Hands across the ocean: An American Artist's 'Filipinism'
Hands across the ocean:
An American Artist's 'Filipinism'
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, September 26, 1987
OF THE correspondence received last week through my editor, Rosalinda L. Orosa, the one most certainly worth sharing is from Vincent Pollard, a poet and performance artist from Chicago, Illinois, who doubles as helmsman for the American transmedia group "South Side Audio-Visual Artists." Pollard's letter was prompted by an article of mine that was published in this section ("Motion Potion — Do Photographs Ever Lie?", MT, July 1), and which questioned the timeliness of a photo exhibit celebrating "the good life" amidst the turbulence and uncertainty of our present-day surroundings.
Although much of Mr. Pollard's letter is of a personal nature, the wealth of photocopy material he had graciously enclosed for our reference should be of considerable public interest. As evidenced by this material, Pollard obviously represents a new breed of clear-thinking American artists deeply concerned with the problems that face the developing nations of The Third World, and the Philippines in particular.
Our plight and our continuing struggle, apparently, is generating more interest in stateside creative circles than we might have imagined, thanks in no small way to the persistent efforts of our brothers-in-spirit like Vincent Pollard. A published critic and freelance writer on the side, his articles in several Chicago periodicals include a great deal of illuminating and sympathetic insight on Philippine art and culture, politics, history, and current events, and his intelligent reviews have been diligently focused on travelling Philippine exhibits in the United States.
An award-winning artist, Pollard's latest multi-media work entitled "Trembling Volcano, Startling Eruptions" is influenced by themes from such well-known nationalist songs as "Bayan Ko", and is even now taking shape as a slide/tape/poetry-performance piece to be presented before community and student audiences in the greater Chicago area. (Interestingly, Pollard wrote in an article published in the Grey City Journal of the University of Chicago that a photograph of "Mayon Volcano Erupting" had "struck (him) as an apt metaphor for the developing political explosion in the Philippines.") This was in 1985, in his review of a visiting exhibit of Philippine photographs curated by Jaime Zobel de Ayala and Arturo Luz.)
A great deal of stateside material mentioned in Pollard's critiques would be of profound significance to us, and it is a pity that not enough effort is being exerted by our well-funded local institutions to get copies of said material for the benefit of local audiences. In his article entitled "The Survivors," published in the Chicago Via Times, Pollard trains his sights on a film entitled "A Dollar A Day, 10c A Dance" (directed by Geoffrey Dunn and Mark Schwartz for Gold Mountain Productions), which chronicles the odyssey of Filipino immigrant laborers working the fields and canneries of Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska — from their arrival in the 1920's, to the Watsonville Riot of the 1930's and beyond.
The ordeal to which these brave souls were subjected included dishearteningly low pay, uncertain employment, harsh working and housing conditions, and — as might be expected — rabid racial discrimination. State legislation prohibited and outlawed marriages between Filipino men and white or Mexican women, and as a result, West Coast Filipino communities were "predominantly bachelor societies in the 1920's." Pinoys found their only opportunity for mixing with white women in the dance halls, where "Taxi-dancing", a national fad, cost 10c a dance.
Pollard writes that "as the Great Depression set in... sharper competition for scarce jobs intensified anti-Filipino prejudice. The dance halls were an obvious target. There were casualties. Fermin Tobera died of gunshot wounds received in a white riot against a Watsonville, California, dance hall in January of 1930."
What struck Pollard most about the film, however, was the ability of these pioneering Filipino immigrant laborers to maintain "their dignity, insight and sense of humor in the face of enormous odds." Their secret, he tells us, was SOLIDARITY. "This persevering togetherness in the struggle against oppression is an implicit lesson one may draw from the film," Pollard concludes, adding that "the lesson is still a useful one."
With such willing hands across the ocean, and such a heritage for bucking the odds, who can doubt that the brown man will survive and prosper?
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Hands across the ocean: An American Artist's 'Filipinism'” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, September 26, 1987
