Manong Construction And Projects

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Yamamotois, in fact, sitting in a reconstruction of his own unit from the original hotel, one of 184 rooms in the mostly single-room-occupancy building that primarily housed elderly Filipino and Chinese bachelors for decades into the late 1970s. When he was 20 in 1974, Yamamoto became one of the few younger residents among the collection of retired migrant farmworkers, merchant marines, and restaurant and hotel service workers renting units for $45 a month with their Social Security checks.

Footage of the struggle outside captures a chaos of people desperately holding on to one another as officers jabbed batons into the crowd. Inside the hotel, demonstrators carried rags dipped in vinegar in case tear gas was used. Beds and furniture bolstered the doors against incoming officers.

In the wake of the eviction, the elders scattered. The city had no formal plan to relocate them, Yamamoto says, and while the remaining activists struggled to find homes for those who were evicted, many were on their own. Some found places in the shrinking number of residential hotels, while others were forced to leave the city.

The night of the eviction for many meant a permanent loss of home. The manongs soon began to die off, many of broken hearts and spirits, De Guzman and Habal say. Today, none of the old-timers remains.

In the years after 1979, when the building was finally demolished and Manilatown was officially gone, nothing happened. A large hole in the ground remained as the corporate owner battled a city-backed Citizens Advisory Committee over what would become of the space. The dogged determination of the remaining I-Hotel advocates eventually forced the sale of the site and the development of the new hotel that now houses primarily elderly Chinese residents.

On the roof of the new hotel one can see both a figurative and literal depiction of a city that has in the years since the eviction struggled with issues of displacement and gentrification. The sprawling view of San Francisco contains a striking juxtaposition of what constitutes survival for marginal communities. On one side: the Transamerica Pyramid and the metropolitan sheen of the Financial District that swallowed a neighborhood. On the other: Chinatown, where the commercial encroachment ended. Between the two sits the new I-Hotel, an echoing remnant of Manilatown.

The designation is the first step in gathering political clout to protect the Filipino community from gentrification, says Supervisor Jane Kim, a major proponent of the district and a former community organizer at the development center. The district will host a large-scale monthly night market to foster Filipino businesses, while a small-site acquisition fund has been started to buy properties to protect residents, many of them Filipino, from Ellis Act evictions and other displacement efforts.

Ant(onia) Lore(nzo) is an artist and organizer from Los Angeles, California (unceded Tongva Land) and currently based in Oakland, California (Ohlone Land). As a mixed-raced Greek & Filipino American, they are the product of a lot of love, a lot of labor, and the manipulations of the American empire. As such, they make their life praxis within contemporary grassroots movements and internationalist struggles built amongst the inexorably interconnected spaces of our globalized contemporary.Artist Statement

I often ask myself how I got here. Do you do the same? Talking to Annie DeOcampo, herself a living archive and informally trained archivist, I think I understand a little more. The Pilipino community of Watsonville is one of the obscured progenitors of the state of California, a recent construction built upon a jagged coast and a slowly shifting fault line. They are part of local stories that lead us to global questions and histories. I invite you to sit, visit this past, and listen to a tale, then, pass these stories on.

Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work investigates hybridity, history, calamity and global culture, often with a humorous bent. She is also 1/3 of the Filipina-American artist trio M.O.B.

Wofford is a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree and a recent recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her other awards include the Eureka Fellowship, the Murphy Fellowship, and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Art Matters Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has also been artist-in-residence at The Living Room (Philippines), Liguria Study Center (Italy) and KinoKino (Norway).

Wofford teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs of the University of San Francisco. She has also taught at UC Berkeley, Mills College, SFAI, California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University. She holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and UC Berkeley (MFA).

Born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and the Bay Area, Wofford has also lived in Oakland and Prague in addition to San Francisco. A committed and active member of the Bay Area art community, Wofford currently serves as Vice President of the Board of Directors of Southern Exposure.Artist Statement

Fabric can be cloth, and it can be a structure. When I look at photos of how the women of Watsonville presented themselves in earlier eras, I think about how they were the fabric of their communities, families, friends. I admire the power in their presentations of self and community, and in their reinventions of self and community: of rolled up work-sleeves, of relationships built, and solidarity woven with other women. Of the strength it took to emigrate and to build a new life, a family, a community.

Poethig is Professor Emerita of the Visual and Public Art (VPA) department at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). As an arts educator and socially engaged artist she deconstructs boundaries in a collaborative artistic process grounded in research, production, critique, improvisation and reciprocal learning. She was raised in the Philippines and has lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. She received her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, California. Her interest in the dialogue between the public and personal, politics and aesthetics, the mathematical and the mystical, the ridiculous and the sublime and an inclusive cultural life inform her process and inspire her work.Artist Statement

Her photographs document the landscape of community memories and cultural practices that amplify a passion in sharing knowledge and creating well-being within and among communities.

She is a founding member of the East Bay Photo Collective and lifetime member of the Filipino American National Historical Society.Artist Statement

I weave talk stories with my photographs and historic images.

Focused on the intrinsic spirit of the pioneer Filipino manong farmworker of the early 1900s, my work examines interconnections and RE:covered historic narratives, past and present.

The content of my work derives from concepts and constructs from my past: childhood experiences, formal education, and an innate fascination with math and science. With techniques such as hand stitching, embroidery, knitting, rotary knitting machine, arm knitting, crochet, wet felting, cast and burnt sugar, as well as technological tools like the scanning electron microscope and computerized Jacquard loom, I express these ideas visually. My materials are as varied as thread, yarn, wool, sugar, tea bags, metallized Tyvek, silk, beeswax, plastic waste, and vintage linens.

Since 2020, my work has focused more on environmental issues. Micro-organisms digesting plastic, bleaching of the coral reefs, mycorrhizal networks in the forest underground, and natural pests of bees have been themes in my newer work.

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