Magkaisa Centre:
Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance of Ontario / Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada
Philippine Women Centre of Ontario
SIKLAB Ontario
magkaisacentre@gmail.com
First edition. First printing. March 2022.
ISBN: 978-1-7780468-0-3
All rights reserved. All written and visual artwork is the sole property of the artists and may not be reproduced without permission.
Cover art created by Natashia Faustino.
Printed in Toronto, Ontario – traditional territory of many Indigenous nations including: Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.
We dedicate this book to the transnational workers who have served as our society’s backbone during this pandemic.
To our loved ones who landed here in Canada before us, full of dreams for a better life.
And to the Filipino/a/x youth, shining a bright light on the possibilities of another world.
In memory of Jean Marc Daga (1978-2013) and Qara Maristella Clemente (1988-2018), whom with their deep love, unwavering dedication, and numerous talents have supported and inspired multiple generations in the Filipino Canadian diaspora to fight for social and economic justice for the most oppressed in our communities.
“The art that we create is created by the community, for the community to express what our community is and what it wants to be.”
— Jean Marc Daga
Introduction
“This is Home: An anthology of Filipino Canadian writings” tells our community’s history, struggles and aspirations through art, poetry and short stories. In the summer of 2021, we at the Magkaisa Centre launched a creative writing program with the goal of publishing an anthology of creative writing and visual artwork. This anthology is the result of the collaborative effort of over 20 Filipino Canadian writers, artists and community organizers that worked for eight months to weave these stories together. As an art practice, this follows a long line of progressive community-based initiatives led by Filipino Canadian youth and women from the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver, our sister centre, over three decades ago. Previous work of theirs include political fashion shows, music, theatre productions and too many others to recount here.
In 2022, we wrote and published this book in attempt to answer the question: What is home? Arriving at the topic of home was neither coincidental nor accidental. In 2010, we launched the multimedia art exhibit ”Maleta Stories” at the historic Beit Zatoun gallery in downtown Toronto. This was the first ever community-based Filipino art exhibit in the city. We undertook this work to build on the suitcase project that was initiated by the Kalayaan Centre in Vancouver in 2007. Their art project culminated in a final piece called ”Maleta Family”, a mobile installation that involved painting five maletas (suitcases) to depict a Filipino family including a mother, father and three children. These are representations that are instantly familiar to our community: the highly skilled father working as a janitor, the mother working as a nanny, the daughter searching for her identity in a predominantly white society, the seemingly anti-social but shy son and the baby sibling crying out for their parents.
The Maleta Family travelled across Canada to tell the important struggles of Filipino immigrants and migrants in Canada. This was largely a story of migration that answered the questions: Where are we from in the Philippines? When did we arrive in Canada? What did our parents do in the Philippines? The suitcases were symbolic to this history of migration to Canada and our need to ”unpack” our stories.
At the Magkaisa Centre, our own exhibit ”Maleta Project” expanded the story of the suitcase family to showcase artwork from young Filipino Canadian artists—both collectively and individually produced pieces. The topics that were tackled include the alienation of young people, the impact of years of family separation and the questions of identity for Filipinos growing up in Canada. It has been more than a decade since the Maleta Family travelled across Canada and we have seen younger generations embrace and own these stories as matter of fact. These stories have made us braver to say: our struggles are a part of this country’s history and we have the right to determine and create a better future here. They have empowered us to ask: What makes a meaningful home?
In the workshops leading up to the ”This is Home” anthology, we continued to touch on our stories of migration and our current realities. We also challenged one another to think about the possibilities of a future that we want–what it might look, sound or feel like.
In its current form, readers will find the anthology organized into different sections to reflect what we covered in the program’s three workshops: Present — Reality, Past — Memory and Future — Aspirations.
Section I
Present — Reality articulates the diversity of the Filipino Canadian experience here in Canada. Starting from a quick ten-minute writing activity, are letters by participants to themselves and to their loved ones, of their reflection on things they always wondered but never said. There are stories of love and of heartbreak, as well as the resolved determination of frontline workers to prevail against many obstacles during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Section II
In Past — Memory, we tell stories about our journey of migration and complicated relationship to our ancestral lands. In the writing activity, participants began the exercise with the prompt ”I remember…” to write about their own story or the story of someone else in their family. Here we find memories like the scent of balikbayan boxes, vivid tales from our parents about coconut trees and the feeling of not knowing when we might see our loved ones again.
