Reading Update: Filipinos in the East Bay

Filipinos in the East Bay by Evangeline Canonizado Buell, Evelyn Luluquisen, Eleanor Hipol Luis

Wow! This book is so amazing! We just picked it up today at Books Inc. in Alameda. It’s bittersweet to see some faces of community folks who’ve since passed away, namely Helen Toribio and Ray Gatchalian.

My only criticism is that no one project is ever 100% complete, and there are obvious absences within these pages, for example, Pusod and its former staffers. Pusod was formerly based in Berkeley, and in its heyday, a bustling East Bay center of the Fil Am arts and activist scene, however short-lived it was.

Despite these absences, this project fills me with warmth; it’s a well organized compilation of historical evidence, generations of workers making families and homes here. We see the wives and descendants of Buffalo soldiers, agricultural workers, military men actively making community, claiming this place. Filipinos have been here for a long time. I look at these old pictures of Fil Am communities in Oakland, and think about how our centers seem to have moved. I see a map of Oakland Chinatown and see the Fil Am family owned businesses, community centers, and gathering spaces, and as I have worked in Oakland Chinatown for over 8 years now, I see how those have vanished.

As well, I am honored to be included in this book, as a longtime Fremont resident, now Oakland resident, and Fil Am community artist. Also in the section of artists in which I am included are writers Vangie Buell, Janet Mendoza Stickmon, Oscar Penaranda, and Aimee Suzara, vocalist Golda Supanova, blues singer Sugar Pie Desanto (my god, how hot is she!), blues musician Carlos Zialcita, the band Mahal, and musicians Ben and Joachim Luis. They include pictures of the FAA sponsored Lasa ng Jazz show which took place at the Alice Arts Center in the early-mid 1990’s (across the street from my old studio apartment), and which showcased Fil Am musicians contributions to and immersion in American jazz throughout the century. In these Lasa ng Jazz pictures we also see Rudy Tenio, Melecio Magdaluyo, Flip Nunez, et al.

There is so much in this book. I love it.

Film Post #2: On Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal

Here is the firing squad execution scene. No surprises on the film’s ending. I will say that getting to the execution, post faux trial is well paced and wonderfully wrought.

OK. Back to my original question of who Marilou Diaz-Abaya envisioned as a target audience for Jose Rizal. DVD extras tell us this film’s budget was phenomenal by Philippine standards, and that the film was commissioned by the National Centennial Commission. Producers tell us that they wanted to prove to the rest of the world that Philippine filmmakers could also make meticulous and beautiful (by international standards) works of art. I think this international focus is apparent in the writing, which is something of a comprehensive and poetic historical overview, which is different from a “history lesson.”

Film: Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal

File this under Why Am I Only Watching This Now? We started watching Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal (1998) yesterday evening. We didn’t finish it yesterday evening because the film is nearly three hours long.

I’ve come across Philippines based Francis Cruz’s review of Jose Rizal, and it helps with some of the things I am thinking. As a Filipino American, with only very limited study of the man and his role as a writer whose works helped inspire the Philippine Revolution, I should confess I appreciate the film’s very textbookishness which Cruz criticizes for its being relatively unoriginal. As Cruz discusses the film’s narrative but non-linear, flashback abundant structure as “uncharacteristic for a film that targets the Philippine mass as its audience,” I wonder if the target audience really is the Philippine masses?

Philippine Independence Day

Today is Philippine Independence Day, as depicted above on the Philippine five peso bill. That’s Emilio Aguinaldo positioned in the center declaring independence, and waving the Philippine flag, which actually was adopted as the national flag on June 12, 1898.

“Independence” from whom? “Independence” for whom? I like to ask.

