workers struggling under crushing poverty. Prijoles had traveled repeatedly to the Philippines since 2006, documenting conditions in Negros and advocating for farm workers whose lives rarely improve no matter who occupies the presidential palace in Manila.
Those conflicting stories are exactly why members of Congress, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, have called for an independent investigation.
After all, two American citizens are dead.
If an ally’s military kills Americans under disputed circumstances, shouldn’t we want to know exactly what happened?
Yet the story barely made news in the United States. Perhaps because it’s inconvenient. It’s inconvenient for Manila. It’s inconvenient for Washington.
Strategic allies aren’t supposed to kill American citizens.
Filipino Americans understand something many Americans don’t. The Philippines isn’t just another country. It’s family.
When someone from Hayward dies while trying to improve the lives of sugar workers halfway around the world, the distance between California and Negros suddenly disappears.
President Marcos had bigger issues on his mind this week.
China’s growing aggression in the West Philippine Sea dominated much of the speech. Marcos rightly rejected racist insults aimed at Filipinos and insisted his country would not surrender its sovereignty.
“We are not racists. We are not liars,” Marcos declared. “We are respectful and we are dignified. We are Filipinos and we do not yield.”
Strong words. Necessary words. But patriotism isn’t measured only by how forcefully a government stands up to China.
It’s also measured by how a government treats its own people.
The Philippines inherited many of America’s democratic institutions. Even the “State of the Nation Address” echoes our “State of the Union.” Congress. Elections. Constitutional government. We exported the architecture of democracy.
What we couldn’t export was accountability.
For too many Filipinos outside Manila, democracy still feels less like government by the people than government by political dynasties, oligarchs, and entrenched interests. Marcos Jr. isn’t his father. He isn’t ruling under martial law. But many of the structural inequities that pushed generations of Filipinos to leave home remain stubbornly intact.
That’s why activists like Lyle Prijoles believed ordinary workers deserved better. And that’s why his death matters.
The United States sends military assistance to the Philippines because China poses a genuine threat. Fair enough.
But friendship should never require silence.
Military cooperation shouldn’t exempt any government from answering hard questions when civilians—and especially American citizens—are killed.
For Filipino Americans, this isn’t simply foreign policy. It’s personal.
Because when your family still lives there, when your paycheck still helps keep relatives afloat, when your heart is divided by an ocean but connected by blood, the Philippines is never just another country.
It’s still home. And home deserves better.
EMIL GUILLERMO is an award-winning journalist, political analyst, and comic monologist. See him on his microtalk show on YouTube\@emilamok1.
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