THE first Philippine festival of documentaries from the earliest works to the most current, Daang Dokyu is back. With it are more memories. Viewing them is always bittersweet.
More bitter than sweet is a documentary about the Filipino workers, which is titled Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers. According to sources, there were more than a hundred thousand Filipinos who left the Philippines at the turn of the century. Many of them went to Hawaii and worked in pineapple plantations; still many went farther to the US mainland, finding jobs in canneries in Alaska and Washington down to plantations in California. The first major waves took place in the 1920s and 1930s.
Subjected to the harshest conditions, these Filipinos were exploited to the fullest by American companies. Most of them could not read and write; only a handful spoke English. They traveled following the season of planting. The racism present then (still present now) did not allow them to marry local American girls. In fact, anti-miscegenation was enforced for these workers: they were not allowed to intermarry. During weekends, they went to dance halls in the town to fulfill their need for socialization and maybe paid for sex.
The manongs grew old single. A Filipino growing up in a camp remembers how these sad old men gifted him with a brand-new car upon his graduation from high school. They expected him to make something out of his person. For this young man, the manongs lived through the younger generation.
At the core of this documentary is the story of Larry Itliong, a farm labor organizer, and a band of Filipino farm workers. They initiated one of the longest labor strikes in the history of labor movement in the US. In the famous Delano Grape Strike of 1965, the group founded the United Farm Workers Union (UFW).
In the retelling of the history of labor movement, the Mexicans who joined forces with the Filipinos were given more prominence. Where the Filipinos played a pivotal role, the movement became more popular as a result of Mexican leadership strongly attributed to Cesar Chavez’s.
After a massive march, the growers relented. But when the Filipinos went back to the camp to continue working in the farm, they realized they had been duped. The Filipinos got the worse part of the agreement.
The Delano Strike made Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta into two of the well-known historical figures and Mexican-American civil rights activists to Californians and Americans across the nation.
Much as Chavez and Huerta deserve their place in the narrative of labor strikes, the documentary reminds us how erasures have been committed in the historical storytelling.
Who among us remembers names like Itliong and Andy Imutan? Who has encountered Philip Vera Cruz and Pete Velasco in any tale about the migrant Filipinos in the United States? Do not smirk but these individuals have as much weight as Sebastian Elcano, Pigafetta and Magellan if we only consider the world from the Filipino perspective.
Here we are spending funds to commemorate the anniversary of the circumnavigation of the world as if we had contributed ships and compasses to the Eurocentric endeavor and forgetting this significant aspect of our diaspora, when Filipinos spoke English for the American capitalists to understand and to their fellow Filipinos Tagalog so that their brothers would best understand the issues.
What has the National Historical Commission of the Philippines done to commemorate the Delano Grape Strike of 1965? I know what I can do: each time I hear the song “Dahil Sa Iyo,” I would remember and pray for the manongs who marched humming the love song as White American growers and policemen threatened them with subordination and beat them.
If only for the memories, we have to thank again Daang Dokyu for this endeavor. There is an urgency in the curating of any and all documentaries about the Philippines. Only the documentary as a form that relies on truth as art rather than art as truth can help us recover those little histories, those tales we dismiss as anecdotal, and make us gradually, effectively whole again.
Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers is written and directed by Marissa Aroy. Nominated for the Emmys, the documentary is produced and photographed by Niall Mckay, with editing by Nick August-Perna.
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ATTENTION, filmmakers, film students and teachers: Daang Dokyu is offering talks on Philippine documentaries for free. These sessions will be done via its Facebook and YouTube Channel.
One session will have Prof. Nick Deocampo talking about “Historya ng Dokyupelikula,” which is slated on October 21 at 4 pm. Deocampo will speak on the beginnings and movement of documentary filmmaking in the Philippines “through two World Wars, and from revolution to revolution.”
Deocampo is both a filmmaker and film historian. He presently teaches as associate professor at the UP Film Institute in the University of the Philippines-Diliman. As a filmmaker, Deocampo is noted for Oliver, one of his prizewinning works. Done in 1983, the documentary is about a female impersonator whose performance in gay bars support his family. The film will be streamed by Daang Dokyu from October 16 to 22.