Filipina/o/x Foodways in Hawaiʻi: Liberatory Education, Critical Pedagogy, and Praxis

Abstract

This research study seeks to both recover and legitimate particular Filipina women's knowledge and epistemologies for education, knowledge that has been silenced, undervalued, and up until recently deemed unworthy of knowing by school curricula. The study centers Filipina/o/x foodways with education, memory work, social biography, critical pedagogy, and praxis. I draw upon a diverse group of scholar-practitioners who are committed to reimagining what education can be and who it serves. In my first article I illuminate how education and food was used as a strategic colonizing tool by American reformers in the Philippines from 1898-1946. I show how those same tools were used by Filipina/o/x laborers on Hawaiʻi’s plantations to resist unjust labor practices and to retain their Filipina/o/x culture & foodways by practicing alternative economies that center around food, food production, sharing, and conscious consumerism. Scholars such as Vincente Rafael, Rene Alexander Orquiza, Dawn Mabalon, and Dean Saranillo’s work informs this study as they explore the ways in which food tells the complex stories and history of Filipina/o/x in the Philippines to the Filipino diaspora. In my second article I examine the ways in which Filipina/o’s used their Filipina/o/x foodways to demonstrate their resourcefulness in order to resist and remain resilient in the face of discrimination and oppression. I look at how food can be an alternative archive with untapped insight into Filipina/o/x stories that go untold and systematically silenced. In establishing my research I utilize standpoint theory and my NAIMAS methodology that centers everyday life of Filipina/o/x’s in Hawaiʻi in order to re-member, reclaim, and reconnect to our Filipina/o/x’s ways of being, knowledge, and epistemologies. Specifically, I examine through a historical and political lens the role of survival gardens, soup/strike kitchens, and selling/sharing (kumpang and uraga economy) stories of food sovereignty. In my third article I look at how Filipina/o/x children in K-12, students in higher education, and community members of all ages can attain and access Filipina/o/x culture, history, and stories through food. By incorporating informal and formal education into multiple ways of learning my aim is to contribute to the prevention and combat of what many Filipina/o/x in the diaspora experience called “identity crisis” linked to generational trauma and a colonial mentality. This work aims to be a decolonial tool for students and teachers in informal and formal education.