Pacific Rim She-Roes

We are going to kick off AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Month with a serious interrogation. While I’m genuinely delighted that we set aside time each year to appreciate, learn about, and uplift Asian and Pacific Islander people, cultures, and histories, we also have to ask how and why such a vast and diverse geographic region gets lumped together under this “AAPI” label.

I often wonder: what do we lose when we lean on this kind of shorthand—what happens to people’s actual identities, cultures, and histories when they’re squeezed under a term this broad, and whose ease of understanding is it really designed to serve?

So I suggest a bit of caution when using labels like “AAPI.” Even when the intent is inclusive and celebratory, homogenizing in this way can flatten difference and obscure culture; it can actually reinforce a generic western (white) gaze by smoothing over power and making rich, specific communities more “manageable” to the dominant culture rather than more authentically seen.

And yet, May is AAPI Heritage Month, and I do want to honor the cultures.

And while we’re at it: what is “culture,” actually? Is it your downtime, leisure activity or a hobby? Doubtful. Anyone whose community has ever been targeted for erasure probably concurs that culture is how folks stay alive. Culture is the language they refuse to let disappear. It is the history people write down when nobody else bothers to get it right.

I would add that it is also the care and keeping some wonderful community members undertake by preserving and building inside of systems that were never constructed with them in mind. Culture is people daring to say “we matter.”

This week, we’re uplifting three Pacific Rim She-Roes who carried culture forward in three distinct but yet connected ways: Bernadita Camacho Dungca, Felicisima “Ping” Serafica, and Dr. Dawn Mabalon. They remind us that when dominant systems try to flatten folks into silence or caricature, culture-keepers engage in radical acts! They keep speaking, they keep documenting, they keep building.

Bernadita Camacho Dungca: Language and Culture-Keeper

A force in Micronesian education and public service, Bernadita Camacho Dungca spent her life insisting that Chamoru language and culture were not artifacts, but a core element of the everyday reality of those living in the U.S. territories of the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. Her life's work sought to protect what colonization and militarization had tried, and almost succeeded, in erasing.

The thing about culture-keeping is that is rarely neat, tidy, or simple. To be a culture keeper means tending to those elements of a people that you cherish while simultaneously diminishing the antagonisms: colonialist pressure, imposed "norms," political and social invisibility, English as the default or at least highly privileged language... all the quiet insistences that your language, culture, and life ways are “less useful,” or somewhat illegitimate. This sometimes leads not just outsiders, but the people themselves to consider their their history as being “too minor,” or "too complicated to deal with."

Such harm is acute in Guåhan (Guam). Since World War II, the island has been saturated with U.S. military bases, English-dominant schools, imported media, and consumer culture, which has pushed indigenous language and practices to the margins of daily life. Many young people grow up more fluent in mainland television, fast food, and English than in the stories, foods, and rituals of their elders, while militarization has taken land, damaged sacred and ecological sites, and made families economically dependent on the base economy.

These shifts existentially threaten the intergenerational ties and the informal spaces where culture is passed down. Extended-family gatherings, subsistence work, and village networks have become perilously replaced by disposable consumer goods and homogenized pop culture that frames Guåhan as an outpost rather than a homeland.

The result of this shift is pretty dire. The island faces a constant struggle against erasure, and the poor health outcomes associated with an imported and highly processed diet. Even for those who are attentive to the food ways, the challenge of which reclaiming land, language, and history is not easy when the purveyor of “meaning” is the powerful and often indifferent US. This is what empire does to culture.

As a linguist and educator, Dungca refused to accept this reality. She treated language as portal, container, and living archive all at once. She helped create a Chamoru reference grammar and dictionary, trained teachers to actually teach in Chamoru, and pressed for school policies that made the language visible and legitimate.

She is the writer of the Inifresi, the Chamoru pledge of allegiance, composed in 1991 and later adopted as Guam’s official pledge in 1998. It is still recited in classrooms and public gatherings today, calling people to defend Chamoru beliefs, language, waters, and lands—not as a fluffy feel-good recitation, but as a daily, spoken promise and validation.

Here is a beautiful sung version provided by the Guam Visitors' Bureau.

Reflection: How do you uplift your roots while working inside dominant systems?

Felicisima “Ping” Serafica: Building Bridges in Care

Felicisima “Ping” Serafica was a Filipino American nurse, psychologist, and cross-cultural researcher whose work reshaped how health professionals think about care across languages, traditions, and belief systems.

