Filipino Students at Cal State East Bay
Filipino Students at Cal State East Bay
A standing guide to PASA, founded in 1972 and still running — the Hayward and Concord campuses, half a century of Pilipinx Consciousness Night, and the transfer path in.
PASA Since 1972
There are Filipino student organizations at nearly every campus in California. Most of them are younger than the students in them, in the sense that nobody currently in the room remembers who started it or why. Institutional memory at a four-year college has a half-life of about three years.
Cal State East Bay is an exception, and it is worth understanding why before you decide where to apply.
PASA was established at this campus in 1972 — the same year the institution itself changed its name to California State University, Hayward. It is described by the university's own library as one of the longest-standing non-Greek student organizations on campus.
That is more than fifty years of continuous Filipino American student organizing at one address. Very few campuses in the CSU system can say that, and almost none can prove it.
In October of 2023, for Filipino American History Month, PASA members built a physical exhibit about their own club — assembled from artifacts donated by the organization's founding president, who had kept them since the early 1970s. A CORE jacket. A memory book. Outreach pamphlets. Stickers. His own photographs of the club's first years. A student librarian then interviewed six current members and built an online exhibit so the artifacts and the voices sat together.
Someone kept the record for fifty years, then handed it to the people it belonged to, who added their own voices and made it permanent. That is the entire argument of PinoyBuilt, executed by students, at a public university in Hayward, before this site ever wrote a word about it.
Pilipinx Consciousness Night
PCN is PASA's annual production and the thing the club is organized around. It pairs traditional Filipino dance with an original play, staged in the campus theater over two nights.
The 52nd edition ran in April 2024 and featured twelve traditional dances — Subli, Pista, and Singkil among them — woven through a play called "Loss," about a young Filipino American reconnecting with his cultural heritage. Dance trials and back-to-back workshops began in January, three months out, in partnership with the university's Theatre and Dance department.
If you join PASA and commit to PCN, understand what you are agreeing to. Months of rehearsals. Choreography learned from scratch. Production work that is not glamorous. Students who have done it describe it as the defining experience of their college years, and they are not exaggerating in either direction — it is that meaningful and it is that much of your semester.
Plan your course load in the spring accordingly. This is the single most useful piece of scheduling advice on this page.
Three Campuses, Two Counties
Cal State East Bay is not one place, and which location you attend meaningfully changes your experience of it.
Ask PASA directly whether anything is programmed at Concord, and ask before you enroll rather than after. A club that has run for fifty years at one campus is not automatically present at another one twenty-five miles away, and a satellite campus can be a quiet place to be the only Filipino student in the room.
Reach them through @pasaofcsueb. If the answer is no, that is not a reason to rule out Concord — but it is a thing to know before September rather than in November.
Getting In
Cal State East Bay is, in practice, a transfer school as much as a freshman-entry one. Students arrive from Chabot, Las Positas, Diablo Valley, Contra Costa, and Solano.
→ PinoyBuilt's admissions coverage
On the Name
The organization was founded in 1972 as the Pilipino American Student Association. Its formal name today is the Pilipinx American Student Association, and the annual production is billed as Pilipinx Consciousness Night.
PinoyBuilt does not use that term in its own editorial voice. It uses the organization's name when naming the organization, which is the ordinary courtesy owed to any group that gets to decide what it calls itself.
The question of what we call ourselves is genuinely unresolved, and it splits along campus, generation, and region rather than along right and wrong. A club that has existed since 1972 has had this argument more than once, under more than one name, and will likely have it again.
That is not a weakness in the organization. It is what a fifty-year-old institution looks like when it is still alive. PinoyBuilt has written at length about where these names came from, including the one on this masthead.
What Nobody Tells You
The Hayward campus is built up a hillside. Parking, class buildings, and your legs will all have opinions about this. Look at a campus map before you build a schedule with fifteen minutes between buildings.
CSUEB skews heavily commuter, which means campus can empty out after four in the afternoon and on weekends. Clubs are not a nice extra here — they are the difference between having a college experience and having a long drive twice a day. Join something in your first month, before the semester decides for you.
PASA charges dues each academic term, and paying them is what makes you eligible to vote in club elections. Small thing, easy to skip, and then you have no say in who runs the organization you joined. Pay it early in the term.
PinoyBuilt is looking for student correspondents, and CSUEB is on the list. PCN season, the Concord commute, what fifty years of PASA actually feels like from inside it — these are stories.
Student Correspondents →Yes. PASA, the Pilipinx American Student Association, was established in 1972 and is one of the longest-standing non-Greek student organizations on the CSUEB campus. It runs cultural programming, community service, and Pilipinx Consciousness Night, the annual production that has been staged for more than fifty years. PASA charges a membership fee each academic term, and paying it is what makes a member eligible to vote in club elections.
Yes. Cal State East Bay operates three locations. The main campus in Hayward sits on about 200 acres at 25800 Carlos Bee Boulevard. The Concord campus occupies roughly 384 acres, making it larger in land area than Hayward. There is also a smaller Oakland center. Concord serves Contra Costa County and is the closest CSUEB location for students transferring from Diablo Valley College.
CSUEB enrolled 12,323 students as of Fall 2024, including 9,784 undergraduates and 2,539 graduate students. The university offers 136 undergraduate and 60 post-baccalaureate areas of study, and employed 760 faculty as of Fall 2024.
PCN is PASA's annual production, combining traditional Filipino dance with an original play, staged in the campus theater. The 52nd edition ran in April 2024 and featured twelve traditional dances including Subli, Pista, and Singkil, alongside a play about a young Filipino American reconnecting with his heritage. PCN is a major undertaking for the students who run it, with dance trials and workshops beginning months in advance.
Yes, and it is one of the most common ways students arrive. Cal State East Bay is a primary transfer destination for students from Chabot, Las Positas, Diablo Valley, Contra Costa, and Solano community colleges. Ask your transfer center about Associate Degree for Transfer pathways in your major, which carry admission guarantees to the CSU system when eligibility requirements are met.
The organization was founded in 1972 as the Pilipino American Student Association and now uses Pilipinx in its formal name. The change reflects a debate within Filipino American student organizing that is genuinely unsettled, with campuses and generations landing in different places. PinoyBuilt uses the organization's own name when referring to it and does not use the term in its own editorial voice.