Section III
Future — Aspirations explores our visions for a meaningful life in the future. In the writing activity, participants wrote a response to the question: How do you want to feel on a Monday morning? This led us to reflect on how we already feel at the start of the week and how we might want to feel instead. Simple, mundane things that we would love to have time for, like fry eggs in the morning and eat with our loved ones were collectively expressed. Because we are stuck in survival mode, these can seem like luxuries we can’t afford. With each story about how we want to feel on a Monday morning (or whenever your work week begins), we’re beginning to find the first few words of a language that reimagines and dares to create another world—one that we can fall in love with and want to fight for. There is something better that we can work toward now and the seeds of it are already here—present in our everyday experiences of joy and pleasure
Community in the time of a global pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to meet in person, online communication was prioritized as a means of staying connected for us at the Magkaisa Centre. Being without access to the spaces where we usually come together as a collective–like our favourite restaurant, House of Gourmet–pivoting to the virtual world was important for continuing to create space for community members to meet, laugh, share grievances and try to make sense of the issues unfolding in front of us.
“This is Home: An Anthology of Filipino Canadian Writings” represents the next phase of collective storytelling after our historic Maleta Project. The Maleta Project launched in October of 2007 as a collaborative art project and was guided by three frameworks: community collaboration, critical engagement and development of art practice.
With the intent of continuing to unpack our migration stories, conceptualizing ”This is Home”” came about because of the need to examine our stories and situation after migration more optimistically, as well as to explore what it means to build a meaningful home in Canada through social change. We settled on developing a creative writing program that could be executed exclusively through virtual means. In May of 2021, we released a call out to artists and anyone interested in writing, regardless of expertise and experience. We wanted to enable participants to feel empowered to share their voice especially during times of uncertainty, anxiety, and grief.
Writing our own experiences
As community organizers at the Magkaisa Centre, one of our main tasks is to write our history and share it with our community. History has shown us that the experiences of racialized people are often whitewashed. This work of documenting our lived experiences is a necessary component to writing our history. In sharing these stories with each other, we are teaching our own history no one else but us can share.
The workshops
The program was offered free of charge and we asked that participants commit to attending all of the scheduled workshops and be open to collaboration, learning and sharing in groups with participants across generations, locations and differing writing experience.
We launched the program in June of 2021 with the help of artist and writer, Charlene Sayo who gave a presentation and led a discussion on progressive art and culture and the importance of ”political imagination”. This was a term she used to challenge participants to use art not solely as an expressive, artistic outlet, but to bring attention to important issues, without losing the creativity that art allows. She shared her past experience as an organizer for the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance of British Columbia (FCYA/UKPC-BC) and her experience growing as an artist in various mediums. Key takeaways include how art has a significant role in communicating social issues, engaging people in a way that is easily consumable and ultimately aiding to combat racist and oppressive representations of communities of colour.
Following the launch, we had three bi-weekly workshops. Each workshop was broken into four components: (1) Educational, (2) Writing techniques and examples, (3) Writing exercises and (4) Debrief and discussions. Discussions and writing exercises were conducted in both smaller, more intimate groups as well as larger groups. A writing assignment was assigned after each workshop for participants to work on and be used as contributions to the anthology.
We explored and discussed a different theme in each workshop: (1) NOW: COVID-19 and Our Community (2) HISTORY: History of Migration (3) FUTURE: Envisioning our Future.
During the NOW workshop on June 19th, we explored examples of fiction and non-fiction, different storytelling forms including poetry, prose, photography and learned about the creative processes of our favourite authors. We also delved into the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic and our community. Through a guided sharing exercise, we connected our personal experience to the collective realities of our community during and even before the pandemic. Charlene Lee, activist and member of the Philippine Women Centre of Ontario (PWC-ON), provided insight into the fight against encampment evictions and other mutual aid efforts in Toronto. Through making connections with issues that are particular to other communities, we were able to dive deep into a discussion about tackling the root cause of the intertwined struggles of many communities across Canada.
