Nelia Sancho & American Transnational College Activism

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Publication Date: 
October 16, 2023

Nelia Sancho & American Transnational College Activism

On September 11, 2023, The New York Times published an obituary for Nelia Sancho, the Filipina beauty queen who left her pageant career to become an activist. She died at age 71 on September 1st, 2022, after dedicating her life to fighting human rights abuses and advocating for women’s causes. Sancho was a dissident: she variously spoke up against Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal dictatorship, served as a chief financial officer of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and as a founder of the Gabriela Women’s Party national organization network (which to this day represents Filipinas in the House of Representatives). The Filipino news media called Sancho a “guerrilla queen.”

Nelia Sancho in her pageant days.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/world/asia/nelia-sancho-dead.html

In college at the University of the Philippines, Sancho was a member of the Sigma Delta Phi sorority when she started entering beauty pageants. She became so successful that she took a gap year from school to compete for the Philippines across Asia. During her travels, Sancho encountered an Australian diplomat who said she was being exploited, because “the Philippine government was leveraging her polished beauty-queen persona as propaganda to distract the world from its human rights violations.” 

 
Sancho was one of many successful pageant winners in Southeast Asia who have served as beauty icons for their respective nation-states. For instance, anthropologist Holly High argues that the Laotian state has promoted Miss Beer Lao as a pageant queen to “tame the perceived threats of globalization” to Laos “by domesticating them into a ‘Lao’ form.” Indeed, nation-states often try to project beauty queens as symbols to their own advantage. Upon realizing this point, Sancho decided not to continue cooperating and instead quit beauty pageants forever. 
 
Miss Beer Lao 2014.
 
After that, Sancho joined a variety of student activist groups. She and several sorority sisters got involved with the Filipino Communist Party, to oppose the violent Marcos regime. The young women went into hiding when the police discovered their activities. But government agents raided their hideout, arrested members of their group, and shot and murdered two of their professors point-blank. From that day on, Sancho devoted herself to activism, and to the Communist Party. On multiple occasions thereafter, she went into hiding, got arrested, and emerged from incarceration to help her community.
 
We can learn many things from Sancho’s career. To start, her experiences serve as poignant reminders of a series of events in Filipino history during the Cold War and post-Cold-War era. Furthermore, for college students reading about Sancho’s bravery and heroism as student in the early 1970s, her story offers lessons about trajectories of college student activism in the post-colonial world. 

In his recent book The Student (Yale University Press, 2023) Michael S. Roth, President of Wesleyan University, says there is “a long history of student protest in” America and “today’s demands from students for greater diversity and inclusion (…) fall within that tradition.” Young people in the United States now are getting “accused of being censorious, illiberal and careerist — as well as ‘woke.’ This is all part of the long, cliche-ridden history of accusing the young of failing to live up to an older generation’s idea of the student.” And while Roth addresses the U.S. context in The Student, the kinds of college protests that he references are not just an American phenomenon. Indeed, we can draw a connection between Roth’s argument about American colleges and Sancho’s life, because she was a college activist, but also because she attended the University of the Philippines: an American-style university, founded by the U.S. colonial government in 1908. She became involved in activism as a member of the American Sigma Delta Phi sorority.

Nelia Sancho, later in life.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/world/asia/nelia-sancho-dead.html.

We can compare infrastructural and educational milieu that surrounded Sancho as a budding activist to college environments in the United States. For example, only a decade after Sancho protested against the Marcos government at the University of the Philippines, students at my own institution – Yale University – started pitching and camping under 24/7 anti-apartheid protest tents in public spaces. In some ways, too, Yale may be just as post-colonial as the University of the Philippines: it is named after its earliest major benefactor, Elihu Yale, who made his fortune as a highly-ranked official of the British East India Company in colonial Madras.

Yale Student anti-apartheid protest in the 1980s.

 
In short, Nelia Sancho’s life is relevant for studying the histories of the post-colonial Philippines, the Marcos regime, and Filipina rights movements. It also points to the global continuity of college student protests in American colonial institutions of higher learning.
 
 
Sources:
 
Holly High, “Miss Beer Lao” in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, eds. Barker, Harms & Lindquist (2012).
 
Mark Alden Branch, “When Yale Activists Targeted Apartheid,” Yale Alumni Magazine, Dec. 6, 2013, https://yalealumnimagazine.org/blog_posts/1649-when-yale-activists-targeted-apartheid.
 
Michael S. Roth, “Opinion: College students were ‘woke’ in the ’60s, annoying to elders and drivers of social change. Meet their successors,” Los Angeles Times, Sep. 9, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-09-09/student-protests-colleges-speech-diversity-equity-history.
 
Sara Tardiff, “Nelia Sancho, Beauty Queen Turned Defiant Rights Activist, Dies at 71,” The New York Times, Sept. 11, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/world/asia/nelia-sancho-dead.html.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Author: 
Aruna Balasubramanian