As we've seen in past editions of #SistoryLessons, inequity and discrimination are common injuries within the healthcare sector. When healthcare is offered with little curiosity about or regard of cultural relativism, non-majority culture and group norms are treated as neutral as best, but more often than not, condemned as a problem to manage, or “accommodate”—or ignore.

Ping insisted that cultural awareness and even cultural humility were not nice-to-haves; they were absolutes if a society is serious about healing. She explored how values, language, and concepts of "self " can impact the way people experience illness, and caregiving alike. She even went further, considering how, in the case of Filipino people, ideas of relationship, belonging, and mutual responsibility affected the circle of care and wellness.

She showed that when providers and patients are not "aligned," the outcome is often distance, distrust, and community erosion.
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As a scholarship student in the United States, Ping encountered both welcoming opportunity and its predictable opposite: hostility, segregation, and discrimination. In the early 1950s, she and other international students were barred from local facilities and physically threatened, but their response was to organize! They helped start a local NAACP chapter (mind you: she was Filipina, not Black, but these students understood the concept of solidarity, and linked their struggles to the wider racial justice movement.)

Later, she helped establish one of the first hospitals for children with developmental or learning disabilities in the Philippines, then returned to the U.S. for advanced study and became the first tenured Filipino American professor of psychology there, shaping intercultural psychology and nursing education.

Reflection: How do you build bridges between bodies and belief systems?

Dr. Dawn Mabalon: Little Manila Is Our Home

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, a third-generation Filipina from Stockton, California, was a historian, writer, and activist who refused to let Filipino American history be treated as a footnote. She co-founded Little Manila Rising and authored Little Manila Is in the Heart, (here is a Scribid preview) documenting one of the most important Filipino American communities in the United States and the workers, families, and organizers who built it.

Many people would like to comfortably relegate the past to something that is over and done with, and not worth examining. We certainly are all experiencing how dangerous and destructive such a mindset can be. Dawn knew then what more and more of us have come to know these days: if communities do not protect their stories and legacies, others (usually hostile agents) will swoop in and rewrite them, distort them, or erase them altogether.

Her research centered farmworkers, laborers, and families in Central California whose lives had been pushed to the margins of mainstream histories. She showed how Filipino migrants faced racist immigration laws, violent attacks, and exclusion—and still organized for labor rights, built dense cultural networks, and shaped the region’s political life. Her scholarship and public work left far less room for anyone to say, “We didn’t know.”

Dawn taught history at San Francisco State University, mentored students, developed public history projects, and fought to protect the last surviving blocks of Stockton’s Little Manila from demolition. Her scholarship combined rigorous archival work with deep accountability to elders and community memory.
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Reflection: What stories in your family or community deserve to be preserved?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

In honor of Bernadita Camacho Dungca: Why is language preservation important? What words or phrases from your heritage are especially charged with meaning for you?

Thinking about Felicisima “Ping” Serafica: How does caring for others shape a community’s inner life? Write about a time you supported someone through a challenge and what you learned about both of you.

Reflecting upon the legacy of Dr. Dawn Mabalon: What stories in your family or community deserve to be preserved? Who told you your story mattered—and how do you keep telling it?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

To be more like Bernadita: What stories from your home, island, or hometown feel fragile, at risk, or misrepresented? Write one down, in your own words.

In the spirit of Ping: How has health care supported—or failed—your community? What do you wish caregivers, therapists, or institutions understood about your or other people before they provide service?

Carrying forward Dawn’s work: What part of your family’s story was never written down or was written down by someone else? How could you begin preserving it today—through audio, journaling, interviews, or art?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

In solidarity with Bernadita’s people: Learn about Pacific Islander women leaders, past and present, and support movements that defend their sovereignty and lands. Look up endangered or threatened languages where you live and who is fighting to keep them alive. I recommend Cultural Survival, a magazine and organization whose former CEO is a friend.

In response to Ping’s example: Support nursing, social work, and medical programs that center cultural humility and community-led care. Donate to or volunteer with organizations providing health care and social services to immigrant and diaspora communities.

In acknowledgment of Dawn’s legacy: Support historical preservation projects led by communities of color. Read Filipino American scholarship and history, and share what you learn in your own networks—crediting the people who did the work.

