Celebrating Kabataan Magkaisa 3
This past October 5 & 6, members of Anakbayan-USA along with over 450 Filipino youth and students from 113 organizations across the country united to fight for our livelihood, rights, and futures at the Kabataan Magkaisa 3 Conference and the Kabataan Alliance General Assembly! Anakbayan-USA is proud to have been a co-convener for this historic gathering of Filipino and Filipino-American youth, joining together to address the issues of our kababayan in the Philippines and overseas under the theme: Kabuhayan, Karapatan, at Ating Kinabukasan, Ipaglaban!
Over 20+ chapters of Anakbayan-USA mobilized to Southern California to learn from a range of speakers and workshops, as well as share lessons from our chapters' work on the ground in taking up the fights of the exploited and oppressed masses in our local communities and beyond. With October also being Filipino-American History Month, we re-affirmed our role as Filipino youth and students overseas in continuing our history of resistance by fighting for a genuinely free and democratic Philippines.
At the KM3 Conference, Anakbayan-USA held two workshops to engage attendees in how we can work together to address the problems we're seeing in our local communities. For our workshop "Youth Unite With Workers!", we emphasized the importance of taking up the struggles of our fellow youth and migrant Filipino workers as part of building the mass movement for change. Although workers make the world run, their rights are continually under attack, as they are subject to workplace exploitation and exported as cheap labor by the Philippine government. We must expose the state neglect of our kababayan and condemn the prioritization of militarization and war proffiteering over the livelihood and well-being of the people. Our workshop on "Filipinos for Palestine" elaborates on this point, where we highlight the interconnections between the Palestinian and Filipino struggle for liberation and the links between the fascist repression of students and our right to a quality education. As we witness heightened repression across multiple campuses this incoming school year as a reaction to the wave of Popular University encampments earlier this year, we must continue to take action and build international solidarity to end the genocide happening against the Palestinian people.
As the youth continue to face uncertain futures, with education becoming more inaccessible, heightened fascist repression against students, and increasing militarization across the globe from Palestine to the Asia-Pacific, all the more for us as Filipino youth to step into our duty to fight for a future that Filipinos deserve! We as youth are inheriting this world, and as a powerful social force for change, we must continue our legacy of resistance in the fight for national democracy as the true solution to the issues faced by not just the youth but of the toiling masses across the globe!
