October is Filipino American History Month and to celebrate, the Harvard Square Philippine American Alliance is partnering with Harvard Square Business Association to host the third annual Filipino American Festival in Harvard Square on Oct. 6 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The event will take place along side the business association’s Oktoberfest and the HONK! Parade.
Event leader Cathy Uy said the aim of the Filipino celebration is to diversify the Cambridge festivities and “teach everyone about different cultures.”
She said expects people to come from as far as Ohio and from much of New England to celebrate the culture and history of Filipino Americans.
Filipino American History Month nationally commemorates the first recorded Filipinos’ arrival in the United States: Morro Bay, California in October 1587, according to the Filipino American National History Society.
To attract more visitors, the festival will include new features, like an outdoor fashion show.
“We are promoting a young generation of these fashion designers in the Philippines,” Uy said. “They’re coming here to showcase their clothing, which is plant-based.”
Uy said Harvard’s Peabody Museum reached out to her to find a way to feature Filipino artifacts that are currently at the museum. The collection includes a terno, a traditional Filipino women’s dress from the 1800s.
The historical clothes will not be worn in the fashion show, but they can be seen along with other Filipino artifacts at Harvard’s Peabody Museum on Oct. 5 and 7, with pre-registration.
A few more features the festival has planned include a traditional Filipino game called sipa, in which a soft ball is kicked back and forth over a low net; an adobo workshop led by Chef Vallerie Castillo-Archer; and a “balut” boiled fertilized duck egg-eating contest.
There will also be performances by multiple dance groups and entertainment by Ronaldo Abante, semi-finalist for “America’s Got Talent.”
Uy said all of these events are meant to not only highlight Filipino culture, but to bring people together.
“I think everyone would be able to relate through music, food, art, fashion,” Uy said.
Another new part of the festival is a “Pink on Wheels,” a pilot test for an Amb-U-Car with preventative breast cancer care for women in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines.
“Aside from educating people, we also want to help out,” Uy said.
While working with partners in Manila, they will begin raising funds to make the care available to underprivileged women in the Philippines.
Uy said the main goal of the festival is to educate people about Filipino culture because Filipinos have been present in the U.S. many generations. She moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in the early 1970s.
She has lived in New Jersey and New York, where she says she was heavily involved in the community. As a member of the board of directors for the Philippine Independence Day Council, she assisted in organizing their biggest Philippine independence parade in New York City.
This is something that she said she missed after she and her husband moved to Massachusetts.
“Moving here, I didn’t see that at all,” Uy said. “I saw a lot of smaller-scale non-profit organizations doing their own festivals.”
As of 2020, there are about 25,842 Filipinos in Massachusetts, making them the sixth largest Asian population in the state, according to APIAVote.org.
Uy said collaborating with all of the groups, which were hours away from one another, seemed impossible, and it would be difficult to support all of them.
She started out in Boston working as a community advisor, which she said helped her solve the separation of community she felt.
“That’s where I learned the concept of home away from home,” Uy said. “Moving here from Jersey was quite lonely, not knowing anyone. Everyone here is to themselves unless you force them out. …[I said] let’s do this for the Philippines, let’s do this for the Asian community,” Uy said. “One day, just for a few hours, [let’s] make it home away from home for everyone.”