More on Their Lives

Bernadita Camacho Dungca — May 31, 1940 – 2016 - Language and Culture-Keeper

By the 1970s, Chamoru language and culture across Guam and the Marianas were under heavy pressure after centuries of Spanish, Japanese, and U.S. rule, war, and mass displacement. English dominated in schools and government, and younger generations had fewer chances to hear or use their ancestral tongue.

Bernadita Camacho Dungca studied linguistics abroad and returned home in 1973 to teach at the University of Guam. There she helped develop a Chamoru reference grammar and related teaching materials that treated the language with scholarly rigor, countering the idea that it was merely a “dialect” or informal speech. She also trained teachers and worked with education officials so that Chamoru could be offered as a subject and language of instruction in public schools instead of being discouraged or punished.

In 1991, Dungca composed the Inifresi, a pledge affirming Chamoru identity and responsibility to land and ancestors; it was formally adopted by Guam’s government in 1998. Today it is recited in classrooms, at public ceremonies, and at community gatherings, often alongside the Guam Hymn and the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, placing Chamoru nationhood and belonging in the center of civic life rather than at the margins.

Across her career, Dungca helped build the infrastructure for language revitalization: university programs, teaching resources, policy changes, and daily practices that signal to Chamoru speakers—especially children—that their words and stories carry authority and deserve continuity.

She was a private woman and lived in the age before the Internet, so fuller biographical details remain sketchy. This in no way negates the significance she carries for all us budding culture-keepers today!

Infresi, the Guam Pledge

Ginen i mas takhelø’ gi Hinasso-ku,
i mas takhalom gi Kurason-hu,
yan i mas fígo’ na Nina’siñå-hu,
Hu ufresen maisa yu’ para bai hu Prutehi
yan hu Difende i Hinengge,
i Kottura,
i Lengguahi,
i Aire,
i Hanom yan i tano’ Chamoru,
ni’ Irensia-ku Direchu ginen as Yu’os Tåta.
Este hu Afitma gi hilo’ i bipblia yan i banderå-hu,
i banderan Guåhan.

Translated into English

From the highest of my thoughts,
from the deepest of my heart,
and with the utmost of my strength,
I offer myself to protect
and to defend the beliefs,
the culture,
the language,
the air,
the water and the land of the Chamorro,
which are our inherent God-given rights.
This I will affirm by the holy words and our banner,
the flag of Guåhan!

Felicisima “Ping” C. Serafica — March 22, 1932 – April 27, 2019 - Pioneer in Cross-Cultural Care

Dr. Felicisima “Ping” Serafica was the first tenured Filipina American professor of psychology in the United States. Born in 1932 in Legazpi City, Philippines, she came of age during World War II; when her father fell ill, the family was pushed to the edge of poverty, but Ping continued her studies and refused to give up on higher education. Invited by her dean at the University of the Philippines to study at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship, she encountered U.S. institutions from the inside for the first time.

At Penn, an internship with the American Friends Service Committee led her into special education work with children who had developmental and learning disabilities. She completed a master’s degree in special education in 1952 and returned to the Philippines for a time, helping to establish some of the first hospitals in the country dedicated to children with mental disabilities—places where children who had often been hidden or neglected could finally receive focused care.

During a later summer in Lincoln, Illinois, working in a local school for developmentally disabled children, Ping and other international students confronted Jim Crow segregation directly. When they went into town, they were denied service in restaurants and other establishments and threatened by white residents. Rather than accept this, they organized with Black community members to pressure businesses to desegregate, and many local facilities eventually opened their doors more equitably.

Ping later entered the psychology program at Ohio State University, where she built a career in developmental and cross-cultural psychology and became the first Filipina American to earn tenure there. She served on university committees pushing for affirmative action policies that expanded resources for women and minoritized students and helped found Asian American studies at Ohio State in 1990. Her books and co-edited volumes, including Social Cognitive Development in Context and Mental Health of Ethnic Minorities, examined how culture, migration, family responsibility, and racialization shape people’s experiences of illness, caregiving, and community.

Across her life, Ping argued that health and education systems cannot be neutral if they are built on one culture’s assumptions. Her work asks caregivers, teachers, and institutions to understand people in the fullness of their histories and relationships, not as problems to manage quickly but as lives that deserve context-specific, culturally aware care.

Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon — August 17, 1972 – August 10, 2018 - Historian of the Un‑erased

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon grew up on the south side of Stockton, California, in a family deeply rooted in the city’s Filipino community and Little Manila district. As a student, she rarely saw her community’s history in textbooks, an omission that helped propel her toward a career as a historian. She earned her PhD at Stanford University and became a professor of history at San Francisco State University, specializing in Filipino American, Asian American, and urban history.

Her landmark book Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California traces the development of Stockton’s Little Manila from the early twentieth century through urban renewal. Drawing on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, she documented how Filipino farmworkers and service workers formed unions, built mutual-aid networks, and created a rich cultural and political life in the face of exclusionary immigration laws, racist violence, and anti-miscegenation statutes.

Outside the academy, Dawn co-founded the Little Manila Foundation (now Little Manila Rising) to preserve the remaining blocks of the neighborhood from freeway construction and redevelopment. She collaborated with elders, youth organizers, architects, and city officials to secure historic designations, create educational programs, and install markers that conveyed the depth of Filipino presence in Stockton. She was also active in the Filipino American National Historical Society and contributed to public history projects, children’s books, and curriculum on Filipino American History Month.

Dawn’s sudden passing in 2018—after an asthma attack while swimming off Kauaʻi—cut short a life of teaching, writing, and community work, but the organizations she helped build, the students she mentored, and the archives she created continue to shape how Filipino American history is taught and remembered. Her short but impactful career demonstrates how research, storytelling, and organizing can constitute a hefty toolkit for asserting that the lives of marginalized communities belong at the center of U.S. history. Never an asterisk or footnote.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

There are many "AAPI" women in my book I could have chosen to celebrate in this month of May, but I selected Bernadita and Ping because their legacy and work, along with Dawn's, really exemplify how, when a community loses control of its stories, it loses part of its soul. They said nope to that!

In this moment, when violence, authoritarian drift, and open contempt for vulnerable communities are almost becoming normalized (fight that!) these three women demonstrate the kind of resilience we must all dig deep to find within ourselves.

Culture-keepers do not take the blows and whimper in private, they found institutions and movements, they build clinics and classrooms, they designate archives and pledges. I hope this first May edition of #SistoryLessons gives you a little spark around the concept of resistance and insistence: that our lives, values, and cultures, will never be relegated to footnotes, caricatures, or silence.

P.S.: CHamorro? Chamuru? Chamorro? Pinay? Pinoy?

Pertaining to how the people of Guam and the Mariana Islands call themselves, “Chamorro” and “CHamoru” are both in use today, and the difference is about politics and pronunciation, not just spelling.

“Chamorro” reflects older Spanish- and English-based conventions, where the language was written with “rr” and “o” even though people pronounced it with a “ch” sound and a final “u.” In the 1980s, Guam’s language commission standardized an orthography and declared “CHamoru” the preferred form, using “CH” as a single letter and “-u” to match how speakers actually say the word.

The change has been uneven. Some government agencies, laws, and especially institutions in the Northern Mariana Islands still use “Chamorro,” while Guam’s language commission and many activists use “CHamoru” as an explicit decolonial choice. As a result, all three appear—Chamorro, CHamoru, and Chamoru—and each signals a different relationship to colonial history, standardization, and cultural self-definition.

“Pinoy” and “Pinay” are informal, colloquial terms many Filipinos use for themselves that grew out of community speech and migration history, not official naming. They carry a sense of familiarity and shared experience, especially in diasporic and working‑class contexts, and often signal pride, humor, or solidarity among people who recognize themselves in those words. Because of that history, they function as “in‑group” labels, closer to a nickname or reclaimed slang than to a neutral demographic term.

Precisely for that reason, it is important to be cautious about linguistic intrusion. When people outside the community use “Pinay” or “Pinoy” casually, it can land as presumptuous—as if they are stepping into an intimacy they have not earned, or borrowing a term that carries histories of both affection and insult. For non‑Filipinos, it is usually better we default to “Filipino” or “Filipina/Filipino,” and reserve “Pinay/Pinoy” either for direct quotation or when explicitly invited into that language by the people being described.

This is a nuance I have personally learned about over the time of writing Brave Sis Project, and I'll share that honesty with you to show that we all have the capacity to grow and improve. I hope that disclosure helps you feel more comfortable with the idea of showing up imperfectly, but willing to learn and grow.

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.

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