Bindlestiff Seattle presents
Is America in the Heart?
A weekend of Filipinx Music and Theatre in the International District
NOV 9th and 10th, 2018 @ Theatre off Jackson
with funding from 4Culture
This is our second production as Bindlestiff Seattle. Our last project was a stage reading of two Tagalog plays March 2018 at Theatre off Jackson.
Bindlestiff Seattle is the "ading" iteration of Bindllestiff Studio in San Francisco, a non-profit organization and only permanent theatre arts space in the country devoted to showcasing works by Pilipino and Filipino American performing artists.
More info can be found here on Bindlestiff Studio: www.bindlestiffstudio.org.
For updates on Bindlestiff Seattle: https://www.facebook.com/bindlestiffseattle/
This weekend of music and theatre is to highlight local Pilipinx talent, build a community and push our narrative into Seattle's artistic landscape.
For tickets: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3624698
Dramaturgy_for actors
image source: https://www.washington.edu/boundless/archiving-history/
Yakima Valley story: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/ninety-years-ago-in-washington-a-wave-of-anti-immigrant-sentiment-resulted-in-horror-for-filipinos.html
Carlos Bulosan was born November 2, 1911 in Mangusmana, a small town in the province of Pangasinan, Philippines. Born in a family of peasant farmers, Bulosan saw the poverty and hardship his family was relegated to. With few opportunities and with much of the wealth concentrated amongst the ruling class of landowners, Bulosan followed his two brothers to America. He arrived at the age of 17 in Seattle on July 22, 1930.
Bulosan joined the over 125,000 Filipino workers in the Alaskan canneries, the fields of California and in the Hawaiian plantations during 1907-1946. He arrived in the middle of the Great Depression, Filipinos were deemed as nationalists without the protection of citizenship. Many men like him faced racial discrimination, exclusion from ownership of land, and prohibited from various employment. Unions were still being formed and Filipinos faced intense labor exploitation and vicious vigilante violence. Although violence were frequent, two in particular made newspaper headlines, the 1928 attack in Yakima Valley in Washington and the 1930 Watsonville Riot in California.
Bulosan lived in poverty, laboring in restaurants and farms, and saw the suffering of his fellow migrant workers. In the 1930's he became involved in union organizing with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). He was hospitalized and was diagnosed with tuberculosis and kidney problems in Los Angeles General Hospital. As he was recovering, he began to develop his literary skills. With only three years of elementary education, he frequented the public library to complete his high school education. He became a journalist and activist, publishing his first book of poems in 1944, The Laughter of My Father.
Image source: “Filipino farm workers picking lettuce, Nagano Farm,” Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/item/0480f352d91b246aff3336f1cbf0af04.
Image source: http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/cwflu.htm
Image source: Guadalupe Produce Farm Workers : 1936 ; Tony Lapiz and sugar beet cutting crew with a truck load of sugar beets. Digital Public Library of America
Image source: Filipino and Japanese farm workers loading pea crates : Nagano Farm, Morro Bay : 1925.Digital Public Library of America
Image source: Filipino asparagus pickers in California, attired in their working clothes. 1950's from Haggin Exhibit photo collection, Filipino American National Historical Society
$1 a day a dime a dance
An excerpt from Mina Roces's article,
‘These Guys Came Out Looking Like Movie Actors’’: Filipino Dress and Consumer Practices in the United States, 1920s–1930s
Wages were on average a dollar a day although sometimes the workers would be paid by the piece or by the crate. Filipino Farm Laborers in Salinas Valley in California in 1927 worked for ten hours and earned $2.75 a day. Jacitno Sequig remembered that when he arrived in 1928 he worked hoeing cabbages for a dollar a day for ten hours.
More than three thousand Filipinos came annually to the Pacific Northwest to work in fruit orchards, berry and hop farms, mines, lumber mills, and Alaskan canneries. When their work was completed they returned to Seattle where they lived in the International District.
"First I went to Hawaii. It was very bad the first week. I cut sugar cane with that big bolo, and the following day my fingers were sore from holding the bolo. I did that for a dollar a day for ten hours"
"I worked for 24c an hour picking tomatoes. We lived in the bunkhouse. We had no electricity. There was only a firewood stove and the bunkhouse was dilapidated."