*

The flag’s symbolism is interesting. I have heard that the flag of Cuba, a nation who had also declared independence from Spain, was an influence on the Philippine flag’s design. The actual Declaration of Philippine Independence states the following:

Moreover, we confer upon our famous Dictator Don Emilio Aguinaldo all the powers necessary to enable him to discharge the duties of Government, including the prerogatives of granting pardon and amnesty,

And lastly, it was results unanimously that this Nation, already free and independent as of this day, must used the same flag which up to now is being used, whose designed and colored are found described in the attached drawing, the white triangle signifying the distinctive emblem of the famous Society of the “Katipunan” which by means of its blood compact inspired the masses to rise in revolution; the tree stars, signifying the three principal Islands of these Archipelago - Luzon, Mindanao, and Panay where the revolutionary movement started; the sun representing the gigantic step made by the son of the country along the path of Progress and Civilization; the eight rays, signifying the eight provinces - Manila, Cavite, Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Bataan, Laguna, and Batangas - which declares themselves in a state of war as soon as the first revolt was initiated; and the colors of Blue, Red, and White, commemorating the flag of the United States of America, as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards this Great Nation for its disinterested protection which it lent us and continues lending us. [Emphases are mine.]

*

As the above Declaration of “Independence” leaves a sour taste in my mouth, let me also share one of my favorite poems ever, “Open Letters to Filipino Artists,” written by “Bohemian” turned activist poet Emmanuel Lacaba (1948-1976), which speaks to the pragmatic role of the poet in the world, and the active choice the poet makes in being relevant to the “masses”:

A poet must also learn
how to lead an attack
- Ho Chi Minh

I

Invisible the mountain routes to strangers:
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that’s free a twig to grasp,
Or else we headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon they’re red with skulls of carabaos.

But patient guides and teachers are the masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding, and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.

South Cotabato
May 1, 1975

II

You want to know, companions of my youth
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he’s dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.

Like husks of coconut he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and song within his chest
Now of consequence is his anemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.

He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there
But because the masses are there where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.
Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,
He is no bandit but a people’s warrior.

South Cotabato and Davao del Norte
November 1975

III

We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.

The road less traveled by we’ve taken-
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time. Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants our lost
Generation has found its true, its only home.

Davao del Norte
January 1976

Emmanuel Lacaba was executed by the Philippine Constabulary and the Civilian Home Defense Front (thats’s like, what, Department of Homeland Security?) in March 1976. He was 27.

Some Quick Thoughts On Teaching, and Writing About Teaching

It’s been nice being quiet over here.

It’s been an interesting time in my in box lately.

Paul Hoover has left a couple of comments in response to my blog post on the recent Black Dog Black Night Vietnamese poetry anthology reading at the de Young Museum, and I am glad he did. So this has got me thinking about the active effort that some American poets make to place themselves outside of their own cultural, literary, linguistic, political contexts, to attempt to participate in others’ “subaltern” contexts. This active effort contrasts theorizing about the possibility of placing the self outside of one’s own context. The challenge then, would be to disrupt the existing conventional power dynamic (First World versus Third World, privilege versus deficiency, standard versus deviance), and to understand other poets’ contexts without yielding Orientalist, fetishizing, or distanced-from-above ethnographic results in one’s own work and work ethic, and to reconsider seriously that one’s own context is not the center or standard by which all others must gauge themselves, and that these other contexts are not peripheral to one’s own.

The term, “subaltern” then, is kind of problematic for positing inferiority and other-ness.

Anyway, this isn’t even the point of my blog post.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson also writes to invite me to submit an essay on teaching and poetry to an anthology he is editing. I tell him I don’t teach full time, I am not affiliated with any academic institutions, nor am I officially affiliated with any community arts organizations, and this is OK with him. Given my non-affiliated, non-official status, and given my visiting scholar, visiting professor, visiting artist status, I think on whether my teaching values really carry weight in institutional spaces.

