The Pistahan Parade

Last weekend was my first Filipino parade and I wish I had attended at least one of these sooner. Seeing all the different contingents from all walks of life come together to share Filipino culture on the streets of San Francisco was a moving experience. (All puns are intended).

The Pistahan Parade and Festival has been around for more than a decade, but compared to the Chinese New Year parade, Carnival parade, and other San Francisco parades, it is actually a small one, drawing in about 600 participants.

I used to think Filipinos in America, both immigrant and American-born, lacked the desire to participate in cultural or community events like this. That the reason why the Chinese New Year parade is bigger is because they have thousands of years of “documented culture” before Filipinos.

I used to think that the “regionalism” of Filipinos was an obstacle against a sense of true unity for Filipinos in America. That the geographical division you see on the Philippine map is a visual representation of the community division I thought I saw of the Filipino community here in San Francisco and in America in general.

But this parade showed me that there are people out there, outside my own little, narrow-minded world. People who are Filipino-born and American-born, people of Filipino ethnicity and non-Filipino ethnicity, who are participating actively in and for the Filipino community.

It showed me the colorful, cultural, past of the Philippines that goes beyond the thousands of years I have yet to discover and it got me excited about the ever-changing and evolving culture of not only Filipinos, but of people from other countries. Most importantly, on that morning, I witnessed the “unification” of Filipinos. Not because of a dictator and not because of a boxer.

In demonstrating this, the Pistahan Parade, to me, was the biggest parade in the world.

To sum it all up, I over heard someone complain to the parade director at one point, where the director responded:

“Parades are all about moving forward. If we think backward, well, that would be one screwed up parade!”