Whose History by Ava

Whose History by Ava - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I started AP U.S. History, a college credit class meant to cover everything, the hardest part wasn't the material, it was realizing how much the material left out, and more importantly the type of history left out. Memorizing dates and treaties felt easy compared to the question that kept nagging me: whose history was I actually learning? When I told my father I was struggling, he gave me strange advice: "Learn our history, our family's, and see how it fits into what you're being taught." So I did. That search helped me learn about the blind spots of our history more than any textbook could have.
I started with the textbook itself. Filipino history has a few lines: Filipinos killed Magellan, then were colonized by Spain, then by the U.S. There was essentially nothing noting the 200,000 Filipinos the Americans killed in the Philippine-American War. A country that believed the people should have a choice on who rules them would not let the Filipinos rule themselves. Alan Brinkley noted basically nothing about the Japanese occupation, the Marcos dictatorship, or the People Power Revolution that ended it. Being Filipino American, I wasn't offended so much as confused, how does a textbook decide what counts as "American history"? I started reading it less as an unbiased fixed record and more as a set of choices someone had made about what mattered.
Then I turned to my own family, and the gaps became personal. My grandparents met in the Philippines and came to Chicago in the late 1950s so my grandfather could study accounting and my grandmother could pursue a PhD in anthropology. During the civil rights era, my grandmother became an activist, protesting the police killing of a Black seventh grader. For that, she was deported, even with a student visa and three young children. As a result my grandfather lost his job soon after, and my father was sent back to the Philippines to live with relatives while his parents tried to rebuild. None of that is in any textbook, but it's civil rights history, immigration history, and family history all at once.
The pattern repeated a generation later, in ways that made me think harder about how history gets sorted into "important" and "personal." My grandmother later helped lead an Indigenous rights case for the Kalinga people in the Philippines, work that contributed to the reversal of a World Bank dam project and, eventually, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act. She was imprisoned for opposing the Marcos regime before being released through her brother's church connections. Meanwhile, my father grew up in Brooklyn on food stamps, dropped out of high school, and joined the Marines at 17, while my mother, whose father had gone to college on the GI Bill, grew up middle-class in Connecticut. This made me realize what I call the “American Paradox”, how there can simultaneously be a family that did everything right, came legally, furthered education, and came to be members of a society they believed in, yet were punished for it. And another family, one also did things correctly, serving the country, getting an education, and then a home, was rewarded.
Piecing this together changed how I read everything, not just history textbooks. I started noticing the same pattern in the news, in novels, in class discussions: a story is treated as central or as a footnote depending on who's telling it and who it flatters. I got more comfortable asking out loud, "whose account is this, and what's missing?", a habit that's made me a sharper reader and a more careful writer, since I now try to notice what I'm leaving out, too.
So when I struggled with that AP U.S. History curriculum, the struggle wasn't really about content. It was about learning to question the frame a subject comes in, rather than just absorbing it. That's the skill I actually walked away with, and it's one I now bring to every subject, not just history.