Anyway, my essay will center around reading poetry, discussing poetry, writing poetry with Filipino American students within Ethnic Studies spaces, within ethnic-specific writing workshops and discussion spaces. What are the specific needs and are they met here rather than in conventional and institutional spaces in which Filipino Americans find themselves to be a cultural, linguistic, political, social minority. I am interested in privileging, centralizing Filipino American spaces, literatures, and concerns in writing and discussion. I think again on the high caliber discussion of R. Zamora Linmark’s “They Like You Because You Eat Dog” at UCSB in a small group consisting of primary Filipino American students. Did they benefit from this discussion, the ethnic make-up and progressive and transnationalist political leanings of all the folks in the room, the fact that I was able to engage them on poetics, poetic line, poetic form, grammar, and other literary tools (irony, anaphora, etc.), and how these mutually inform the poem’s addressing of issues of colonial mentality and self-hatred, immigration and economic downgrading, ultimately, Filipino American immigrant communities’ concrete survivalist strategies and pragmatism.

I haven’t even begun to process everything discussed in Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s class (this massive lecture hall with over 200 students in it), but for sure, one thing I really enjoyed about visiting UCSB and talking to Celine again, after many years, was the ability to engage in detailed critical and nuanced talk about artistic process and craft, pressing political issues of ethnicity, gender, economics, war, and Filipina speakers and subjectivities. Most “ethnic” academics I know can be pretty clinical and un-nuanced in discussing artistic and creative process and how political concerns are executed in creative work.

Finally, part of me is wondering how long I will be able to do this kind of work unaffiliated. The other part of me is happy to have the freedom to do this kind of work with unaffiliated status. I think seeing Celine again has enabled me to think about institutional spaces and what I can accomplish in these spaces a little more seriously.

Still, not quitting my day job here.

Pop Culture Interlude: Arnel Pineda!

Been back from UCSB and currently exhausted and have much to say about my visit there.

But first, as I am still brain fried, let me offer this brief pop culture interlude: Sunny Vergara emails me and Oscar from the Philippines, asking if we’d be down to see the new Journey at the Shoreline Amphitheater in September.

So totally worth the price of lawn ticket admission: Arnel Pineda! Whom Oscar and I have been watching all evening on YouTube, and whose CBS News Sunday Morning Interview is just a perfect little tear jerker. Seriously though, if you think about how many tenor range Western rockers Pineda can mimic, as we see in all of his Philippine cover band, the Zoo’s YouTubes — Sting/The Police, Don Henley/The Eagles, Robert Plant/Led Zeppelin, Steven Tyler/Aerosmith, John Rzeznik/The Goo Goo Dolls — doesn’t it make you think of the art of Filipino mimicry of all things Western? At this point though, I am not hatin. I am thinking that this talent Pineda has has enabled him to access exactly what so many Western gazing Filipinos dream of accessing. So more power to him. Born in Sampaloc to a couple of tailors, a former scrap metal collecting street kid, now he’s on his way to becoming a worldwide pop culture icon. You can’t make up his found on YouTube story, and those tears for his mother! It’s interesting to see the new Journey concert footage, with a hella big Philippine flag waving in the audience. And I think it’s also interesting how much news this seems to have been making. I am wondering what that’s about. For me, I feel like I grew up around Western rock and roll worshiping Filipinos, so many uncles and cousins with guitars. And this is something that always drew me to community folk with jam sessions on guitar, pulutan, San Miguel beer, or a much more wicked tagay. This is what’s marked so many of the gatherings in which I’ve found myself, so I can’t help but totally love Arnel Pineda’s story. And his voice.

Southeast Asian, Take 4

Whew! And I believe, my friends, that we have a speech!

I am now exchanging emails with a professor from the Southeast Asian Studies Department, and musicians from Oakland based Balinese Gamelan Sekar Jaya. As part of my speech will include a reading from Diwata, the gamelan ensemble musicians will be accompanying me on this, totally improvised. As one of the musicians tells me, this particular section or instruments within the ensemble traditionally play accompaniment to a singer who sings poetry in a way that I think fits Diwata, rolling loose storytelling.

This is going to be so exciting!

I’ve done improvised performance with Joachim Luis accompanying me on kulintang. This can be lively. An ensemble of similar instruments is going to be even livelier.

