This piece was published in partnership with The Xylom, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on global health and environmental disparities.
LOS ANGELES — Nurses, labor organizers and survivors of a brutal dictatorship are banding together to apply lessons learned from anti-authoritarian organizing in the Philippines to the present-day United States.
Political activist Myrla Baldonado became one of the “forced disappearances” under Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., in 1983. She was kidnapped by state agents, swept away to a secret location, tortured and then imprisoned for two years.
She sees echoes of what she experienced in the United States today. But she has hope that nonviolent protests, like the No Kings rallies, can enact change the same way they did in the Philippines. Nearly two million people marched down Epifanio delos Santos Avenue, or EDSA, in 1986 to protest against the Marcos regime. The disgraced dictator abandoned his office and fled to the United States.
“The lesson is that dictators fall. I mean, since time immemorial, this happened, from Nazi Germany to what happened during the ESDA Revolution and many other dictators. You all fall down,” Baldonado said. “It’s only a matter of time that they do.”
She wants people who are despairing or mired in hopelessness to know that the more cruel those in power become, the harder more and more people will fight back.
Joe Arciaga, a nurse and veteran, is the driving force behind bringing the No Kings rallies to Historic Filipinotown, a residential enclave west of Downtown Los Angeles. He wanted to link local activism with national pro-democracy movements, and founded the Filipino American Lakas Collective in 2025. Through that, he pulled together the rallies in Unidad Park in June and October. Now he’s gearing up for round three, in March.
(Courtesy Joe Arciaga)
Lakas — “strength” in Tagalog — is new, but it joins a rich network of community groups that have been organizing for civil and labor rights for decades. Led by advocates for Filipino health care and domestic workers, many of whom are single women new to the country, they have mobilized to support their community as violent Immigrations and Customs Enforcement actions increased across the city.
At the rallies, titos and titas handed out water and freshly baked pandesal, reminiscing of when their legs were strong enough to march all the way to City Hall. American and Philippine flags were interspersed with signs equating President Donald Trump with former Philippine leaders Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte.
California is home to 40 percent of the nation’s Filipino Americans, and the Los Angeles metropolitan area is home to the largest population of Filipinos outside of the Philippines.
The long arm of American imperialism played a role in these current demographics. The Philippines was an American colony until 1946. During that time, nursing schools were built and maintained by the colonial government. When immigration quotas were abolished in 1965, it became easier for Filipinos to immigrate to the United States, and many women nurses were encouraged to do so as the Marcos administration sought to grow the economy with diaspora funds.
At home, the democratically elected Marcos prolonged his presidency and concentrated power through martial law beginning in 1972. That spelled danger for activists like Baldonado, who started protesting against the Marcos administration when she was in college. She continued her activism for over a decade, cutting contact with her family for their safety and going by a different name. But in 1983, government agents grabbed her from a library. Baldonado became one of the regime’s “forced disappearances,” held in a secret location and tortured. After a couple weeks she was transferred to a jail, where she was imprisoned for two years. Baldonado was free but still recovering from her ordeal when the People Powered Revolution overthrew Marcos in a mostly bloodless uprising in 1986.
At the No Kings rally in June, she brought red carnations and passed them out to the attendees.
“No one believed we could bring down Marcos without bloodshed,” Baldonado said later in an interview. “The flower was a symbol of that, the urge for people to do it in the nonviolent way and to deescalate.”
Baldonado’s American chapter began in 2006, when she immigrated and took a job as a home care worker. The conditions were untenable: She experienced verbal abuse and sexual harassment, and her pay averaged only $5 per hour.
(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Baldonado began organizing for better working conditions for caregivers and domestic workers, first in Chicago and then across the nation. Her work was honored by the Obama administration.
Now, she works as the director of community engagement at the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, continuing to advocate for care workers. Many of the people she works with are middle-aged single women who immigrated from the Philippines — similar to her story.
In the new Trump administration, the center has been hosting immigrant rights trainings and supporting detained Angelenos. Baldonado sees the hopelessness overtaking people in the wake of rising violence from the state, but she believes change will come through people-powered action, just like it eventually did against Marcos.
“We want them to see that there is still a glimmer of hope, despite all the difficulties that we are having right now,” she said. “History has shown that dictators don’t remain forever.” Baldonado knows that intimately.
At the No Kings rally in October, Jollene Levid climbed onto a park bench and read off the notes she had just finished compiling on her phone.
