Fifty years ago this week, Filipino grape pickers in the Central Valley walked off the fields to protest low wages and poor working conditions. Shortly thereafter, Cesar Chavez and 1,200 Mexican laborers joined their ranks.[…]
Human Rights Watch today released a new report and video about Philippine children who dig and dive for gold in dangerous small-scale mines. Believe me, we understand “hanap buhay” …. but this is heartbreaking.
A Red Cross report entitled: “Shelter Report 2015: Philippine Typhoon Haiyan Response” provides detailed instructions including cost for making a reinforced coco lumber and sawali native style dwelling for about P30,000 in materials. What makes[…]
A beautiful before-the-storm video by Gloria B. Sommer of an early morning walk through the seaside barangay of San Miguel in Balangiga, Eastern Samar. Moreso than most videos like this — this one really makes[…]
There are two ways to read Daughter of Samar here on the site. First, you can click on the menu button in the upper left corner of the blog, and it will reveal a menu[…]
A group of friends who call themselves “Unlifriends” opened a library in Tacloban City last week under a private initiative, funded personally and with donations from friends from Singapore. The group wants to open more[…]
For Filipinos, the Balangiga Massacre (or Uprising, or Encounter, take your pick) on September 28, 1901, was a heroic explosion of pent-up resentment; a repudiation of a hated foreign occupier, perhaps even an assertion of nationhood. In America,[…]
A Microhistory of the event known historically as the Balangiga Massacre that asks the question — was this a massacre? And of so, of whom? The American Company C, Ninth U.S. Infantry, occupied the Philippine[…]
As America’s first brutal war in Asia winds down a US Infantry Company is almost wiped out on the island of Samar. The Balangiga Massacre seemed to be the 9/11 of its day leading to[…]
