YBCA In Community

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Last March, a few weeks after moving to the Bay Area, I attended an anti-violence rally at the 16th Street and Mission BART plaza organized by El/La Para Trans Latinas, an organization for transLatinas that builds collective vision and action to promote the survival and improve the quality of life of transLatinas in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I had moved to the Bay Area to create a new program for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts called YBCA In Community. YBCA In Community’s goal is to develop an innovative new framework for accessible arts engagement; one that convenes low­ income, ethnically diverse, underserved community members, partner community organizations and individual artists to collaborate in experiential art making. Thus, having heard of El/La Para TransLatinas’ work from respected queer and trans* community organizer friends in Los Angles I was committed to find a point of entry. I personally wanted to learn from El/La Para Trans Latinas, to have this work grounded in their mission for personal wellness and human rights and to support their efforts for visibility and dignity. Partnering El/La Para Trans Latinas with the right artists was important and I am grateful that Xandra Ibarra (a.k.a La Chica Boom) and DavEnd held an important space of creative inquiry and self-exploration with great care and attention to detail.  It has been a tremendously heart-expanding experience and I am glad to share it with you.

Tonight we celebrate, MUJERES DIVINAS Y PODEROSAS, a collaborative variety show created by and for Trans Latinas that honors El/La’s work in the community. After 9 months of monthly workshops, conversations and rehearsals, using a creative methodology rooted in transparent mutual mentorship we are here  in the Mission District at the renowned Brava Theater.  Hosted by community luminaries Christina Quiñonez and Yosimar Reyes. It's FREE, it's predominantly in the language of Trans* Latina majesty and we are honored you joined us!. Trans Pride is not once a year, but a 365-day journey.

A special heartfelt thank you to Susana Cáceres, Isa Noyola, Marcia Ochoa, Cris Izaguirre, Adrian Escobar, Jovana Luna and Andrea Manzo at El/La Para Trans Latinas; to Ani Rivera and the amazing staff at Galería de la Raza and its Digital Mural Project (DMP) Team: Lexx Valdez, Lead Artist and Jessica Sabogal, DMP Coordinator. The DMP team met with El/La Para Trans Latina participants to create the vibrant ¡Mujeres, Divinas y Podersoas! DMP currently on display at the corner of 24th St and Bryant.

By Thea Tagle YBCA In Community Scholar in Residence

Since last I left you, so much has been going on with YBCA In Community’s South of Market (SOMA) site project! Lead artist Eliza Barrios has taken off running with the high school youth of SOMCAN (South of Market Community Action Network) and the senior citizens of Veterans Equity Center (VEC); after several meetings with each individual organization, we finally brought members from both together in an epic afternoon of karaoke and kwento (conversation).

    As the seniors crooned Sinatra and the teens jammed out to R&B, Eliza and videographer/friend extraordinaire David Lawrence set up an interview room, where we brought small groups of three to talk about their experiences living and/or spending time in the South of Market. Here, Eliza posed the questions that have been driving the project thus far: What perceptions do you think others (tourists, San Franciscans) have of SOMA? What do you love about SOMA? What does your ideal SOMA look like?

    What was most interesting in these conversations—and in the project as a whole—are the greatly divergent experiences of the youth from the seniors. While several of the youth have been directly impacted by the redevelopment of the South of Market and Mid-Market Corridor and have a vested stake in anti-eviction community organizing, many of the seniors have lauded the new developments for the city’s “cleaning up” of the neighborhood and the opening of new green spaces for recreation. The veterans’ daily struggles—to receive healthcare and pension benefits, to find safe and affordable home care, and the like—and the fact that many of them have now relocated outside of the SOMA to areas like Glen Park and Daly City probably has much to do with their startingly different answers to these questions. Who wouldn’t love an open area to play chess and relax, in the midst of an otherwise difficult and possibly monotonous day? I know I am super curious to see how the conversation between Eliza, the SOMCAN youth and the VEC senior citizens develops as the projects go on.

Hi again, folks! We’re back for another round of introductions to the In Community project in SoMa, and today I’ll be sharing with you what makes this neighborhood such an important site for this project.

The South of Market is one of the city’s oldest downtown districts, and is one of its largest. While the borders are fuzzy and have changed over time, for In Community’s purposes, we work between 2nd and 10th Street, from Market to Brannan. On any given day, a walk down Sixth is a revelation of the uneven distribution of wealth in the city, as the throngs of financiers and tourists in the Financial District give way to something else entirely—it’s hard to miss the rows of liquor stores, single-occupancy housing (SRO) units, and the large homeless and transient population that make this area their home. If you look closely, you’ll find other things on Sixth Street; namely, the Bayanihan Community Center (BCC) and Bindlestiff Studios, two of the most important sites of Filipino American community and arts remaining within downtown San Francisco. Their being in SoMa is hardly accidental—many visitors and even longtime residents of the city don’t know it, but the South of Market has been a center of Filipino life since the 1940s, and there remains a large population of folks trying to hold on to life in the face of subsequent waves of gentrification and displacement ushered in by SF’s tech booms of the 1990s and today.

