Pilipinx American Survivance and Resurgence Despite Colonial Harm

Background: Filipina/o/x Americans (FAs), the third largest Asian American ethnic group, experience mental health disparities coupled with low rates of help-seeking behaviors, two problems with compounding detrimental effects (Martinez et al., 2020). Decades of research document these intersecting problems, but little progress has been slow to identify mechanisms for meaningful change. Studies have retrofitted western interventions for FAs yet few have centered Filipino cultures and knowledge as sources for healing, though epistemicide was integral to colonial projects like western research. Culture has been frequently invoked to shift disparate outcomes (Walters & Simoni, 2002). Thus, locating and building upon wisdom contained within cultural inheritances of FAs heal from centuries of harm endured by oppressive colonial projects.

Methods: This narrative analysis (N=12) provides a view on FA epistemological survivance / resurgence and offers new directions for developing culturally-embedded interventions, improving goodness-of-fit of services offered, and disrupting both disparate outcomes and low help-seeking rates (Riessman, 1993; Vizenor, 2008). Survivors of colonization enacted survivance, that is they selected important parts of culture to retain. Using the Indigenist Stress-Coping Model and decoloniality as frameworks the authors look within stories of FA survivance and resurgence to fortify FA healing and wellness (Walters & Simoni, 2002).

Results: This study sought to understand what stories of survivance and resurgence do when told by FA leaders of a decolonization movement. Survivance found includes intergenerational lifeways and relationship with the ancestors, such as atang or feeding the spirits and receiving ancestral dreams. Resurgence includes examples of building on ancestral practices including bangka (canoe) building in diaspora. As Ilog, a participant, exemplifies, survivance forms the basis for resurgent practices, or the processes of enlivening and (re-)generating culture in present and emergent times:

...going back as far back as I can genealogically, honoring them, naming them, offering up food, fruits, coconut water, you know, the atang, creating the ancestral offering. These are the Indigenous practices that have always been carried on. So reclaiming this is tremendously, culturally healing, spiritually grounding, they help to revitalize our mind-body-spirit, of a people so...reclaiming these practices are integral to our wellbeing, as a people.

Survivance and resurgence practices continue to be enacted and lived, despite persistent impacts of violent colonial missionization projects. These stories describe practices intergenerationally passed to FAs. Centering these ancestral knowledges is seen as crucial to FA individual, familial, and community healing by participants.

Conclusions: Future studies examining the effect of survivance / resurgence on healing could inform culturally specific interventions and interrupt legacies of colonial harm. Since Filipina/o/x’s are heterogenous, consisting of various distinct ethnolinguistic groups, national contexts, Indigenous statuses, and generational statuses, future work should resist applying homogenizing logics to FAs. This means that the work of decoloniality, similar to that of coloniality / modernity, must be specific, responsive to contextual factors, and agile when implemented. Development of tools that are culturally specific and flexible enough to prevent erasure can provide invaluable lessons to social work on strategically improving practice with diverse, vulnerable, and historically marginalized populations.