To be of the Philippines in the United States — to have crossed the Pacific yourself, or to have been born from ancestors who brought you here — is to carry the archipelago’s violent, feudal history in your soul, an intergenerational weight. For some Filipino, Filipina and Filipinx workers, that weight can translate into an understandable silence, into coping with the conditions employers set, into an anticipatory obedience to avoid the mortal danger we fear, in our bones, we risk by speaking and acting for what we deserve. Because to gather as a collective with fellow workers in the Philippines is to challenge an entrenched feudal structure designed to crush us and keep us silent. To go on strike is to risk your life; the classist elitism will threaten to crush you and your body even as you lay it down before the machines, both real and metaphorical. Labor leaders under every administration, from Ferdinand Marcos Sr., in the 1970s and 1980s, to Ferdinand Marcos Jr. today, are routinely threatened, arrested and imprisoned on false charges — and sometimes murdered.
That fear of protesting was something Jennifer Suzara-Cheng knew well. When she was an 8-year-old child in the Philippines, soldiers burst into her home, destroyed the family’s belongings, and arrested her father, Antonio Suzara, for criticizing Marcos Sr. It was her first lesson in the terror of speaking out. But it was a fear she and her family chose to face; upon his release, after torture and deprivation in a prison camp, Antonio Suzara became a union organizer.
As a teenager, Suzara-Cheng became a student leader at her own provincial university, Ateneo de Naga. The group — Justice for Aquino, Justice for All — was named for a political leader, Benigno Aquino, Jr., who was assassinated on the tarmac upon his return to the Philippines to challenge dictator Marcos Sr. “When we go out to strike,” Suzara-Cheng said, recalling that time in the 1980s, “we are scared for our lives.”
To go on strike is to risk your life; the classist elitism will threaten to crush you and your body even as you lay it down before the machines, both real and metaphorical.
Suzara-Cheng immigrated to the U.S. in 2004 to give her children a better future than what she saw for them in the Philippines. In Concord, California, she had the opportunity to strike again, this time for better working conditions at the high school where she was a science teacher. She wanted to join the labor action, but felt the same fear she’d known back home: that by striking for a better life, she could be risking her life. She asked her union president to sit beside her, and stay with her, for protection. He reassured her: “Jennifer, nothing will happen to you here.”
Twenty years later, on Oct. 21, 2024, Suzara-Cheng spoke into a wireless microphone, addressing her fellow educators. She said her union’s name: UTLA, United Teachers Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s scope is massive: over 900 school sites across 725 square miles. UTLA’s membership includes 35,000 educators.
“UTLA gave me the freedom to speak, the freedom to fight,” she said.
The event was called “Filipinos That Strike,” and Suzara-Cheng’s outspoken voice was one of many. The dinner, presentation and open mic celebrated the people of the Philippines’ role in the recent, historic LA teachers’ strikes. Educators, researchers, academics, labor organizers and their children were festive and proud, celebrating with food and music, a DJ included. They were there to honor the work of Jollene Levid, an oral historian, labor organizer and researcher who gathered the stories of Filipino, Filipina and Filipinx striking educators — people like Suzara-Cheng — into a permanent archive.
FIRST, THERE’S THE hard work of organizing a strike: assembling, convincing and negotiating with people. Then, together, you take direct action to get workers what they deserve. But there is an equal need to reflect and preserve the stories of strikers: Each voice a potential education, a catalyst for future labor leaders and strikers.
These acts of reflection and preservation are essential, as Levid knows well. A lifetime Filipina American labor organizer, Levid was a UTLA co-coordinator during the monumental Los Angeles teachers’ strikes in 2019 and 2023, successful protests that secured better working conditions for teachers and improved classroom conditions for students. The University of California Los Angeles Labor Studies program invited Levid to be its inaugural Labor Movement Fellow: an initiative to give union leaders time and space to reflect, study and record important elements of their place in the labor movement.
At Filipinos That Strike, Levid presented her oral history project in a speech to fellow UTLA members. Here, there was no fear; the overwhelming feeling was one of happiness — a combination solidarity party, academic celebration and Philippine-style feast. Attendees piled plates high with Filipino American food: coconut milk adobo, white rice, fish and bibingka cornbread. Johneric Concordia, proprietor of The Park’s Finest, the local Historic Filipinotown restaurant that was feeding the crowd, was himself a product of LAUSD schools. “We’re an example of the long play,” he said, a nod of appreciation to the patient teachers who helped raise him into the adult community leader he is today.
Levid opened her speech with a reminder that children were not to be excluded from workers’ events. “Children are welcome,” she said. When children cry, they express a need, and members of the audience should feel free to help the caretakers in meeting those needs.
One of the bracing anecdotes Levid shared was of her younger brother, when he was a high school student in 2001. He called her in distress after his social studies teacher told him, “I feel bad for Filipinos. You have no history.”
“UTLA gave me the freedom to speak, the freedom to fight.”
It was one incident of many that drove Levid to use her weekends and vacation days to collect the oral histories of Filipino community members involved in the strikes — to break both the silence within Filipinos and Filipino Americans in the U.S. and the silence imposed on them.
“You deserve libraries’ worth of books written about you, about striking educators. So this archive is the beginning of that,” Levid said.
In 2002, Levid was herself inspired by a singular oral history: Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement, the testimony of the elected leader of the United Farm Workers who remained with his union through a grueling, monumental five-year strike. Levid drew a direct line between the history of Filipinos in the agricultural movement and the Filipina strikers now leading battles for better working conditions in schools, hotels and hospitals.
In a joyful call-and-response, to cheers and celebratory tears, Levid praised several of her fellow UTLA leaders: Grace Regullano, for example, who was the UTLA Research and Data Analytics Director through the 2019 strike. “Remember how UTLA found $1.5 billion in reserves and said LAUSD could fund smaller class sizes?” Levid said. “That wasn’t magic — that was Grace’s leadership.”
Then Levid turned the microphone over to the audience, prompting them to share their own memories of the strikes, and their feelings about joining the oral history archive at UCLA. Teachers and organizers rose and spoke, among them Grace Regullano. “The vibes were pristine,” she said of the strikes, to applause.
Elementary school teacher Emily Reyes rose and took the mic. She spent years organizing her school colleagues to go on strike. “It was a tough go,” she said. When the March 2023 strike finally happened, the first day brought rain. “We danced in the rain,” Reyes said. “It was very joyful. We knew we were doing the right thing.”
“You deserve libraries’ worth of books written about you, about striking educators. So this archive is the beginning of that.”
English teacher Christine Gonzalez, still wearing her school ID and classroom keys around her neck well into the evening hours, stood. “We have the power to create the environments we deserve to teach in and that our students deserve to learn in,” she said. The crowd whooped and clapped in agreement.
At the end of the evening’s open mic, Levid led a unity clap. In labor history, she explained, fieldworkers speaking many languages would put down their tools when they heard clapping. Later, Filipino activists added a phrase: “isang bagsak.” (One down.) If one falls, goes the phrase, everyone falls. But together, no one need fall.
The crowd clapped together, banishing all present and historical silences. “Isang bagsak!” Levid called out, and a single, final clap resounded in perfect unity. Then cheers and smiles and more fellowship and feasting, as the celebration of Filipino strikers continued.
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This article appeared in the March 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Filipinos that strike.”
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