At any rate, in an effort to procrastinate on my speech writing, and work off some nervous energy, I took the veggies from this weekend’s trip to the Jack London Square farmers market, and some organic tofu, and I made vegetarian lumpia. Ingredients: sugar peas, baby carrots, white onion, green onion, garlic, and tofu sautéed in soy sauce and a little oyster sauce, freshly ground black pepper, and sesame oil. After letting this cool, I wrapped these up into some fat lumpias, and shallow fried them for a couple of minutes on both sides (fried to the color of my forearm).

To accompany: garlic fried rice made with leftover chicken adobo in coconut milk, and a salad made with organic mixed greens also from farmers market, tomatoes, and a peanut vinaigrette.

(Robert Karimi: “Remember folks, just because you eat lumpia, doesn’t automatically make you Filipino!”)

I should also say I was inspired by Robert Karimi’s and John Castro’s lumpia campesina (fried to the color of Castro’s forearm) at The Cooking Show Con Karimi y Castro. Because the revolution begins in the kitchen. Word.

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription

This is something that’s come to mind, thinking on Philippine connections to other Southeast Asian communities/civilizations. It’s interesting thinking on artifacts and other cultural markers. Not like I will be mentioning this particular artifact in my speech; it’s just come to mind. It apparently predates the use of baybayin. You can read about it here.

Blog Post #2 On Gelacio Guillermo and Eugene Gloria

This is a follow-up to my original post on Gelacio Guillermo’s response to Eugene Gloria’s poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

A fellow Filipina writer has brought up some very good points in an email discussion elsewhere, reminding me that the poem in question is an old poem, probably written in the 1990’s or so. And this is something I was just saying yesterday evening: to be fair, the poem was written a long time ago and that after reading Hoodlum Birds, I consider Eugene Gloria a virtuoso. The only reason why I am reading and responding to this older poem now is because Guillermo has just found the poem and has just written and published a response to the poem.

This fellow Filipina writer also reminds me that the poet’s audience and readership must be considered. How do Filipino American writers and other “ethnic” writers portray our cultural and historical artifacts, i.e. “foreign” words and “foreign” objects, to mainstream American literary institutions.

I am also conscious that I have asked some critical questions of a fellow Filipino American poet’s work, and that can be construed as anti-community. I certainly don’t intend this at all. I am trying to understand how we have grown or changed or evolved as a literary community.

Nick Carbó’s anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue (Coffeehouse Press, 1995) contains a rather comprehensive introduction on English language Filipino poetry (both Philippines-based and Filipino American), and he discusses nostalgia for the Philippines as a prevalent theme in contemporary Filipino poets’ works. I think the poem in question fits neatly in this category.

Still, even in poems of nostalgia, I think the question of to whom we are writing about ourselves is important. I believe that as readers, figuring out who the poetic speaker is, and who poet and the poetic speaker are addressing is important in understanding the poem. That said, I still question why the speaker in this poem is an unnamed Filipina daughter of a colonel, and why she is addressing Guillermo. I question whether her language and how she treats the historical events she cites are consistent with how a Filipino would address a fellow Filipino, how a Filipino would discuss certain Filipino issues with another Filipino.

Carbó’s introduction also discusses the politicized/activist Bay Area 1960’s-1970’s Flips scene of which, despite my post-1965 immigrant status, I think of myself as a descendant — Liwanag, Kearny Street Workshop, the Bay Area Pilipino American Writers (BAPAW). He names Jaime Jacinto, Virginia Cerenio, Serafin Syquia, Jessica Hagedorn, and Al Robles as some of the key figures, who concerned themselves with grassroots, community-based workshops. Carbó states that these folks never reached any levels of national success, “however intensely felt and well-organized this assertion of Filipino writing was in the Bay Area.”

[Interesting that he includes Hagedorn in this part of the discussion, given that no other Filipino American writer's achievements equals hers.]

