The Political Role of Philippine Children and Young People as Represented in Youth Fiction

Abstract

Lualhati Bautista's Dekada '70 (1983) is a mainstay of Philippine high school reading. It tells the story of Amanda Bartolome and her five sons during the titular decade as they live under the shadow of Martial Law. And while youth activism is at the core of Dekada's narrative, existing scholarship on the book does not adequately reflect this. This article begins the work of addressing this gap by identifying schemas of Filipino children's and young people's participation in the socio-political sphere through the characters of the Bartolome brothers and reading them through the lens of Diane M. Rodgers's typology of children as social movement participants.