In Voices, A Filipino American Oral History (Stockton: Filipino Oral History Project Inc., 1984, 2000)
Image source: https://sites.google.com/site/centralcoastroutesandroots/roots/tigertowns/bachelor-life
This article presents a great picture of the night life of the Filipino farm workers in their pursuit of love and fraternal companionship and activism.
https://www.ozy.com/flashback/filipino-laborers-the-politics-of-partying/32389
Image source: Photographs by James Earl Wood Photgraph Collection #35 Courtesy of The Bancroft Library
This article puts into context historical framework of early 1900's migration and events leading up to unionization.
More on Carlos Bulosan's work as a platform to view the racialization and struggles of the Filipinos in America by Dr. Amanda Solomon Amorao.
file:///Users/lornavelasco/Downloads/1892-6676-1-PB.pdf
America Is in the heart
Image source: Courtesy of University of Washington Special Collection
At the age of 35, Carlos Bulosan published his first novel America Is in the Heart, which he deemed as a personal history. The book powerfully documents the stories growing up in the impoverished rural area of the Philippines and the migration into the United States to work as laborers living in dehumanizing conditions, struggling through discrimination and exploitation, and carving a home where they can with other Filipinos.
It is one of a few rare books that crystallizes the immigrant farm worker's experience during the Great Depression.
In his novel, within the first few chapters, Bulosan wrote why he was compelled to write this book on page 57, the moment he chose to leave his homeland, "Yes, I will be a writer and make you all live again in my words."
Bulosan never returned home, he died September 11, 1956, at the age of 42 from bronchopneumonia. His grave could be found at Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
PeregriNasyon/Peregrination (n) a journey, especially long and meandering one
PeregriNasyon is a play by Chris B. Millado, inspired by America Is in the Heart. The play was first produced by Teatro Ng Tanan at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF, August, 1994. This was followed by a production at Kumu Kahua Theatre, Honolulu Hawaii, November 1996. It's last known production was by Ma-Yi Theater Company at the Theatre Row Theatre, on August 8, 1998.
PeregriNasyon starts with events that happened in the Philippines and the United States in 1898-1935, starting with the Filipino American war and the military operations conducted by the US government. Parallel scenes occur between Pangasinan and Watsonville in order to magnify the class struggles and uprisings against economic exploitation in the U.S. and American imperialism in the Philippines.
Timeline
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Tactics of dehumanization
"The Filipino's First Bath" depicted on the cover of ''The Judge'' magazine, first published on June 10, 1899. U.S. President William McKinley is shown taking a savage baby with a spear into a body
As part of the colonization efforts of the Philippines by the United States, images such as the one used on the right often depicts Filipinos as savages, less the human, and deserving of control.
The use of language to dehumanize is present in the play PeregriNasyon by Chris B. Millado. In his play, Filipinos were called the N word by the American constabulary ruling the Pangasinan region. Filipinos were similarly seen as less than human, barbarians as a way of extending the systems of white supremacy from the United States to the archipelago.
Here are some helpful links on furthering the conversation with young people on the use of the N word the use of language to dehumanize and continue oppression.
https://www.rethinkingschools.org/articles/teaching-the-n-word
https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/fall-2011/straight-talk-about-the-nword
In Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H Francia's book called Vestiges of War: the Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream 1899-1999, there is an article by Rene G. Ontal called "Fagen and Other Ghosts: Afrian-American and the Philippine-American War." This article brings to light the distinct dual awareness of African American citizens in the United States and the soldiers sent to fight in the Philippines of how the Philippine American War symbolizes their own continued oppression. For example, one solider-journalist, Gunnery Sgt. John Galloway surveyed the Filipino citizens and received this note from one Tordorico Santos:
"Before you arrived, the White troops began to tell us of the inferiority of the American Blacks--of your brutal natures, your cannibal tendencies, how you would rape our señoritas, but the affinity of our complexion between you and me tells, and you exercise your duty much more kindly...in dealing with us. Between you and him, we look upon you as the angel and him as the devil.
Galloway concluded after his report, that "I fear the future of the Filipino is that of the Negro in the South."