I bring up Carbó’s discussion of the Bay Area Flips to address the issue of poetic addressee. My longtime experiential knowledge of these Bay Area Flip poets tells me that they/we were/are addressing one another, transcribing what we otherwise always relied upon oral tradition to keep alive — old and ongoing stories of our communities and families. So then these Flips prioritized the vernacular, the local, or the locale, the farms where asparagus and broccoli were harvested, the crab fisheries of Naknek, Alaska, the Pajaro River Valley, the Richmond District, the Fillmore, SoMa.

I am wondering if in “talking to ourselves,” in using insider/familiar language/vernacular, we necessarily sacrifice “national renown” by lessening the numbers of readers who would be able to understand this language and these reference points. I am wondering then, if this is the opposite of what I read in Eugene’s poem, for in writing as the other and addressing the mainstream institution, our familiar artifacts invariably come to be handled as foreign objects, and that there is no place for familiar (never mind “intimate” at this point) language in these poems.

I refer to Carbó’s introduction, which was published in 1995, because I feel like Eugene Gloria’s poem belongs in that context. And both I see as rather outdated.

But I was mentored by Filipino poets of national, international, as well as local renown, and so I grew up in poetry not subscribing to the belief that (inter)national and local, elevated poetic diction and vernacular cannot coexist, or that they must negate one another.

Gelacio Guillermo responds to Eugene Gloria’s Poem, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.”

This is so interesting. This essay/letter was forwarded to me by two separate people, wanting to know what I thought of it. The truth is, I am having a little bit of a hard time piecing this story together. I do know for sure that Eugene Gloria did, indeed, write a poem entitled, “To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” This poem was published in The Literary Review in March 2000 (link here).

Gelacio Guillermo (note the correct spelling of the name) is a real person. He came across this poem in 2008, and now responds with very valid points:

Despite the mis-spelling proceeding from mispronunciation of foreign names so typical among North Americans, I thought I was being referred to in the poem and would like to take issue with you on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as subject for creative work.

The poem’s speaker is presumably a woman whom I believe Eugene Gloria “invented.” Gloria fabricates a background or position for her. She is Filipina in/from the Philippines, and part of this narrative takes place during Martial Law. She is the daughter of a colonel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which speaks to some level of privilege. In the poem, she brings up her own breaks with the church, and her rebellions, which I read as the reasons why she is compelled to express kinship with “Gellacio,” whom she imagines has gone to “the mountains,” implying he is a political insurgent. She is addressing her fabricated, imagined, romanticized, and sexualized version of “Gellacio Guillermo”: “Your brindled skin is sweating in Iowa sun, // your hair in a tight chingon, / you, barefoot and G-stringed like a Manobo / prince in St. Louis…”

I am wondering why she imagines him G-stringed, tribal, regal. In his letter response to the poem, Guillermo points to the term, “brindled,” and its etymology:

The “brindled skin” has a far earlier provenance: the black slaves during those centuries of slave trading were assessed, like livestock in the market, according to their animal strength and the gloss of their hide. “Brindled” originates from the late ME [Middle English] “brended,” a variety of “branded.” Vestiges of racist arrogance of the West die hard.

I am wondering if she is the one objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as this “barefoot and G-stringed … Manobo prince,” or if it is Eugene Gloria objectifying “Gellacio Guillermo” as he imagines a Filipino national/Filipino from the Philippines, or if it is either or both she and Eugene Gloria anticipating “Gellacio Guillermo’s” objectification by white middle Americans in Iowa.

The real Guillermo was indeed in Iowa; in his letter, he reveals that he spent six months (October 1970 to April 1971) on a writing fellowship at Iowa University’s International Writing Program. Guillermo then, was a writer; he was a Filipino writer in middle America. “Gellacio, / I am reading you in English,” the unnamed Filipina persona says. I am wondering why this is so remarkable; Filipinos in the Philippines have been writing in English and reading in English since the late 19th century/early 20th century.

I am wondering if Guillermo’s six months in Iowa University on a writing fellowship is comparable to the Philippine Reservation of the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, to which the speaker has made reference.

