Critical Questions, Gaps in Memory

The faces are numerous, the colors vibrant, and the time covered, quite expansive. The mural identifies itself as a narrative with snapshots of the fight for historical inclusion of the “forgotten” or “invisible” Filipinos in history. Yet we can notice how the artist, Silva, favors certain figures—mostly male activists, politicians, or military leaders, such as Vera Cruz, Itliong, and Rizal, whose depictions take up greater proportions of the wall and the metaphorical timeline. In my research, I found that the mural echoes the dominant written and oral histories available to Filipino Americans and the public. In a 1998 interview, Silva notes that his narrative is “a very safe portrayal…like History 101” for those in the US. As Filipino-American scholar Theodore S. Gonzalves discusses in his analysis of the Unidad Park mural, “Silva’s narration locates men as stewards of the Philippine nation.” While this “safe portrayal” offers insight into taught narratives and can be a valuable reflection of traditional ideals, it also minimizes the accomplishments of the women in Filipino history.

One such woman is Gabriela Silang. The depiction of Silang takes up little space on the mural compared the surrounding male figures (e.g., Rizal). She might escape a first look at the wall, placed like an accessory to the battle scenes. Yet she was hardly an accessory to the Ilocano resistance against the Spanish rule during the Seven Years’ War. After her husband, Diego, was assassinated, Gabriela Silang took on the full leadership of the resistance, assembling troops who fought to abolish the colonialist tax and replace Spanish functionaries with native people. Ultimately, she and her troops were executed by the Spanish in 1763.

Today, Gabriela Silang continues to be a present force in Filipina communities, who have since created an organization inspired by her life and legacy as the first Filipina to lead a revolt against Spanish colonization. The GABRIELA National Alliance of Women is an alliance of more than 200 organizations, institutions, and programs for Filipina women. Based in the Philippines and with branches in the US, the organization campaigns for female liberation, tackling issues of gender discrimination and violence against women to national and international economic and political concerns. Although Silang takes up only a minute portion of the mural, her significance to Filipinas is apparent in her continued presence in contemporary life. Such engaged activist work is evidence of an acknowledged and reclaimed Filipina past, made visible in a social/political sphere. Although Silva’s depiction of Gabriela Silang is relatively small, that image is still imbued with the spirit of resistance that inspires/ activates Filipino communities today.

In other places on the wall, women behind events are unseen, or their suffering is masked. To the right of the sun, in a yellow dress, is Corazon Aquino, the eleventh president of the Philippines and first woman in office. On the wall, she is painted at a moment of victory in 1986, gesturing the Laban sign (the call to fight, from the People’s Power Revolution), signaling the restoration of democracy after twenty-one years of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos. Silva’s depiction represents a time of peace in the country under her leadership, but it does not display the event that placed her there—the assassination of her husband, Ninoy Aquino, the outspoken senator and leader of the People Power Revolution. Not shown are the repercussions of that loss—that Corazon Aquino, for example, had to use tranquilizers before public appearances so that no one would see her crying over her husband; she sacrificed her mental and physical health to be the restorer of democracy the country needed.

The mural, of course, in its limited space and ambitious project, cannot fully address every detail of every life involved in the making of FilAm heritage. Often, Silva employs symbols to encompass the exploitation of many lives. For example, the “Positively No Filipinos Allowed” door is an icon of the Anti-Filipino Riots of the 1930s that speaks to the discrimination and hatred towards Filipinos working in California at that time. During the Race Riots, California State legislation called for a Congressional Act restricting Filipino immigration. The Chamber of Commerce resolution reads: "The unrestricted immigration into the State of California of natives of the Philippine Islands is viewed with alarm both from a moral and sanitary standpoint while constituting a menace to white labor.” As expressed in legal documents, the government at the local and state levels recorded few of the Riot victims. Silva’s choice to use the door to represent the era could speak to a form of amnesia—the blotting out of named victims. One of the only known victims of this period was Fermin Tobera, a twenty-two-year-old agricultural worker, who was shot by a mob of young white men. In a 1930 article in the Philippines Herald, Tobera’s mother, Valentina Ibarra, was interviewed as she sought damages for the death of her son. Despite Ibarra’s pleas to the Philippine and US governments, the culprits were never condemned.

