UH graduate
uniting Americans

A Filipino-born communications
consultant from Hawaii is on
a crusade against discrimination

By Susan Kreifels
Star-Bulletin

Sonia Lugmao Aranza has traveled the small towns of the American heartland. She's stood in Texas corporate boardrooms filled with white males and watched them roll their eyes and smile at one another as a Filipino woman is about to teach them about tolerating the other sex, other races and ethnic groups.

The Asian-American has been asked if she knows karate. If she's really American because she doesn't look like one.

But it's exactly that kind of environment where Aranza feels she does her best work.

The University of Hawaii graduate is a Virginia-based communications consultant hired by giants such as Texaco, the U.S. Postal Service and the Food and Drug Administration to teach their staffs about tolerance of people different from themselves. She quickly asks the Texas men about their own differences -- age, religion, who plays golf and who isn't paid enough to spend time on the course -- and about their assumptions of one another and the world.

"The individual lens from which we see the world is how we end up treating each other," Aranza said. That lens is shaped by parents, education. "I help people investigate their lens."

Aranza, born in the Philippines, moved to Kalihi in 1969 when she was 8 and learned her English from Big Bird on "Sesame Street." Today she runs Aranza Communications, speaking for a living. Earlier this year she made the cover of "Filipinas," a mainland magazine about Filipinos.

Aranza, in Hawaii recently for the 20th reunion of Radford High School graduates, is passionate about her work. "I want my son to grow up in a world that doesn't clip his wings," Aranza said about 8-month-old Aaron Aranza. "I don't want him to have my experience, 'Gee, you don't look American.' I say, 'What does an American look like?' "

Aranza's message works because it's powerful and confident but nonthreatening, according to Jon Melegrito, executive director of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations based in Washington, D.C.

"Her strongest message is that America is in the heart," Melegrito said. "America has nothing to do with skin color, your accent or the slant in your eyes."

After working in the Honolulu City Council and state Legislature, she moved to Capitol Hill in 1990, becoming U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie's director of constituent relations for four years. "Sonia has a special talent for interpersonal communication," Abercrombie said. "Very few people have her ability to establish rapport so quickly."

After crisscrossing the country many times as a trainer, she said small-town America "still sees Asians as foreigners." She uses recent controversy over Chinese political contributions to make her point.

During the height of the debate, her husband Danny, the Guam-born deputy director of insular affairs at the U.S. Department of Interior and a former Honolulu attorney, was for the first time checked for citizenship by White House guards.

"We don't do that with Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans, question their loyalty," she said.

Aranza blames the lack of awareness on an education system that still ignores Asian-American history. "It's as though we've never existed. We toiled the land, we laid out the train tracks."

She also said media focus on a world where "everything is black and white."

However, Aranza said not enough Asian-Americans have stepped up to change that, nor have they become involved in the political process. She points to the Hispanic community as a good ethnic model in recent years. During anti-immigrant debates in Congress, "the Hispanic community made great strides to be on the radar screen. Now entire departments are going after the Hispanic market."

"The Asian community needs to be the same, speak up," she said.

She's encouraged by changes in Washington; the Clinton administration, she says, has appointed more Asian-Americans to positions of authority than any other. She praised a Smithsonian Institution exhibit on Japanese-Americans in Hawaii.

And she encouraged parents to guide their children into the political process as well as be concerned about good-paying jobs.

Aranza is aware of Hawaii's brain drain due to a poor economy, but she said "everybody ought to experience the world. It's good for young people here to venture away from the islands." "Growing up in Hawaii is a special privilege and unique experience. But it's different from the mainland and you ought to be aware of it. On the mainland there are people who don't have the same lens."

Aranza's advice: Know yourself, know your roots, and stay deeply rooted. At the same time, don't be afraid to experience other ideas, and don't rely on mainland Hawaii clubs for companionship.

Aranza speaks before many Filipino youths on the mainland.

"A lot of young people are going through cultural identity crisis," Melegrito said. "They're not sure if they're Filipino or American. She's very proud of her cultural heritage but also being American. There is no contradiction."

Young people from the islands, Aranza predicts, will learn about their own "Hawaii lens" if they move elsewhere.

"Leaving Hawaii teaches about your own tolerance," she said.