I am wondering why “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” whom she believes has previously gone into the mountains has become her symbol of rebellion, and why she has come to need “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City” as this representative of the “salvaged.” I am wondering why she needs a representative of the salvaged at all. And here, do note that the “salvaged” in a Philippine (specifically Martial Law?) context are not the saved, but the dissidents drowned in the Pasig River and other bodies of water for their dissidence.

Mostly, I am wondering why Eugene Gloria created this unnamed Filipina persona to address this imagined “Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City.” Guillermo points out: “I am named; why isn’t she?”

I want to go back to Guillermo’s original point in his letter: “on the question of the poet’s responsibility when he takes on the life history of a dead or living person as a subject for creative work.” Is Eugene Gloria’s poem “irresponsible”? Do we get away with not taking responsibility all the time, never expecting our poetic subjects to gain access to our work and have the opportunity to respond?

Maybe I understand the poem, but I suppose I don’t understand why the poem. And I don’t think I have answered any of my own questions about responsibility here.

Philippines-based and Filipino American Poetry: A Brain Dump

I was recently contacted by a Filipino American UC Berkeley undergraduate who was looking for information on Philippines-based Filipino poetry, and he came to me as he perceived me as some kind of authority on the subject.

I’d originally agreed to meet with him and brain dump on him. But then something in his email made me think again. He asked me for some recommendations on Philippine poetic traditions, and mentioned that in this area, he was reading the anthology Returning a Borrowed Tongue, edited by Nick Carbó. I thought, curious, this anthology as the student’s primary resource on Philippine poetry traditions.

Arcadia Publishing: Filipinos in the East Bay

Exciting news! It looks like Filipinos in the East Bay, part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, and compiled and co-edited by Evangeline Canonizado, Evelyn Luluquisen, Lillian Galedo, Eleanor Hipol Luis, of the Filipino American National Historical Society East Bay Chapter is in the process of being printed. It is scheduled to be released by the end of June.

This is quite cool, and I am so proud to be included in this volume, and considered part of our community’s history in this place, especially by these community leaders and Oaktown and Berkeley Pinay foremothers.

So there’s that, and that’s big Yay.

Somewhat Filipino Food Post: Variation on Sinigang

Somewhat like sinigang. Something like sinigang.

It’s funny because for so many other Filipino dishes, my mother is a traditionalist when it comes to my cooking of it, but when it comes to sinigang, it’s so anything goes. I typically use lemons, tomatoes, and eggplant to make a sour broth. My sister uses umeboshi plums, and she steams the fish in the sour broth.

This recent “experiment” was a good use of leftover rice, and leftover sauce from Shan Dong Restaurant’s Shan Dong Prawns (they serve the sauce in a separate container when you order to go). This was also great sick food for my recent flu-ish state.

Assembled in a good size, glazed Japanese soup bowl (layers from the bottom up):

(First layer) Brown rice with black barley and daikon radish seeds cooked in a little organic butter and chicken stock. Really interesting nutty, popping texture on this.

(Second layer) Wild Atlantic salmon fillet (really rich, dark pink), seasoned with lemon juice, kosher salt, and cracked pepper, then coated with a sweet soy garlic glaze and broiled. Topped with sesame seeds. Really melty texture on this.

(Third layer) Ladled over first and second layers: Sinigang (lemons, tomatoes) broth with miso, and containing two handfuls of pea sprouts, two chopped tomatoes, grated ginger, scallions, and garlic sautéed in sesame and peanut oil.

On presentation alone, it was one of those hell yeah I’d pay good money for this entrée at a place better than your average trendy Potrero Hill or Castro Asian Fusion place. I only wish I’d taken pictures.

Poetry in Epiphanic Mode: Carlos Bulosan, “If You Want to Know What We Are.”

I am still unclear on what is meant by “poetry in epiphanic mode,” as we are discussing over at Craig’s blog, but I believe the following Carlos Bulosan poem may be that. I found it at Bulalat.com.

UC Santa Cruz Poetry Series: Filipino American Poets!!