The second workshop on July 3rd centred on the theme of HISTORY. We first learned about the different steps involved in getting from the raw format of our writing to our first draft. This was followed by a presentation on the waves of migration of Filipinos to Canada. We looked at the historical push and pull factors, how immigration pathways have become more exploitative and how our community continues to experience deskilling. This made it possible to trace the history of the current conditions experienced by the Filipino community in Canada. It is this history that led to the overrepresentation of our folks in “frontline”, low-waged work and to their experience of racist and exploitative labour and immigration policies. In small groups, we shared our personal histories of migration. Together, we learned about our differences and similarities as children of landed immigrants and of live-in caregivers and weaved the stories about coming to Canada from our lolas, lolos, mothers, fathers and siblings.
The theme of FUTURE was explored on July 17th in the third and last workshop. We questioned why our image of the future is bleak, dystopian and dark (and how we have capitalism and Hollywood to thank for that!). We discussed how to break away from that vision and the seemingly hopeless future and how we can shift our imagination towards a future that is free of oppression and exploitation. We learned about the importance of community organizing and discussed how it has been used throughout history to bring about social change and how it can empower us to create the future that we want. For the writing component, we learned about how to give and receive feedback in a collective setting.
The format and topics we covered in the workshops nurtured a space where participants could feel encouraged to share their writing and speak about very personal topics from family struggles, personal experiences, work issues and desires for the future that we uncovered in the process. We acknowledged that none of us were professional writers (nor therapists) and we all show up to the workshops to learn from one another.
The scheduled workshops were followed by drop-in sessions once or twice a week during the month of August and September to support the writing process. The drop-in sessions were also a chance to include those that missed the scheduled workshops.
Planning meetings were scheduled and committees were created to divide the work of putting together the book. The committees included: content, art and design, digital and web, promotional and budgeting. When we received pieces from the majority of the participants, we started to discuss how the book would take shape, the flow, different sections and what visuals to add. We had a meeting with everyone to discuss the artistic direction and design of the book, brainstorm ideas, create mood boards for the cover and talk about symbols, while keeping in mind all the topics that were covered in the workshops and the written pieces. The content committee applied a buddy system wherein each participant was paired with someone else to chat with about their written pieces and provide feedback to.
The pieces in this anthology often speak to one another as if in conversation. We hope that readers also get a glimpse of how inspired we were to tell our stories and bridge connections among the different generations and identities of Filipino Canadians.
As Filipinos are often excluded in mainstream Canadian culture, media and news, it is important for us at the Magkaisa Centre to fill this void by promoting an understanding of our community’s history and the role we play in this country.
Filipinos started coming in waves to Canada in the 1960s after the government removed discriminatory provisions from its immigration program based on racial origin. They either came directly from the Philippines or through the United States and other countries in Europe. This first wave of immigration brought Filipinos with professional training as teachers, nurses and engineers. This was to the benefit of Canada, as these professionals could meet the labour shortages in these areas. The second wave brought Filipinos to Canada through sponsorship. In the 1970s, an increasing number of Filipinos continued entering Canada under the “family reunification” immigration policy category. These were family members of those that arrived in the first wave, many of whom came to Canada to escape the political and economic crisis taking place in the Philippines that escalated with the declaration of Martial law in 1972.
The 1980s are considered the beginning of the third wave of Filipinos coming to Canada, which brought care workers from other “stepping stone” countries like Singapore and Hong Kong. This wave is where we see the majority of Filipinos (still professionally trained) coming in as nannies through the Federal Domestic Movement (FDM), a labour program which hired foreign caregivers to live in the homes of Canadians to meet their demand for child care, elderly care and care for individuals with high needs. This trend continued into the 1990s when the Canadian government changed the previous FDM program to the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), further encouraging private forms of live-in care where the majority of workers were Filipino women. These caregiver programs have continued into the present day in various forms and names, with Filipino women still making up the bulk of this workforce.
This nature of working and living in multiple countries position Filipinos to have a transnational perspective and experience of work. This is why we describe our community as a transnational community. While we maintain an attachment to the Philippines, we have continued to establish roots in Canada over the decades and generations. This is why this country is considered home for many in our community. Whether or not it is appropriate to call this country home will be discussed in a later section.
