In Fall 2025, Yale began offering credit-based Filipino language classes. As the co-presidents of Kasama: The Filipinx Club at Yale and as two of the students behind the initiative that led to these course offerings, we are deeply proud of this development. However, as we celebrate the achievement this represents for our community, we want to also reflect on why we had to advocate for these courses in the first place, and what this means within a broader movement for more critical Filipinx studies at large.
Despite Filipino/Tagalog being the fourth most-spoken language in the United States, the majority of U.S. universities continue to lack courses in or related to the Filipino language, and it took years of student advocacy for these classes to come to fruition here at Yale. This systemic underrepresentation of Filipino language, history, and studies in curricula is not coincidental, but rather an ongoing consequence of colonialism perpetuated by institutions such as our own. For us, language courses are not the end of the conversation. Rather, they are a launchpoint for holding our institution accountable for reckoning with its colonial past and its constitutive shortcomings.
In October 2023, Marissa Halagao, BC ’27, in collaboration with other Kasama and Asian American Cultural Center staff members, organized Yale’s first Filipino Language Workshop. Kasama members emphasized the vast linguistic diversity of the Philippines, where over 180 languages are spoken, and taught the audience phrases in the languages Tagalog, Bisaya, Ilonggo, and Kapampangpan. This interactive and educational workshop culminated in a discussion about the underrepresentation of Filipino languages at Yale. At this event, Kasama launched a petition calling for credit-based Filipino language classes, and the “Tagalog @ Yale” initiative began.
Over the next year, this powerful student movement began to create substantial results. Student testimonies compiled in an open letter to the Yale College Council in the Spring of 2024 resulted in a Yale College Council Senate vote in our favor. Alliances with faculty from the Center for Language Studies and the Council for Southeast Asian Studies culminated in the Council for Southeast Asian Studies creating a Filipino (Tagalog) language lecturer position in September 2024. In collaboration with our faculty allies at the Council for Southeast Asian Studies, Tagalog @ Yale helped to facilitate hiring meetings between students and candidates for this new lecturer position. Throughout this process, we were driven by the knowledge that our language would finally be represented in our classrooms, and we left each introductory meeting and teaching demonstration excited for the future.
However, we know that advocacy does not exist in a vacuum. As we rallied community and administrative support, we also began to research the history of Yale’s role in the Philippines, making connections between colonial history and our current pedagogical underrepresentation. We must acknowledge the cultural and historical contexts that create the need for students to advocate for and sustain such classes in the first place, which stems from our elite institutions engaging in colonial suppression as complicit collaborators of the American empire.
***
During the turn of the 20th century, the United States began their overseas imperial conquest. They “acquired” the Philippines along with Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, ignoring the ongoing anti-colonial revolution and governments formed in these Spanish territories. Filipinos were paternalistically characterized within American propaganda as “little brown brothers” who were “unfit for self government.” Meanwhile, the United States portrayed itself as a savior and beacon of democracy shouldering the “White Man’s Burden” in an attempt to justify its genocidal campaign against Filipinos in what the American government has deemed the “Philippine-American War,” a title mischaracterizing the events as being two-sided. This military operation—which saw American soldiers commit war crimes such as torture and civilian targeting, and during which Filipino casualties were sometimes ten times higher than on the American side—ushered in an age of American imperialism that pathologized any form of Filipino revolution. According to “The Miseducation of the Filipino” by Renato Constantino, the development of a white supremacist education system began to “remove the last vestiges of resistance.”
The American education system penetrated Filipino society not only through the prioritization of western culture and language, but also through direct degradation of the Filipino identity. American educational institutions like Yale took an active role in the development of the colonial project of the Philippines. In 1901, The Philippine Commission—a governmental body established by President William McKinley to manage colonial rule in the Philippines—sent a group of about 500 American teachers known as the Thomasites to the archipelago. 192 institutions were represented by the nearly 500 Thomasites, 15 of which were from Yale University. Notably, Yale alumnus William Howard Taft became head of the Second Philippine Commission in 1900, effectively patronizing Yale graduates to serve the Philippine Commission’s imperial vision of assimilation.
The Thomasites’ mission was to build a new school system that would support the aims of the American regime in the Philippines. Similar to Native American boarding schools in the United States, the colonial schools in the Philippines eroded Filipino ideals, language, and identity, replacing them with curricula centering white American culture and history. Young Filipinos learned “A is for apple,” read stories about snow, and were punished for speaking anything other than English. The penalization of all things Filipino created a “colonial mentality”—an internalized sense of inferiority that poisoned the minds of a population by targeting Filipino youth.
