About 50 students from local high schools and community colleges gathered in Boelter Hall classrooms Saturday to discuss their Filipino heritage and culture with students in Samahang Pilipino, a UCLA cultural group.
The organization hosted Pilipin* Youth Empowerment Day, an event that featured workshops that focused on Filipino-American history, identity and representation in the media.
The event is a part of a wider project called Samahang Pilipino Advancing Community Empowerment, or SPACE, that offers workshops, peer tutoring and other services to underrepresented students at local high schools and community colleges.
The organizers wanted to encourage more Filipino students to pursue higher education, said Maria Carmel Valendez, a second-year sociology student and a peer advisor for SPACE. She added the event has not been hosted since 2009.
Russell Castro, a fourth-year history student and Samahang Pilipino Academic Committee retention coordinator, said organizers also wanted to teach the students about Filipino social and cultural empowerment. He said he attended the event as a student in 2007.
“I learned a lot about Filipino-American culture and the struggles and challenges that the Filipino-American community faces here in the United States and also overseas,” Castro said. “It’s something I wasn’t able to grow up with.”
Lewis Kingman, a student at El Camino College who attended the event, said he was glad to see it return and felt it was an important event for students to attend.
“When I come to the meetings here at SPACE, I’m struck by how much of a family we are,” Kingman said. “When we’re together, we’re a really strong unit and we can really make a difference.”