“We are here today as Filipinos, Filipino Americans, as immigrants, workers, communities of color to remind Trump that this is not 1565,” she cried.
“We Filipinos will never bow to a crown — from Spain to the Imperial Japanese and American colonizer, to Donald Trump and his cronies, we say NO KINGS!”
Levid had not imagined herself speaking to a crowd. But her mentors, the women who taught her how to build collective power, instilled in her the necessity of translating revolutionary ideas to everyday language.
Like Baldonado, Levid has dedicated her life to the power of collective organizing. Since college she knew she wanted to work with unions. She started organizing as an undergrad, but something felt out of place in those activist spaces: “Women’s issues were always secondary,” she said. “It was almost like always an afterthought. But my experience growing up in an immigrant family as the eldest daughter I knew was always informed by my gender, my sex.”
When she went to an event hosted by a feminist collective in college, everything clicked into place. Now her political home is AF3IRM, a feminist group fighting imperialism around the world. She has served on the leadership of the national organization and is active in the Los Angeles chapter.
AF3IRM has been active in local communities, protesting ICE as well as American intervention in Venezuela and Iran. “We’ve been hitting the streets and organizing new women to join us,” Levid said.
(Courtesy Joe Arciaga)
Levid’s family is from north east Los Angeles, one of the most concentrated areas of Filipino Americans in the country, and she still lives there today. But her day job as an organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles takes her all over the city.
She has always chosen to work for unions in fields dominated by women. Education and health care are some of the largest sources of overseas Filipina workers, and they wield power differently. “When those women workers strike, the facilities can’t work without them,” Levid said. “Filipino women have been instrumental in these types of labor fights.”
Levid has been busy in 2026, as 94 percent of the teachers union she works for voted in favor of a strike if benefits negotiations stall out.
Levid’s advocacy for workers took a new tack in 2020. After her aunt, Rosary Castro-Olega, became the first health care worker in Los Angeles County to die during the Covid-19 pandemic, Levid dedicated herself to documenting the deaths of Filipino health care workers.
She was part of a group that scoured obituaries to create Kanlungan, a digital memorial. Their data work laid the foundation for future studies that found Filipinos made up a disproportionate amount of nurse deaths during the first year of the pandemic. The numbers are stark: 4 percent of nurses in the United States are Filipino, but they accounted for 26 percent of nursing deaths during that time.
Her work drew the attention of Arciaga, who co-produced “Nurse Unseen,” a 2023 documentary about the history of Filipino nurses and their caregiving during the height of the pandemic.
The topic is personal to Arciaga, whose family left the Philippines after Marcos declared martial law. After serving in Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War, he entered nursing, encouraged by his wife — who is also a nurse — thinking it would be temporary. Instead, the decision sparked a decades-long career.
Arciaga says it’s an honor to join the ranks of Filipino nurses who have come before him, and he is a member of the Philippine Nurses Association of America.
Arciaga was active in numerous local organizations, but he didn’t see anyone coordinating with national efforts.
“I want to live in a world, a society that respects civil liberties, that respects freedom,” Arciaga said. “I want a government that respects democracy and the rule of law, and I want my legacy to be that of someone who stood up.”
He co-founded the Echo Park chapter of Indivisible, the national progressive organization, and the Filipino American Lakas Collective, a group organizing for civil liberties and democracy. And when Indivisible announced the No Kings rallies, he wanted to host one. But he had never put together a protest before.
(John Nacion/NurPhoto/AP)
So he called up Levid, who he met during the production of “Nurse Unseen,” remembering her experience as a union organizer. Levid shared resources she had made and trained volunteers on how to host a successful action. She helped organize the rally in June – and the following one in October, where she agreed to speak. She didn’t know how much larger the crowd would be the second time around.
Wearing all black in the blazing sun, Levid didn’t speak for long, but by the end of her speech the crowd was energized. “They have never and will never break the revolutionary spirit of women’s resistance,” Levid yelled before starting a chant.
“When women and children are under attack, what do we do?”
“Stand up, fight back!” the crowd cheered.
“When our community is under attack, what do we do?”
“Stand up, fight back!”
With two protests under his belt, Arciaga is gearing up for the third No Kings rally, planned for March 28. It will take place at Unidad Park again, where a diverse community will assemble beneath an enormous mural of Filipino freedom fighters.
The name of the mural is “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana.”
Its meaning: A glorious history, a golden legacy.