Yale’s support of American colonial conquest in the Philippines contributed to an entire generation internalizing the belief that their mother tongue was uncivilized. Yale’s curricula and institution ingrains this legacy. Yale has never offered any formal Filipino language instruction in its curriculum until we—the descendants of those impacted by their colonial violence—made it happen. Moreover, this systematic undervaluation of our culture is built into the campus itself: at the bottom of the flagpole in Beinecke Plaza is a plaque commemorating the American soldiers who committed the mass genocide against Filipinos in what history textbooks call the “Philippine-American War.” We pass by this landmark each day and must be reminded that our institution continues to unashamedly memorialize the suppression of our cultural identity. These language classes are not simply an ode to our culture: they are an act of resistance to dominant pressures to assimilate, and a direct rejection of the forced Americanization that subjugated our people in our homeland.
***
At the inaugural Filipino Ivy League Conference in Fall 2024, we presented our “Colonial Linguistic Suppression & Filipino Language Advocacy” workshop in which we discussed with participants how our institutions have both prioritized colonial and western imaginations and played an active role in shaping them overseas and domestically. Among the approximate 500 Thomasites, not only were 15 originally from Yale, but 19 were Harvard graduates, 13 were from Cornell, and 24 were from the University of Michigan. In a room full of Filipino students who now attend these schools, directly reckoning with and discussing this history was powerful proof of the essential role that critical Filipinx studies can play.
For us, creating and teaching this workshop was one of the most powerful outcomes of the Tagalog @ Yale movement. It was an example of the ways education can be harnessed by students to analyze, organize, and mobilize, and was an opportunity to be in community with our fellow Filipino students to interrogate and push back against the minoritization of our identities.
Marissa Halagao, BC ‘27, was born and raised in Hawai‘i, where over 25% of the population identifies as Filipino. Despite Filipinos’ vast presence, they are seen as an invisible majority with subordinate status in the islands, subjugated by the American plantation empire that displaced Native Hawaiians and coerced thousands of Filipinos and members of other Asian groups to migrate and work under a stratified system. Halagao recognized that these converging processes of colonial domination are rarely taught in our education. As a result, she launched the Filipino Curriculum Project, a student driven advocacy initiative of Filipino students from across Hawai’i to create a curriculum about place-based Filipino history, culture, and identity in collaboration with educators. The course, “CHR 2300 Filipino History Culture,” was approved by the Hawai‘i Department of Education and introduced to Hawai‘i high schools in 2024. Because of the generational impacts of Americanization and pressures to assimilate, Halagao was never taught to speak her mother tongue of Tagalog or her father tongue of Ilokano, and it was through learning her history and through collective mobilization that she felt connected to her community. Now, as Kasama co-president, she has been able to continue this legacy. By emphasizing the connections between our university’s complicity in the colonization of our homeland and its lack of Filipino language and culture courses, Kasama gives Halagao hope that education can be used not just to rectify the wrongs within our institution, but also to instill a sense of collective ownership over our histories, linking our demands with our own struggles and those of other colonized peoples.
For Janina Gbenoba, TD ’27, the writing and presentation of the “Colonial Linguistic Suppression” workshop was similarly life-changing. She was the founder of her high school’s Filipino club, but it was not until joining Kasama at Yale that she found her passion for political education related to cultural identity. The “Colonial Linguistic Suppression” teach-in was one of the first opportunities she had within Kasama to have critical discussions with her Filipino peers about American imperialism in the Philippines and Yale’s role in it, and the necessity of contextualizing our language advocacy efforts within that history. It inspired her to continue writing teach-ins with Kasama. Both within and outside of the club, she hopes to continue using education initiatives to start discussions about—and inspire people to become involved in–anti-colonial efforts. As Gbenoba is half-Filipino and half-Nigerian but was taught neither her mother’s language of Tagalog nor her father’s language of Yoruba, she feels particularly motivated to explore histories of colonization and to discuss the ways in which people have always—and continue to—resist imperialism. In working with Kasama to advocate not only for language courses but broader critical cultural studies, she hopes to both connect more deeply with her own cultures and start broader conversations about intercultural solidarity.
***
Reflecting on our path towards achieving Filipino language courses at Yale and our broader trajectory as student advocates, we spoke with our fellow Kasama members to hear their perspectives on our collective work and Yale’s Filipino language courses offerings after a long history of colonial suppression.
“What does language mean to you? What can it tell you about history, both personally and broadly?” These are questions we asked at our first and second Filipino Language Workshops where Kasama members, allies, and faculty joined us to formally begin and support our advocacy efforts. According to Elisa Cruz, BK ‘26, our ate (pronounced AH – tay, meaning “older sister”) and former Kasama co-president, language is very “intimate, precise, and powerful.”Familial kinship terms such as kuya (“older brother”) and ate are used even for people who are not related to you, such as how we call our Filipino instructor Kuya Louward, reflecting this cultural and linguistic intimacy. Whereas teachers in the Philippines are generally referred to as “sir,” “ma’am,” or even “Doc” (for those with PhDs), the general practice for many Filipino programs in North America is to treat those involved in the program like a family, hence the use of these familial kinship terms.
