The last time that Abram Diaz saw Kai Sorem was at an Andres Bonifacio Day rally at Hing Hay Park in Chinatown International District on November 30, 2025. Andres Bonifacio is known as the Father of the Philippine Revolution against Spanish colonization. “Kai joined a small group of other organizers to perform a song called Home, an original song from the overseas Filipino organizing movement here in the Pacific Northwest,” recalled Diaz, a member of Filipino youth and student organization Anakbayan South Seattle (ABSS), and a friend of Kai’s. “The essence of the song is really about being called to go back home to this life that should have belonged to us, to this homeland that should have nurtured us, and seeing our place in this larger movement.”
Kai Dana Sorem was a 26-year-old Seattle and Tacoma-based Filipino American activist who was learning from and helping with rural peasant communities on the plantation island of Negros in the Philippines earlier this year. Between April 19 and 20, she and 18 other activists and community organizers were brutally murdered by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the municipality of Toboso, Negros Occidental.
Born in Steilacoom and with family in Tacoma, Sorem– a founding member of ABSS– was described by ABSS members as “loving, patient, and attentive to others.” Diaz recalls: “Kai was one of the first people to bring me into the overseas Filipino youth organizing. She was really instrumental in helping me find my footing and organizing. This work brought us together, and we were organizing together in ABSS for about three years.” Eventually, Sorem was inspired to organize and immerse herself with the people in the Philippines after having visited the country for the first time in 2025 on an Anakbayan exposure trip.
“She was humble. She acknowledged when she could not understand something, and she took the time to really listen and hear someone out,” Diaz recalled. “At the same time, she was very sharp and very firm as a leader and an organizer, and I really admired her ability to not shy away from difficulty, and just really prioritize the needs and interests of the community as a whole.”
Sorem’s dedication and firm commitment to serving and advancing the interests of the most marginalized and most exploited Filipinos brought her back to Negros earlier this year. Meesh Vergara, Chairperson of Malaya Movement Seattle, explained why Sorem was compelled to serve the rural communities of Negros Island: “I was part of the very first Malaya movement immersion trip batch in 2024. In Negros Island, we saw firsthand the land being taken up by development companies and by big landlords, and how ordinary people really struggled to put food regularly on the table.”
In the 19th century, Negros Island was a frontier that began to be developed by European entrepreneurs and local Filipino elite families to produce and export the in-demand cash crop of the time, sugar. When the Philippines was colonized by the US after the 1898 Spanish-American War, they saw the value of Negros not only as a plantation island, but also of the Philippines as a steady source of migrant labor. According to American historian Alfred McCoy’s study of Iloilo and Negros, upon seizing control of Negros, the Payne-Aldrich Act was passed in 1909 which provided for the duty-free importation of up to 300,000 tons of Philippine sugar into the US, while also providing easier credit to Filipino sugar planters. In addition to maintaining (and indeed strengthening) the elite families’ hold on local politics, the American sugar planters also invested in their businesses, most tangibly in the development of modern centrifugal sugar mills. A major investor was the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, which provided the capital and machinery for Negros island’s first sugar mills, in exchange for being able to recruit more laborers for Hawaiʻi plantations. Negros became crucial to the Filipino migration story to Hawaiʻi, and later the US West Coast, showing an enduring and Transpacific pattern of Filipino labor exploitation by Filipino economic and political elites, in tandem with U.S business interests. According to Belinda Aquino, a Filipino academic and founder of the Cent.er for Philippine Studies in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the Philippines promptly became the primary source of cheap labor for the Hawaiʻi plantations. Before 1920, the largest group of sakada recruits came from the Visayan islands, where Negros is located in.
But while Negros became a sugar plantation island that produces and exports most of the country’s sugar to this day, the plantation workers whose labor makes it all possible remains undercompensated and disenfranchised because of the exploitation of landlords and big companies. “The peasant women that we were staying with told us about the military camping in their backyard and intimidating them,” said Vergara. “They just asked us not to forget about them and to really uplift their stories.”
According to a press release from Malaya Seattle, the AFP waged hours of low-flying indiscriminate strafing, firing thousands of bullets that killed Sorem and 18 others, displacing over 650 individuals and 118 families, and illegally detaining 5 organizers. Victims included Lyle Prijoles, another Filipino American activist based out of Northern California; RJ Ledesma, a youth journalist; Alyssa Alano, a student organizer and leader at University of Philippines Diliman; and Errol Wendel and Maureen Santuyo, both peasant activists. Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance, also known as BAYAN) USA and hundreds of other human rights organizations have decried these killings as a grave international human rights violation by Philippine President Marcos Jr., and calling for “Justice for the Negros 19.”
While Sorem’s tragic and premature death was immediately felt by the Filipino community in Seattle and the Puget Sound area, her friends and colleagues want to remember her fondly as a compassionate and dedicated community organizer. “I’m really proud of Kai, having been living with and serving the peasants in Negros, because of its highly exploited and highly militarized nature,” stated Vergara. Additionally, she shared that at Sorem’s vigil held in April 2026, “students and youth talked about how they were inspired by Kai to go back home too. Despite the military violence, that’s not deterring them, that’s not scaring them, but in fact it’s showing them that the need to go back home and to serve the masses is so paramount right now.” Indeed, as Diaz shares, “We can honor her memory by picking up where she left off and continuing the work that she and the rest of the Negros 19 were doing and continuing the legacy of everyone who has been taken by state violence. I think ultimately, especially for Filipinos overseas, they need to know that it is not a crime to go home. It’s our right as overseas Filipinos; it is our right to go home and serve the people.”
At the same time, Filipino community organizations such as ABSS and Malaya Seattle call for the end of US military aid to the Philippines, the blocking of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s appointment to the UN Security Council, and the passing of the Philippine Human Rights Act which would end the billions of US taxpayer dollars sent to fund the AFP. They also invite anyone interested and passionate in Philippine and Filipino American issues to join them at the 2026 Kalayaan Summit to be held in Los Angeles, California on June 26 and 27, 2026. “There’s a long fight ahead against the conditions of poverty and suffering in our homeland,” states Diz, “and that there’s a place for everyone in this movement to fight for our genuine liberation, so please join us.”
Adrian Alarilla, PhD, is a program evaluator, writer, researcher, and filmmaker. Born and raised in the Philippines, he is currently based south of in Seattle, and has a PhD in History from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Besides contributing to the International Examiner, he is an associate with Alaska-based consulting firm Stellar Group, and has worked with Tribal, governmental, and nongovernmental agencies in Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Pacific Islands.
