This Fil-Am History Month & Beyond: Be Amado, Serve the People
“The struggle for freedom is the next best thing to actually being free.”—Lean Alejandro
This October—which marks Filipino-American History Month in the U.S. and Peasant and Indigenous People’s Months in the Philippines—Anakbayan-USA offers its highest tribute to our dear friend, kasama, and anak ng bayan (child of the people), Amado Khaya Canham Rodriguez. Amado, a mass leader who served on Anakbayan-USA’s National Council and also as chairperson of Anakbayan East Bay, passed away this past August in Mindoro, Philippines. He dedicated the last two years of his life volunteering alongside peasant and indigenous Mangyan communities in the Philippines to build a society that respects the rights of the most marginalized to land, life, self-determination, and genuine democracy. Amado’s pursuit for the collective freedom that has been denied to the Filipino people for so long, his resolve to live out Lean Alejandro’s words in practice, will remain a constant blaze in our hearts, minds, and fists as we continue to struggle for national democracy in our motherland.
Amado, born to Filipino and South African activist parents, stepped into his own leadership in the fight for peoples’ rights. As a young person in diaspora, he recognized that his experiences and the experiences of his family were shaped by both imperialism’s inherent racist oppression and exploitation of Black people around the world, as well as the impacts of imperialism, feudal land domination, and a profit-driven bureaucracy in the Philippines. After the police murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, he helped to re-activate the Black Student Union in his high school to contribute to the nationwide movement for Black liberation. Amado eventually joined Anakbayan East Bay, our chapter based in Oakland, California, where he became a mass leader in the national democratic movement.
Amado’s leadership in Anakbayan embodied the militant tradition of the youth and student movement. Together with fellow students, faculty and staff, and other community organizations, Amado helped to prevent the building of a baseball stadium that would have displaced working class students and families in the Peralta Community College Headquarters District and gentrified the entire neighborhood. Beyond the Bay Area, Amado even pushed for more statewide coordination for Anakbayan’s “Take Back Our Education” campaign, which called to cut and redirect military aid going to countries like the Philippines and instead use it to fund education and other necessary social services. Through these efforts, Amado built the youth and student movement without ever losing sight of its role to serve the toiling masses of workers and peasants.
But Amado’s hunger to serve the people could not be confined to organizing in the U.S. Two years ago, he chose to move to the Philippines to volunteer with peasant and indigenous communities in Mindoro. The semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Philippine society is reflected in the daily struggles of peasant and indigenous Mangyan people who live on the island. They experience limited access to education and healthcare; feudal exploitation at the hands of big landowners; lack of proper infrastructure and irrigation; and more. These conditions are further exacerbated by development aggression from multinational mining and energy corporations that seek to plunder the land. In response to people’s resistance against exploitation and oppression, Duterte ordered his army and police to wage all-out-war under counterinsurgency programs such as Oplan Kapanatagan (“Operational Plan Stability”). Far from ensuring stability, these programs have led to terror-tagging, trumped-up charges, illegal detention, theft, torture, extrajudicial killings, low-altitude strafing and bombing, food and water blockades, destruction of agriculture, and other crimes against the people.
It was among these communities that Amado devoted the last years of his life to: conducting relief missions alongside people of faith, integrating with people, learning their language, listening to their struggles, and sharing their aspirations. For this, for Amado’s love for the people, the Duterte regime chose to vilify him and harass those who helped him in his final days. Anakbayan-USA knows that any attempts to malign Amado and the communities he served will never succeed. We know this because Amado stands on the correct side of history, the side that chooses to forge a better world for the working and poor.
The theme of this year’s Filipino American History Month is “The History of Filipino American Activism.” Who better to uplift than Amado, a young organizer whose sharp vision saw a world beyond himself and the individualist culture that capitalism perpetuates; an activist who saw the ties between his own experiences and the ongoing struggles of people in semi-colonies like the Philippines? It is in Amado’s legacy that the youth and student movement should look toward in building a life in service of the people. Anakbayan-USA enjoins all Filipino youth to be Amado, to continue his work in organizing alongside working class, peasant, and indigenous communities who remain steadfast in their fight for change, and to add our footprints next to his on the path toward lasting peace, genuine freedom, and true democracy for the people.
Mabuhay si Amado! Mabuhay ang pambansang demokratikong kilusan!
