Pilipino Cultural Night

I have a lecture coming up next week. I will be discussing PCN's with respect to history, decolonization, power relations, and essentialism. As a result, I have been spending time writing on the BART going to and from work, and I have not been blogging lately also.

PCN has been one of the more interesting animals I have come across. At first, the necessity of PCN eluded me. "Why do you have to dance Philippine folk dance again? To know your Pin@y culture? Didn't your parents teach you that already? Your grades are suffering! You should drop PCN and study!" is usually the stuff I would mutter to myself.

But time has a great way of showing you why some things are important. Going to grad school allowed me to analyze America and its associated systems of government and laws. History made me realize just how important it is for someone to be able to obtain data about one's own people. And my own dramatic decrease in facility with the Tagalog language woke me up to the rapidity with which culture and language can be lost in a place away from the Philippines.

I have tried to photograph and document the PCN's from 2000 to 2004. But something has always come up and made me unavailable. Just recently, however, I realized that maybe I needed to have this four years of not seeing PCN so that I can be ready for some project. While preparing the lecture, I realized that maybe, I would be in a position to document PCN at UC Berkeley in a documentary.

The timing is almost right. In two years, it would have been twenty years since I first set foot on the Berkeley campus and heard about the Pilipino-American Alliance. I would like to see the differences between the students who are entering Berkeley now versus the students who entered in the 1980's. PCN itself just celebrated 25 years at Berkeley several years ago (maybe in 1999?).

I will see how the stars align.