Dear Sebastian Rizal DelaRosa, my son.

As we bring you in 100% Asian American, 100% Latinx, 100% Cuban-American, 100% Filipino-American, and 100% brown, not everyone is going to know your midi-chlorian count. Some people will force you into silence, but you must force yourself back into sound.

I wrote this poem to Sebastian Rizal DelaRosa, my son. I want him to be able to embody all of those identities without having to negotiate them. He's 100% all of those things. He doesn't have to choose.

Hi, my name is Tony DelaRosa. I identify as Filipino-American first gen, father, husband, Kaviteño, which is the areas where my parents came from.

I see that there's a big gap in how schools, districts teach about Asian-American diaspora as a whole. I had the opportunity as a teacher to fill in that gap.

[Clip of Tony teaching]

Some people will force you into bento boxes, but you must force them into the expansiveness of the kamayan.

People think about race and trauma all the time. No, no. We are more than just our negative parts and the traumatic parts. We are fluid. We have so much multifaceted identities that shape who we are. And that goes the same way for Asian Americans. People see us as robots, as humble, as meek, as silent, as people who bow their heads. Right. But we're not.

Larry Itliong, Filipino-American helped start the Delano grape strike with Cesar Chavez. People don't know about him, right? Yuri Kochiyama. Right. Who was with Malcolm X when he got shot and was part of supporting the Black Power Movement. We think about Grace Lee Boggs, right, who's in Detroit who fought extensively with the Black community. We don't get to see those narratives normalized in school. So that's why people don't see Asian Americans as people as part of the fight for collective liberation.

Some people will force you into their imaginations, of model minority myth, of being ‘minor’ but major solution-POC, of white adjacencies.

A question that I would pose for the entire U.S. education system is: What do we require for people everywhere across the U.S. to strengthen their knowledge and empathy for Asian Americans? So I thought of this idea of writing about how to embody a pro-Asian American lens in schools because that’s where I didn’t see a lot of the narrative well or even being taught at all.

What me and my wife hope for the future of Sebastian, our son's education system. One, the curriculum, the teachers, the administrators, and other students are able to see him for who he is, the beauty that he brings into the classroom. To not put him into any boxes, right. I say bento boxes in my poem, right, because those are compartments. I don't want my son to have to negotiate his identity.

I want him to be able to see that reflected in everything that he sees in schools.

We want people to understand from the get-go that they matter. They bring something unique. They're able to bring their unique gifts from their culture into the classroom, and that is valued. We are together, right, as a people of the global majority. And we do matter and we have a unique contribution to the work of education and social justice.

But you must force them to understand your lineage of resistance, of the Philippine anti-martial law movement. Isang Bagsak. Of the Ethnic Studies movement. Isang Bagsak. Of the Delano grape strike. Isang Bagsak. Of abolitionist dreams because ultimately thinking radically will set you free.