Political and Social Comments

Today, Filipino-Americans constitute the third largest Asian-American group in the U.S. Yet today, stories about our national history and immigration to this country are rarely heard, and if so, are not often understood and appreciated in their distinct political and human contexts. It is the awareness of this particular lack of conversation in the cultural scene that propelled me to start working on a visual narrative/commentary on the Filipino saga. The story starts with two densely packed synopses of the major colonial influences in the Philippines - Spanish for more than three centuries, and American for half a century - and how they have impacted the native culture. The piece, Manila Village,  deals with a little known fact that there were Filipinos living in Louisiana as far back as 1763 and probably earlier. Escaping Spanish galleon ships in Mexico, they found their way to the bayous of that state. Shortly after official American colonization of the country, large-scale immigration of Filipinos to the United States of America. Cheap labor was needed to fill the shortage resulting from the moratorium on Chinese labor import. The first wave of immigrants consisted mainly of men, recruited by labor contractors to work in Hawaiian pineapple and sugar plantations, agricultural fields in the West Coast, and gold mines and fish canneries in Alaska. Several paintings deal with the salient experiences of these workers as gleaned from various historical sources. The work entitled "Pinoy" is an encapsulated presentation of the Pinoy, which is the informal term for Filipino. It shows the wide gamut of racial characteristics that make up the ethnic group as well as the various objects and artifacts that are identified with the people.  Kulang Pa (2009) is an ironic take on the infamous 3000 pairs of shoes that Imelda Marcos was said to have owned when she and her husband ruled the impoverished nation.

This set of works constitutes an on-going project that is meant to tell a comprehensive story. This series is entitled, Telling Our Story.  I chose to work in a very accessible, shorthand manner of storytelling. Juxtaposing graphic, painterly and collage techniques help to create a hybridized stylistic mélange, which I think, reflects the transmogrified culture of the Filipinos, the result of  very long, pervasive and diverse colonial pressures on native society.