Halika, Sulong Tayo!
We are Malaya Tri-City! Our chapter is based in Northern California, encompassing four neighboring cities: Fremont, Newark, Union City, and Hayward. The Tri-City area is home to tens of thousands of Filipinos, many of whom are migrant workers. One in five Union City residents are Filipino, roughly equivalent to 14,000 Filipinos. Tri-City Filipinos mostly work in the service and retail industries. Our area has popular Filipino businesses such as Seafood City, Red Ribbon and Jollibee, where a lot of migrant workers can be found. The large demographic of Filipinos in our area serve as a strong basis for why we, as Malaya, need to organize in the Tri-City area to fight for human rights and democracy in the Philippines.
Our chapter was established in June 2020 at the height of the Anti-Terror Act getting passed in the Philippines. This act has broad implications that can put activists (or anyone expressing dissent towards the government) in danger of being tagged as “terrorists,” illegally arrested, and harrassed. Since then, our chapter has been engaging the local community through actions, educational discussions, fundraisers, petitions, and events that further the struggle for human rights and democracy both locally and in the Philippines.
After launching in 2020, we immediately were involved in the People’s State of the Nation Address (PSONA) in San Francisco. In the beginning of 2021, we held a vigil to call for justice for Angelo Quinto and all victims of police violence. We’ve also held local actions, such as a candle-lit vigil for human rights in the Philippines in October 2021. We’ve engaged with Rep. Eric Swalwell via meetings and petitions, urging him to endorse the PHRA.
In this period of heightened repression under the Marcos-Duterte administration, we will ramp up our community organizing efforts to combat fascism and fight for a genuinely free Philippines.
In 2022, we took up two campaigns which were the Defend Lumad Struggles (DLS) Campaign and the Philippine Human Rights Act (PHRA) Campaign. Through the DLS campaign, we successfully fundraised over $600 by partnering with local Filipino small businesses who donated to our raffle. All the proceeds went towards defending the DLS campaign to support Lumad (Indigenous) communities in the Philippines. Our chapter had two campaign committees which carried out the objectives of the DLS and the PHRA campaign.
In 2023, we are taking up a new campaign which is called the Anti-Disinformation Campaign. Our unique location in the Bay Area sets our chapter apart with Silicon Valley being right in our backyards. Through our proximity to the world's largest tech giants in Meta and Google, we hope to advocate for human rights in the Philippines through creative and strategic local efforts to stop online disinformation targeting human rights activists in the Philippines and overseas. We also aim to resist and oppose the historical revisionism that is happening right now with the distortion of the true history of the Filipino people. We will defeat the agenda of fascists and dictators like the Marcos-Duterte tandem as well as their allies.
