“Inspiration spreads as fast as anger,” was a key point in keynote speaker Maria Ressa’s speech at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Maria Elena G. Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program (YPSP) at USF.
YPSP was established in 1999 by Filipina-American activist, journalist, and filmmaker Mona Lisa Yuchengco, following the unexpected passing of her sister, Maria Elena, a USF alum. Mona Lisa Yuchengco, the 2014 distinguished citizen of West Bay, for excellence in philanthropy, for her contributions to the Philippine community in the United States and back home, including the founding of Philippine International Aid. The program was founded after their father, Chinese-Filipino business mogul Alfonso Yuchengco, asked Mona Lisa, “What will you do to keep her [your sister’s] memory alive?”
This past Saturday, the McLaren Conference Center was beaming with a lively, mostly Filipino and Filipino-American audience that filled every seat of the room, holding 400 people total. USF Trustee Board members, students, and the new USF president, Salvador D. Aceves were also in attendance. The celebrations featured a plethora of esteemed Filipino-American artists, professors and journalists, including 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner and journalist Maria A. Ressa, who delivered the anniversary keynote speech, “Hope… In Action.”
After an overwhelming standing ovation, Ressa began her speech saying, “stories build communities.” She continued her introduction, saying that the weaponization of truth and the wildfire-like spread of misinformation online is directly responsible for crumbling democracies around the world, most relevant in the Philippines and ultimately in the U.S. She related to her audience, saying that their shared identity as Filipino-Americans means they have witnessed this “erosion of shared reality” three times: during Ferdinand Marcos’s and Rodrigo Duterte’s regimes in the Philippines, and now during President Trump’s second term. She went on to deliver an evocative presentation about the dire need for media literacy and its essential role in dismantling corrupt democracies and governments around the world. She educated the audience on the deliberate tactics used by major media, such as amplification, reinforcement, and triggering rhetoric. Ressa has most famously contributed to this social and political justice movement by co-founding Rappler, an unbiased news source in the Philippines, mostly spotlighting government corruption and human rights issues within the country. In other words, Rappler focuses on the truth.
The Philippines’ “War on Drugs” is accredited to one man, Rodrigo Duterte. As the 16th President of the Philippines, Duterte and his administration initiated an anti-drug campaign that, through extrajudicial killings, killed 12,000-30,000 people, as estimated by the University of the Philippines Diliman.
JUMP: “Inspiration spreads as fast as anger…”
In Duterte’s presidency, from 2016 to 2022, a threat to the freedom of the press arose as his administration manipulated the truth around Duterte’s campaign in the Philippines. In Ressa’s founding of Rappler, the authoritarianism at play in the Philippines was exposed, and the website is credited with the downfall of Duterte’s government and the corruption happening at the time, landing Ressa ten arrest warrants and eleven criminal charges in just two years as well as the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Before Rappler, Ressa spent almost twenty years working for CNN as a lead investigative journalist in Southeast Asia giving her a raw, first-hand perspective on the way large media news outlets operate.
Directly following her presentation, Maria Ressa sat down for a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas. Born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S., Vargas was an undocumented migrant for 31 years, a status that inspired and motivated his activism. Vargas co-founded Define America, an organization that utilizes the power of narrative to encourage more ethical conversations about immigrants. He is also a Tony-nominated Broadway producer, an Emmy-nominated film producer and a graduate of San Francisco State, where he earned a degree in political science and Black studies. For his contribution to the Washington Post about the Virginia Tech shootings, he and his team were awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.
Vargas began their discussion by keenly pointing out that Ressa is the only person of Filipino descent to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. Ressa was born in Manila, Philippines, and immigrated to New Jersey with her mother, stepfather and sister when she was ten years old. Despite only speaking Tagalog, Ressa quickly proved herself to be an exemplary scholar, later attending Princeton University where she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in English. In their conversation, Vargas then quoted her, “What happens on social media, doesn’t stay on social media. Online violence is real-world violence. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems,” he said.
During their talk, Vargas and Ressa focused on defining their Filipino-American identity and how it plays a role in their careers as activists. When asked how she defines her identity, Ressa shared that in the Philippines she feels very American, while in America she feels very Filipina. She shared that during her legal battles with the Philippine government, she was advised by lawyers and family members to not go back to the Philippines, but she did it anyway. “It was more important to go back at a moment in time where it mattered to hold the line,” she said. She claimed that if she didn’t go back to the Philippines, she wouldn’t be who she says she is. Their talk concluded with both Vargas and Ressa relating her investigative work about narrative warfare in political media to the United States.
“It’s interesting to see the fight and the vigor that the Philippines is having in response to the corruption, whereas here [in America] there is a sense of being far away from that corruption… but keeping that mindset can keep us stuck in the spot we’re in,” said 2023 nursing USF alumn Frances Talino.
In regards to the event’s significance, USF Professor of sociology, Evelyn I. Rodriguez said, “ it brought such distinguished guests to our community, and commemorated the exceptional efforts that have established and sustained one of only three Philippine Studies programs in the United States. It was also a powerful reminder of how essential it is for all global citizens to understand what is happening by, with, and to Filipinos throughout the diaspora in order to understand our world today, and to imagine how we might confront democracy’s greatest challenges.”
Inés Ventura and Sayat Yemiru contributed to the reporting of this story.