Cruz is also passionate about how these language courses are not meant to pacify our institution’s bloodied, colonial legacy. “In the coming years, it doesn’t mean that the only mode of study or inquiry into culture is language… I think there always needs to be a critique of the institution to do more about introducing critical studies,” Cruz said. Knowledge is power, which Cruz emphasizes in her participation in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy where she researches the impacts of, resistance to, and state-manufactured systemic amnesia of the Marcos dictatorship and EDSA People Power Revolution.
Celene Bennett, TD ’26, is another Kasama member who has been involved in the language advocacy movement since her sophomore year. She asserts that “the Filipino language program’s presence at Yale alone is not a check box for the university’s support of Filipino students, but rather, one positive step in supporting both its student community and Filipino culture more broadly that must be sustained through continuous investment.” Bennett was the Yale College Council senator that presented the open letter to call for Filipino language classes to the Yale College Council in 2024. As an active participant in student body politics, she recognizes Yale’s need to take accountability: “The Yale administration should feel a responsibility to invest in communities that have been intentionally suppressed, especially when the university played a major role in said suppression.”
Samantha Fajardo, BF ’27, a Kasama member from Quezon City, Philippines, also rejects the colonial narratives that dominate Filipino history and representation. “In the Philippines, command of the English language is often equated with status and mobility, while Filipino [the language] is unfairly stigmatized as less sophisticated. This sense of shame is colonial in origin, and I think it’s killing the language faster than anything else.” Fajardo asserts that the advocacy and institutionalization of the Filipino language program rejects that, and rather, “It puts Filipino at Yale, in a space meant to represent elite education, where the language has never been thought to belong. In the long term, I want it to become a place where people with genuine love and curiosity for the Philippines can learn the language and keep it alive,” Fajardo said.
In Fall 2025, Janina is a student in FLPN 1100: Beginning Filipino I, and Marissa is a student in FLPN 1300: Intermediate Filipino I. It’s important to note the linguistic realities of the named languages “Tagalog” and “Filipino.” While “Filipino” is politically defined as one of the official languages of the Philippines and the national language of the Philippines, “Filipino” and “Tagalog” are still linguistically and structurally convergent, according to our Filipino (FLPN) course instructor and linguist Dr. Louward Allen Zubiri.
Dr. Zubiri—or as we call him, Kuya Louward—recognizes that using the political terminology “Filipino” also provides an opportunity for non-Tagalog identity inclusion through his pedagogical approaches that feature cultural themes showcasing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Philippines, with over 180 languages. In an interview with Kuya Louward he remarked, “For me, I love seeing everyone’s progress. It’s important to focus on mastering the building blocks so that we build a very strong house…”
Everyone’s house is proudly being built. We will forever recall the first day walking into our Filipino language class, overwhelmed by the culmination of immeasurable effort and passion poured into this movement. We stepped into the class surrounded by the excitement of our community as we all hugged and collectively processed this milestone with our pamilya (“family”). The fight to achieve credit-based Filipino language classes at Yale was over, but we knew we were just getting started.
In the Philippines, there is a song called “Bahay Kubo,” referring to a nipa house, or a house on stilts. Growing up, we were told stories of how people would carry these bahay kubos during floods or other disasters, and how the community was called upon to mobilize the house. Whether it comes to language mastery or student movements, we know that, like a bahay kubo, what we build can only be sustained and mobilized by our collective action.
***
Upon hearing that Filipino language courses would officially be coming to Yale, Filipino American scholar and educator Tony DelaRosa posted the following to his Instagram page on October 3, 2024:
“I’m happy for the Tagalog studies program that popped out of Harvard and Yale in recent years, in big part due to student organizing. I would never undermine that… AND everything whether we like it or not is consequential. Will these institutions, professors, and students advocate for a critical Filipina/x/o and/or critical Philippine Studies program? What’s the ceiling here? What’s the floor?What will empire do with us? Language courses are heritage preservation and not necessarily history preservation.”
What’s the ceiling here? What’s the floor? What will empire do with us? We have not stopped asking ourselves these questions since the Yale Filipino program was established. The Tagalog @ Yale initiative meant so much to us because it was an endeavor deeply rooted in community; it showed us firsthand how collectively powerful we could be as student advocates and activists. But while we take pride in the establishment of the Filipino program here at Yale, we cannot separate it from the context in which it occurred. Yale is still an institution with ties to slave labor, that served as a center for the American eugenics movement, and that is continuing to support genocide and colonialism abroad while refusing to sufficiently fund the largely Black and Brown New Haven community that surrounds it. We recognize as a formerly colonized people ourselves that these histories are intertwined, and so are our paths towards liberation. We therefore hope the milestone of Filipino language courses can help us amplify the demand not only for language representation, but the call to join the anti-colonial struggle globally.
We hope that the momentum of achieving Filipino language classes will amplify the call for a more critical and intimate study of our Filipino identities and histories, and emphasize that the fight against the impacts of colonial education is not over. Our advocacy efforts are not the end of this work; rather, they are a reminder of what we can build when we come together—a reminder that our communities, our collective strength, and our unwavering belief in a better future for everyone are what will help us make such a future a reality.