Finding a sense of place while stuck in a global pandemic is a confrontation of one’s loss in movement. So, amidst this global tumult of an illness that has forced many of us into isolation, quarantine, lockdown, how can one establish a sense of place when one is immobile? This predicates my notion that a “place” or more accurately, a “sense of place” is not fixed. For this paper, my sense of place is a sense of displacement. Place is not just a concrete geography of clear-cut boundaries, but cultural cartography which is always in shifting sands. In my sense of place, I had to go through history and photos which I did not witness but am a legacy of it. This sense of place is embedded in a discussion between bodies of different times and of different movements.
As I am stuck in my dismal place in Lubbock, I decided to read up on diaspora and Filipino migrant laborers in the West Coast in the early 20th Century. I am here because of the bodies of people that were here before me. Filipinos have been in these shores since the late 1500s from enslaved sailors who jump-shipped to the current droves of nurses. Yet, I focus on farm workers. This finding a sense of place for me starts with viewing of archives of one of America’s preeminent anthropologist Dean Worcester of his photographs of the Philippines in the turn of the 20th Century. The Philippines was a “protectorate” of the USA and the government sent over American scholars and soldiers to study, plot out and pacify the islands. In the cache of photos there are clear demonstrations of differences as a visual point of justification of American presence in our islands. “Inquiring into photographs begins with knowing that I am always negotiating relationships, reevaluating purposes, and negotiating transitions as I live alongside my participants’ experiences (Bach, 2007, p.290).” The “participants” here are how the Filipinos were documented in these archival photos. They are photographed as if specimens of an alien species or documented like criminals for a mug shot. There was a particular photo that compelled me of an American soldier sitting at the rice paddies posing Filipino farmers who are standing up while at the corner is a dead body of an insurgent farmer This is like one of those hunting photos of white imperialists in India and in Africa wherein they pose with their game as their servants look on. (See: https://webapps.lsa.umich.edu/umma/exhibits/Worcester%202012/Zoom/58B034.jpg )
The dead body on the farmland brings me back to the notion of modern American agriculture and food security. That there are notions of disposable bodies for the “farms” to thrive. I shift from past to the present in this investigation of place. In these fraught and anxious times of the global pandemic, food is at a cultural flashpoint. While many Americans are fighting over rolls of tissue paper, I look anxiously over at the produce section and am comforted that, for now, there is still enough vegetables available. Then as I look at the lush greens of the shelves and aisles, I think of the immigrant farmers that are paid a pittance to keep us fed and have a semblance of comfort in these unsure times. America may be a superpower with technology moving in breakneck speed, with all the innovations produced in this nation; but many Americans are now realizing that there is a threat to food security is a thing. Food insecurity is a way of life for most of the population from where I am from.
In the early 20th Century, American corporations transported boatloads of Filipinos to plantations in Hawaii, in vineyards and farmlands in California, in tanneries in Alaska. Among those who fed Americans at that time were Filipino pickers of fruits and vegetable. There was an American Agricultural official who said that the Filipinos were perfect for this work because we are short and are used to stooping to the ground which is a pain for the typical white American farmer. This was a “naturalization” of an imagined body based on difference. This is currently demonstrated on how many Americans now openly attack Asian bodies as sources of pathogens; that our weird culinary customs have caused this global pandemic. This is “naturalization” of an imagined episode that is being operated on difference. Now, you may ask, why am I shifting from the past to the present and trying to connect narratives then with current events? This is how I see how things are: networks of information that are intricately connected. “We braid strands of place and space, memory and history, ancestry and (mixed) race, language and literacy, familiar and strange, with strands of tradition, ambiguity, becoming, (re)creation and renewal into métissage (Hasebe-Lutd et al., 2008, p.58).” And by “here” is not just a physical planting of a location, but to be at crossroads in which I can travel several paths because the road is not flat but is a series of lattices that I weave through. These lattices are sourced from history books, from old photographs, and a willful act of imagination. In this sense of place of where I am at, my narrative is thus a part of the tapestry of whispered history of a hushed people. After all, “to these ends, we weave together our autobiographical texts, creating a métissage that simultaneously locates points of affinity while also remaining mindful of differences in context, history, and memory (Hasebe-Lutd et al., 2008, p.57).”
In my inquiry of place, I take a look at positionality not just of myself, but of migrant workers across the generations, working for the American dream. I am just a student of history who is a political cartoonist and I do not make grand claims of representation or legitimization of one particular vision. In a way, I see this as perhaps curating a conversation between these photographs, and try to listen to voices that were silenced, still are being silenced. “In performing our subjectivities, we assert the relevance, the legitimacy, indeed the necessity of including the full range of our humanness in our work of re/membering ourselves in/to the world, embracing the world, with all our relations (Hasebe-Lutd et al., 2008, p.68).” I made a series of works dealing with displacement, dislocation, and land. An assemblage of allegories.
These works are inspired by cartography and the sights I saw up in the air as I glanced out the window and looked below on the tracks of land in the Philippines and in America. I employed layering when I painted this because there is no flat surface in place but undulating lines and emerging topographies. I integrated photographs and cut them up as image transfers, thereby transforming them into “skins” on the wooden panel and not just a field of representation but a kind of sensation to trace the textures of history. I employed glazing as part of the obscuring but not really eradicating such voices from below. As a cartoonist, I rendered line art as means of cartographic linearity sustaining and questioning borders. The colors I employed are that of Filipino skin (which many of us say is the color of the earth in which we source our sustenance) with various eruptions of rashes, wounds, and bluish and greenish veins like patches of forests about to be razed for more farmlands and streams of blue of bringing stories to where I am. A place is not a location but overlapping zones of stories one would notice if one were to be still enough to listen.
Bach, H. (2007). Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology. (D. J. Clandinin, Ed.). Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Hasebe-Ludt, E., Chambers, C., Oberg, A., & Leggo, C. (2008). Being with A/r/tography. (S. Springgay, R. L. Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzouasis, Eds.). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