UC Santa Cruz

POETRY SERIES
Humanities Lecture Hall
7:30 PM

April 9

Al Robles
Tony Robles
Jaime Jacinto

April 16

Shirley Ancheta
Jeff Tagami
Barbara Jane Reyes

Local Community and Story: Photographer Tony Remington, and revisiting the Tikbalang

Last week, I e-met Tony Remington, whose Google search for Manilatown led him to my blog. I’ve known his name for over a decade now, as a San Francisco Filipino American community activist and artist, whose images have appeared in Liwanag and maybe in some of the circa 1980’s Kearny Street Workshop publications.

Tony sent me over a link to his Flickr photo album: Manilatown 1977-81, and these images add so much dimension to the stories I have been told via local folks’ talk story and poetry readings, via lectures in Ethnic Studies when I was an undergrad, via Curtis Choy’s Fall of the I-Hotel documentary which always made me emotional when watching; envision your Lolo dragged by cops out of his home at two in the morning and all you can do to protect him is to have your body dragged away by cops too.

Belated Filipino Food Post: Lumpiang Shanghai Post Ending with a Mel Vera Cruz Image

It had been literally forever since I have made lumpia, and I mean literally because I have never singlehandedly made lumpia. “Making” lumpia means preparing all the ingredients, combining all the ingredients into a mixture, separating the wrappers/skins (they all come stuck together in a package if you are like most of us and buy the Menlo brand of wrappers in the red square plastic package rather than make them yourself), and then wrapping each and every single lumpia.

I have participated in the assembly line that was comprised of me, my older sister, my mom, and my Mama, who would assign each of us a specific task: chopping the water chestnuts and scallions, peeling and grating the carrots, cutting the square wrappers into two isosceles right triangles and then separating them. When I got older, I would actually be allowed to do the actual wrapping; it was like graduating.

Good Friday

Happy Good Friday, and Happy Vernal Equinox.

We are off to see Linh Dinh this evening at the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley, and for some non-self-flagellating chill time afterwards. Joining us this evening may be Craig St. Perez, Javier O. Huerta, and in the Bay Area for the weekend, Ms. Lara Stapleton.

In the meantime, I leave you all with the international media spectacle that is Good Friday, Philippine Stylee.

AP Photo

Local Filipino American Arts: Work, Working.

[Addendum: Lifted from Christine Wong Yap's blog:

A derisory tone prevails in most media treatment of contemporary art, whether controversial or not, a tone not appropriately skeptical or critically alert but smugly dismissive - and, I suspect, defensive.

This tone reflects little or no effort to imagine the risks of creative work in the postmodern context - the risk of self-deception, of squandering precious time and energy, of embarrassment through self-exposure. Instead, it echoes the tone of anti-intellectualism sounded in every statement in support or denunciation of public policy by every politician who dreads the stigma of “elitism” — and that seems to mean every politician, period.

–Kenneth Baker, “Saving the Soul of Art,” March 2, 2008, SFGate.com]

New Langton Arts: Filipinos in SoMa, SF

Yay and thanks to community artist Amanda Eicher of New Langton Arts. Amanda has contacted me to have work included in Presences, a publication project on SoMa (South of Market), and engaging the neighborhood and its denizens. She is interested in having artists do a walk around the neighborhood, talk to folks, and have projects come from these experiences. It goes without saying that there’s a sizeable and visible longtime Filipino American population present in SoMa, and my contribution to Presences will be all about that Filipino American longtime presence.

I’d done a series of walks around and about SoMa, and a bunch of this writing can be found in the Asia Society’s Asia in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in my Poeta en San Francisco, and Bay Poetics, the anthology Stephanie Young edited. And as a general rule, a lot of my writings on Filipinos in San Francisco are centered in SoMa, which is where Arkipelago Books is located. I’m happy to do another series of walks and additional/further writings on Filipino Americans in SoMa, though in the interest of time, I will be excerpting my Asia Society write-up for New Langton Arts, as I believe this write-up is fairly comprehensive.