This combined workshop and roundtable brings together the expertise of Filipinx American scholars, community organizers, culture bearers, and martial artists around the urgent work of decolonization, intersectional anti-imperialist struggle, radical motherhood, and transformative approaches to mental health through an engagement with Filipinx American relationships to sport and martial arts.

Workshop attendees will interact with facilitators – who hold over five decades of combined experience as martial artists – in a dynamic session that incorporates movement, story sharing, and critical reflection activities emphasizing the interconnectedness between a person’s physical wellbeing, mental health, and the labor of cultivating one’s capacity to participate in movements committed to dismantling oppressive structures of domination internally, at home, in the community, and globally.

This workshop will also encourage attendees to grapple with the stakes of situating Filipinx American sport and martial arts as tools by which practitioners historically reinforced and challenged the scripts of U.S. transpacific empire, gendered expectations and representations of family, the performance of masculinity and femininity, and a radical search for joy in play – discussions present in Constancio R. Arnaldo Jr.’s and Bernard James Remollino’s scholarly work.

These meditations on the expansive potentials of Filipinx American sporting and martial arts cultures are rooted in the mobilization and nurturing of the concept of bayanihan, or “community spirit.” Jean Teodoro frames this culture of solidarity as a portmanteau of “bayan” (people/nation), “bayani” (a person for the people), “ani” (harvest), and “anihan” (harvest season) that expresses itself as “a harvest of heroic acts” to achieve a greater purpose. This harvest of heroic acts coincides with Jyn Rose M. Aguas and Martin Romualdez’s reclamation of voice and the recultivation of inner power modeled after an emergent mindfulness of the potentials of radical motherhood. Participants will be encouraged to share their own experiences and challenged to determine how global solidarity can be cultivated through the work of raising future ancestors in the struggle.

How do we mobilize and engage in our histories as Filipinx Americans without retraumatizing ourselves and our communities? How can we strategize to keep each other safe as we encounter consistent assaults by capital and settler colonial violence? How do we remain mindful of our relationality with our LGBTQIA+, SWANA, and indigenous kin? How do we - as scholars, activists, organizers, and culture bearers – become more in tune with our bodies as we struggle to remain present in the work of collective liberation?

The ultimate goal is to offer multiple possibilities to address the urgent concerns of the present moment’s rise in ethnonationalism, fascism, and deadly silence. Workshop facilitators hope that the activities, discussions, and strategies generated during this session will be taken and applied to attendees’ respective contexts.