An organization that Filipinos started 25 years ago to advocate for affordable housing in San Francisco is using art to share its message across wider circles.
In 2000, local Filipino leaders formed the South of Market Community Action Network, aka SOMCAN, to support tenants’ rights and oppose gentrification in the neighborhood.
Reflecting this work as it continues, SOMCAN contributed a mixed-media installation, “We Live Here,” to “MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy,” an exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, on view through Jan. 4.
Angelica Cabande, executive director of SOMCAN, said the nonprofit gathered photographs, flags, flyers and protest signs for the installation to document the struggles of Filipinos in the neighborhood.
SOMCAN still fights to enable working class people to stay in their homes, she said.
“We want to showcase that Filipinos have always been part of the tenant rights movement, the anti-gentrification movement, and anti-displacement movement,” Cabande said. “We wanted to showcase that we are still fighting, and we’re still organizing, and we are part of a larger history in San Francisco, fighting for tenant rights and immigrant rights.”
MAKIBAKA, the Filipinos’ term for collective resistance, is something protestors would chant in the streets of Manila during Ferdinand Marcos’ regime in the 1970s and ’80s, said Raquel Redondiez, director of SOMA Pilipinas, who curated the show with Trisha Lagosa Goldberg.
Redondiez said some slogans on signs in the exhibit, such as “Stop Deportations” and “Keep Families Together,” are still used.
“It shows 25 years of organizing advocacy in the neighborhood, but it’s very present,” she said. “If you look at some of the flyers, whether it be for transit justice or affordable housing, these are all very current.”
Goldberg said the exhibition could raise awareness for the community, which does not have many public landmarks signaling its long presence in San Francisco.
“SOMA Pilipinas is the one who is on the ground, working directly with residents, around housing rights, around language justice, etc.,” she said. “For over 100 years, there has been an ongoing struggle with the city to recognize Filipinos in the South of Market neighborhood. There’s no plaque. There’s no monument.”
Goldberg said Cherisse Alcantara, whose paintings appear on the Grand Lobby staircase and hanging in the exhibition, received a grant to create paintings of cultural touchstones throughout South of Market but she couldn’t find any dedicated to Filipinos.
“She ended up painting these more subtle sites, like a banana tree growing in the Vicki Manalo Draves Park, or painting the Bessie Carmichael School, a site of Filipino language immersion,” Goldberg said.
Draves, who grew up in the neighborhood, was the first Asian American Olympic gold medalist, excelling in platform and springboard diving at the 1948 games in London.
“Today, it still feels like a struggle for Filipinos to be seen and to have visibility as a collective voting force,” Goldberg said.
The organizers of SOMA Pilipinas had a vision for the show and sought help from Goldberg, the director of programming and engagement at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University and an independent curator for shows such as “Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision” in 2022.
Redondiez said she believes in the power of art, and SOMA Pilipinas has led a big push for public art in the neighborhood so people could know more about the history of art and activism.
Along with Alcantara’s paintings of community spaces, the show includes Erina Alejo’s “The Older I Get, The More I Remember,” a display of archival photos from her former middle school students at the Filipino Education Center. The photos reach from floor to ceiling, with the title of each written in chalk.
Also featured are England Hidalgo’s works of lithographic crayon on rice paper, “The Blighted And Valuable Streets Of South Of Market,” made from rubbings of street signs in the cultural district, and “Gran Oriente Filipino,” the first building in San Francisco bought by Filipinos.
Cristine Blanco’s “Embedded Bricks III” features bricks chiseled with words like “Mother Tongue,” “Family” and “Trust,” and symbols from nature such as ocean waves or a tree.
Filipinos have had a big role in fighting for housing rights for decades in San Francisco and nationwide, Goldberg said, pointing to the International Hotel, which she calls a “lightning rod case.”
The building’s corporate owners in the late 1960s proposed demolishing the structure, known as the I-Hotel, and evicting its elderly Chinese and Filipino tenants. Protests and resistance continued until the residents were evicted in 1977. The building was demolished and replaced with a low-income senior housing complex.
The exhibition includes two artists’ tributes to the I-Hotel fight: “How I Saved San Francisco” by Johanna Poethig and “It Wasn’t Only a Hotel” by Kimberly Acebo Arteche.
“You have to note that they are separated by some 30 years, but they both address housing insecurity in the Filipino community,” Goldberg said. “Artists never put down that torch. They continue to work with the community and really understand what’s important.”
Writer Oscar Peñaranda attended San Francisco State University and participated in the campaign to establish ethnic studies courses there.
Peñaranda went on to teach at the university and other schools. He joined the I-Hotel fight and worked on the arts journal Liwanag, published by Kearny Street Workshop in 1975 and 1993, and by SOMA Pilipinas and Kearny Street Workshop in 2024. Some of those issues are included in MAKIBAKA.
Peñaranda said communities need artists and writers to address social ills.
“We’re not politicians, so we’re not going to run for office. We’re going to do it another way,” he said. “We’re not preachers, so we’re not going to preach in front of people. We have to write and paint and do it do other ways, but it has to be done all the time.”