  While Filipinos have settled in San Francisco since the turn of the 20th century—arriving after the 1899 Philippine American War to work as cheap labor in the city’s hotels, restaurants, and private homes, or to labor throughout the West Coast from California’s farms up to Alaska’s salmon canneries—it was the advent of World War II that brought the first large wave of Filipino migrants to the South of Market, which was a dock area for many Navy ships passing through. As in the Kearny Street / Manilatown neighborhood, Filipino bachelor manongs lived both occasionally and permanently in the lodging houses in SoMa, but over time, as US immigration laws loosened, more Filipina women were able to migrate to the States, contributing to more families forming and settling in SoMa. According to MC Canlas, longtime community activist and the author of SoMa Pilipinas, by the early 1970s the Filipino population in SoMa had grown to 5,000, with many of the families living in Natoma and Minna Alleys. One of their first sites of building community was St. Joseph’s Catholic Church at 1415 Howard; after the 1989 earthquake, the parish was transferred to St. Patrick’s Church on Mission and 4th. Remember the last time you visited YBCA? That brick church across the street, next to the Jewish Museum… that’s St. Patrick’s. They still hold masses in Tagalog/Filipino, and every weekday at lunchtime you can find Filipinos of all ages and classes taking their communion! While many Filipinos have left the neighborhood for suburbia, by choice or by force, the South of Market remains a place for many (especially new working-class migrants from the Philippines) to live, go to school (Bessie Carmichael Elementary has the first Filipino language curriculum in the nation!), and work. It is with this community that Eliza, Raquel, and I are collaborating with, and I’m looking forward to sharing our experiences with them over the next year.

Speaking of YBCA, they’re in the SoMa too, and this is what makes our site (in my opinion) one of the more interesting—and perhaps tense?—locations for the In Community program to be working with. I will be blogging much more about this in the future, but what’s important to know is that the Moscone Center project spearheaded by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) that birthed YBCA was the first major driver of gentrification in the South of Market, way back in the 1960s and 1970s. Will In Community’s affiliation with YBCA help or hinder our ability to build meaningful, social justice-oriented art with the SoMa Filipino community? That’s the question on my mind, always…

To give you a taste of the neighborhood and its lively characters, I’ll leave you with a video clip from last year’s Parol Lantern Festival and Parade, an annual event in SoMa held during the winter holidays. You might even recognize the song that these seniors are dancing to, made “Filipino Style”!

http://youtu.be/Q7ew1e4bAjA

Til next time, new friends!

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The first thing you see when you walk through the door is a pile of blindfolded mannequin heads. The heads and blindfolds are a stark white so the eye needs time to adjust before all the possibilities register. We are gathering in Victor Cartagena’s studio to embark on a journey together.  A group of young women, all participants in CARECEN’s youth leadership program, have arrived with their facilitators, and joining us at various points are the adult leaders that have helped plan this collaboration.

  We sit in a circle as the heads and the white persist.  Different variations of the mannequin heads drawn and printed on paper surround the room along mostly otherwise bare walls. Although we find ourselves in this accomplished artist’s studio, a blank canvas envelopes us and he prepares to, literally, guide us through the process of filling. Raquel Gutiérrez from YBCA warms us up with questions about our superpowers after which we proceed to draw without looking at the paper.

  Gallina Siega is the Latin American version of the game, Marco Polo. Wearing a blindfold, you try to catch someone as you call and respond  “blind! chicken!” The artist has decided to combine this game and drawing; I have agreed to model the exercise. “Gallina Siega” happens to be the title of my essay in This Bridge We Call Home the follow up to This Bridge Called My Back--a book and a subsequent opportunity that were seminally transformative to my path as a writer. In my essay, I talk about the metaphoric possibilities of the game in the context of my community work. Ten years after my words hit the page, I find myself facing this reference again.  The imagery forces all of us to recall being kids, our games, and juxtapose those memories with the real life obstacles that immigrants and their children face––the path unclear, the maps scarce, the narrative seldom under our control.

  Until now. This turning point tempts the volcano. The witness so often spoken for, now  in leadership both in the arts and in the community, have joined forces. We aim to scorch the ground and leave light in our tracks, and count on young women like Brenda, Karina, Alondra, Jenny, Mariana, and Maria to interpret the new narrative.  The artist hands me a long stick with a few pencils and some charcoal attached at the end and makes sure I can’t see.  I use it to try to mark the paper on the wall with lines of my story.  Each young woman who takes a turn after me centers on what made the difference for them, what helped them push through as they negotiate a blindfold, the paper and the script they are excavating.

After months of anticipation, I am so excited to begin blogging about the South of Market (SoMa) wing of YBCA’s In Community Program! Our team—In Community Program Manager Raquel Gutiérrez, video artist extraordinaire Eliza Barrios, and myself—have been hard at work all summer, making connections with community groups and leaders throughout Soma, and will be hustling through next year to make this amazing social practice project happen. But wait, what, you say? What’s In Community, who are you, and what the heck are you folks doing in SoMa? Good questions! (I know you’re all dying to know). Forgive my haste, it’s just that I am so ready to talk about the meat of the project that I forgot to give you the basic rundown! Me: Thea Quiray Tagle, a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies from UCSD and Visiting Faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute, and the official “scholar in residence” for In Community’s Soma site. Some of my dissertation research has been on gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Filipino/American artists’ and community organizations’ responses to the housing crisis, so I was thrilled when Raquel asked me to join the In Community family. Besides big words, I’m a huge fan of Afrofuturist literature/music/film, Spanish league futbal (Viva Barça!), and my crazy Boston Terrier, Orby. I’ll be your erstwhile blogger/guide over the course of the project, and will be introducing you to some of the players and spaces integral to making it a success.