The Race Riots are seldom emphasized in California’s history. For a viewer without any prior knowledge of this iconic sign, the losses associated with it may remain unknown. Although the door communicates the discrimination of the era, accounts of personal suffering and the humanization of victims are lost. This is just one example of a shadowed narrative, waiting to be more publicly revealed—a mere thread in the grander history of imperial confrontation and violence.

Yet I see these gaps—of missing or underrepresented information—as openings for future storytelling and renewed engagement with the past. For there is an advantage to being illegible—to be an unrecognizable or underrepresented face in the history of the United States. The Filipino community has the chance to give voice to subaltern narratives, to the ones covered by a patriarchal, imperial, or otherwise dominant shadow. As Lisa Lowe has observed, “However delayed, partial, or allegorized, the social identity of Filipino Americans forces a reckoning with the past.” The mural, therefore, offers initial opportunities for revisitation, for rewriting and representing.

The continued need to re-evnvison Filipino America, its formation and reformation in the FilAm imaginary, is evident in the final sections of the mural. While Silva’s narrative represents events and figures in an interactive manner on majority of the wall, the final sequences on right side of the mural read more simply, as a catalog of notables. Silva reports that he found it difficult to choose figures for this side, closest to the present, and that narrating the Filipina/o community in the US was challenging. As Gonzalves notes, “the right side of the mural (Filipina/o America) lacks the vitality of the left side (Philippine history).” He writes:

Each of the figures patiently sits, awaiting their accomplishments to be accounted for in a contemporary history…It is here, in the presentation of Filipina/o American cultures, that Silva’s narration falters…Silva’s concluding images read more like a “greatest hits” of Filipina/o American history. The images place a premium on individual achievement as a method to advance the collective cultural currency of Filipina/os.

Silva celebrates the winning of awards and attainment of social station, rather than acknowledge anonymous, or unacknowledged accounts from below. As Lisa Lowe describes, Filipino American critique must pursue the role of “community memory as a force of unrecorded unofficial history, and the role of work and play in Filipino political movements and community building.” Thus, minority communities are encouraged to engage in creative acts in various social spaces made accessible to more public populations.

In addition to producing public artworks, Filipino Americans have increasingly engaged in social, political, and creative acts that recover and reimagine the past. Both localized organizations—such as SIPA and PWC—and international ones—such as the GABRIELA Alliance—celebrate and build from a common heritage for the betterment of Filipino Americans today. Further, critical and creative writing practices have engaged American readership over the last few decades. One of my goals, as a student of English, is to help these works gain fuller admittance into university-level study. From the essays such as those in Positively No Filipinos Allowed, to M. Evelina Galang’s nonfiction work about the surviving Filipino comfort women of World War II, to the fictional stories of Mia Alvar, these authors tell narratives of the everyday—of family and diaspora, the lives of teachers and housemaids, sons and mothers, displacement and home.

With vitality and an engaged sense of urgency, those of us fighting for visibility must employ what historian Pierre Nora calls “the will to remember,” a deliberate act of remembrance that transforms otherwise inert spaces; if places of memory exist for their “capacity of metamorphosis,” then artists and viewers act “as agents of metamorphosis, whose acts of remembrance transform the sites of history into sites of memory.” Silva’s mural, among other FilAm cultural practices and works, accumulates witnesses who engage in deliberate acts of remembering and ensure the artworks’ futures. There is hope for marginalized, near-invisible communities, so long as we can visualize and revisit our heritage, learning from the past—a history marked by suffering and loss, but a glorious one—a golden past—nonetheless.

Critical Questions, Gaps in Memory