An exhibit at the UTSA(University of Texas San Antonio) Institute of Texas Cultures

A few hours at the Institute of Texas Cultures….a time well spent! Wish we had more time to explore this part of the museum, but we were so fortunate to at least able to see with our limited time, this special exhibit called “Mabuhay Filipino Texans”, which is on loan from the Smithsonian.

The exhibit has been going on since May, 2019 and will be there for another six months in February 2, 2020.

As a Filipino descent American, I was really drawn to explore the whole exhibit going from thing to another as fast as I could and as much as I could read some of the inscriptions.

I was with a group of Filipino-Americans that included my husband and my townmates(originally from Abuyog, Leyte, Philippines) and our families and friends upon the invitation of our San Antonio resident hosts, Betty Cooper and Alma De Paz.

“Mabuhay Filipino Texans” is a story of Filipinos in Texas. From the 1820’s to the present, Filipinos in Texas are growing population in many Texas communities. Houston has the largest Filipino-American population.

It’s been known that as early as 1820’s, the first Filipino landed in Rockport, Texas. And since then, there has been a continuous flow of Filipino presence here in Texas up to the present day.

Every photograph and illustration at the museum tells a story or stories of lives of the Filipinos….be those in the fields of military services, struggles in a new country, fulfilling those American dreams, and so much more.

Speaking of the military, as we were going through the giant photographs, some of us got emotional especially when we were reading about how tough it was to be a Filipino in the US military way back in the early 1900’s and probably even before that. But as we are resilient people we know how to survive somehow.

Needless to say we came out of there with a renewed sense of pride of our Filipino heritage, culture and traditions that we continue to integrate with our beloved adoptive country, the United States of America, to whom we are forever grateful.

I could write more about this exhibit but we’ll save that for another post.