Whimsically-spinning dancers and piñata-making crafters kicked off March for San Jose State with the Chavez, Huerta, Itliong Day of Celebration event, bringing Mexican American and Filipino American art and dance to Seventh Street on Thursday afternoon.
CHI Day was celebrated in the name of labor rights activists Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Larry Itliong, three prominent leaders who fought for the rights of farmworkers, according to a series of posts on the Cesar Chavez Community Action Center’s Instagram account.
Craft and club stalls lined the corridor in front of the Arch of Dignity, Equality, and Justice, a monument constructed next to the Student Union Building by Chicana artist Judy Baca in commemoration of Chavez’s life.
The event began with music mixed by Filipino-American singer-songwriter DJ Lex, who grew in popularity on TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing over 636k followers.
Jayden Wright, Associated Students events assistant and kinesiology sophomore, said his favorite part of the event was the different cultural performances that were put on.
“You have Akbayan representing the Filipino culture,” Wright said. “Grupo Folklórico Luna Y Sol, all of them, they’ve just been amazing in showing our culture and representing the different people on our campus.”
Akbayan is a Filipino cultural club at SJSU that held the second performance of the day with a Filipino folk dance performance.
They had two pairs of male and female dancers wearing monochromatic cultural outfits, waving around black hand fans and red handkerchiefs.
Grupo Folklórico Luna y Sol De SJSU is a student group that works toward the promotion, education and preservation of Mexican culture through Mexican folkloric dance, according to their website.
There were three separate Mexican folk dance performances put on throughout CHI Day, two by Ensamble Folclórico Colibrí and one by Grupo Folklórico Luna y Sol De SJSU.
Both groups had dancers painting the air around them with flowy, colorful dresses, while performing traditional Mexican dances in cultural attire.
Ensamble Folclórico Colibrí is a dance group at SJSU promoting LGBTQ+ pride through Mexican Folklórico dance, according to their website.
Furthest from the stage, at the end of the street, stood the LEAD Filipino booth, where local Filipino-American tattoo artists Jeff Quintano and Jordan Gabriel collaborated on a large portrait drawing of Itliong.
LEAD Filipino is a San Jose Filipino American charitable nonprofit organization, according to their website.
The group’s booth let students write postcards and show their support to farm workers.
Applied anthropology masters student Kayla Celest Combes Taduran and sociology student Raymond Goni stood next to the artists holding picket signs that read “Students for Filipino Farmworkers: Justice for Itliong and the Manongs!!!”
Taduran said they were looking for more Filipino American representation on campus as Filipinos played an important role in the labor movements with no commemoration at the university.
Taduran said there are several schools around California named after Huerta and Chavez, but only one in Itliong’s name.
“Akbayan is one of the biggest organizations on campus and there's no Filipino representation,” Taduran said. “I come from SoCal, and I see [the Arch of Dignity, Equality, and Justice] and there's nothing mirroring my experiences or the people before me, it’s a bummer.”
Goni said they were looking to have an art piece installed near the Arch of Dignity, Equality, and Justice to bring representation to the prominence of Filipinos in the farmworker rights movements.
“We aren’t trying to tear down Cesar at all, we’re just saying ‘hey, you have this whole entire group that you are forgetting about,’ ” Goni said. “They need to be remembered and not forgotten.”
The Associated Student’s Community Garden booth offered students the opportunity to express their creativity by drawing on palm-sized wooden pucks.
Matthew Spadoni, Associated Students Community Garden coordinator and environmental studies graduate student, said some of the wood cookies are going to be added to an already constructed collaborative mural of Larry Itliong in the garden space.
“Some of them are just pictures like cute dinosaurs, and others ones have some deeper meaning,” Spadoni said. “After the event, we’re going to glue all these on the side of the garden to make a collaborative mural that was made by all the students who came.”
