Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
In her CUNY FORUM essay, writer Vina Orden discusses quincentennial commemoration of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation across the Pacific to South America, and presents a critique of colonial Spanish and Filipino history, utilizing Luis H. Francia’s play, “Black Henry,” as a radical work of imagination and jumping off point to deconstruct colonial history.
Economic and structural inequality, racial scapegoating, and anti-Asian xenophobia all played a role in violence against Asian Americans, then, and continue unabated to today in 2021. Against the backdrop of the continuing global Covid-19 crisis and anti-Asian violence and hate in the United States, we present to you the reader some signals of hope and reclamation on the local and national level: Asian Americans recognizing and reclaiming their place in the larger civil society despite immense institutional and ideological barriers.