Every time my mother and I would visit Lola, my great-grandmother, I knew I was in for an afternoon of delicious food and listening to a household of chismis (or gossip), in a language I could not understand. I would sit for hours, straining to catch familiar words, but eventually gave up and waited for my mom’s translation on the car ride home.
Frustrated, I often asked my parents why they never taught me Tagalog, our mother tongue. “We didn’t want you to have an accent,” my mom would joke. Beneath the humor was a common truth: a pro-assimilation mindset shared by many immigrant families in America. Yet the consequence is clear: Second-generation children like me are left navigating an inherited culture that feels just out of reach.
As a Filipina American and the first in my family to attend an Ivy League university, I was ecstatic to attend the prestigious Brown University and explore the many opportunities to connect with my culture. I had heard stories from my cousins who attended universities in California, where they strengthened their Filipino roots by taking Filipino language classes. Although they were also American-born like me, I was always jealous of their Filipino-ness: their ability to converse with our elders, recall traditional folk stories and history, sing karaoke songs in Tagalog with ease, and hold a deeper sense of belonging at family gatherings. I often felt caught in between — yearning for that same closeness, yet struggling with my own linguistic and cultural distance.
However, when I began my freshman year of college, I was disappointed that Brown did not offer any Filipino language courses. Brown University prides itself on offering over 25 languages to students, from Spanish and Chinese to less common languages such as Akkadian, Nahuatl, and Sanskrit. Unfortunately, there is still no formal curriculum in place for learning Tagalog or Filipino, the fourth-most common native language spoken in the U.S., and it is not just at…
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