Today, Filipinos contribute to Canadian society as the country’s third largest source of immigrants. Contrary to the idea that Filipinos have a good life here in Canada, the reality is that community members are often desperately stretched to make ends meet. Professionally trained Filipinos in jobs such as nursing, early childhood education and engineering, are all too often de-skilled just to have a chance of migrating to Canada. Many take on multiple low-waged jobs to piece together a living that pays two sets of bills—for family here and for family in the Philippines. Coming into Canada by way of the restrictive labour policies such as the Live In Caregiver Program (now known as Canada’s Caregiver Program) has kept many Filipino Canadians stuck in temporary and low-waged jobs.
On January 30, 2020, the contagious disease we now know as COVID-19 was first declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Symptoms of this disease vary between mild to severe respiratory illness and other flu like symptoms that are especially severe to those with weakened immune systems. While the disease was first recorded and discovered in China, it rapidly spread across several countries in the following months. By March 1st, WHO declared the COVID-19 disease a pandemic and we began to see a rise in the number of cases in Canada. Lockdown measures soon took effect after public pressure, across the country. Work from home options were instated, travel was restricted, students shifted to online learning and the term ”essential workers” (those working in industries considered essential for the functioning of society such as healthcare, food services, transportation and manufacturing) became commonly used overnight.
It was soon determined that the majority of essential workers came from racialized communities, many of whom were already underpaid and overworked. The pandemic disproportionately impacted racialized and working class populations, including Filipinos, and brought awareness to the harsh realities of our communities in Canada. During the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, news broke that the largest outbreak of COVID-19 cases in Canada was tied to a single site at Cargill, a meat packing plant in Alberta, where over 500 workers tested positive for COVID-19. Cargill’s workforce is 80% Filipino, many of whom are also temporary foreign workers.[1]
In the Filipino Canadian community where living in multigenerational homes is the norm and community members are overrepresented in frontline work, we became familiar with stories of friends having to navigate difficult times. Going into work every day on the ”frontline” meant anxiety and dread, knowing the enormous risk of contracting the virus and bringing it home to family. This was the case for one of our members, Kayla, a hospital worker who tested positive for COVID-19, along with her younger sister and parents. They did not get COVID-19 from the hospital’s emergency department where she works, but instead from an outbreak at a food processing factory where her dad works. Kyle, a participant of our program and postal warehouse worker, became infected along with his dad who works there. For two weeks, they stayed in their basement in an attempt to keep his mom and elderly aunt safe. Another member, Nora, working as a personal support worker at a long term care home contracted COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic. At almost 60, she was in a constant state of fear of the virus’ impact on her health and feeling the toll of isolation and not being able to see her loved ones.
Before this public health crisis, Filipino workers were already overrepresented in healthcare and service industries now conventionally known as frontline work. Among the largest visible minority groups in Canada, Filipino Canadian workers have the highest representation in accommodation and food services, with 15% of employed Filipinos working in the sector, compared to 9% of white Canadians.[2] Filipinos also make up the bulk of workers in the healthcare and social insurance industry, with 1 in 4 employed Filipino Canadians working in the sector compared with approximately 1 in 10 of all workers.[3]
The pandemic has taught us that the Canadian healthcare system is rotting from the inside out. The crisis at elderly care institutions has shown what happens when profitability is at the core of our healthcare system. The pandemic deepened the existing precarity that Filipino workers, especially those in low-waged jobs, were already experiencing. In stark contrast to the experience of wealthier Canadians, 25% of minimum wage jobs (under $14 per hour) were lost in 2020, while high-paying jobs (at least $40 per hour) grew by 9%.[4]
In what is a COVID-era anthology by Filipino Canadian youth, artists and community organizers, we draw attention to the Canadian healthcare system because it is one prime location of Filipino workers in Canada. For decades, the Canadian healthcare system has been under the assault of privatization and defunding. Of particular interest to us is elderly care institutions and the personal support workers (PSWs) who work there that are predominantly Filipino and Black women. Its shameful state says a lot about how much this country values care work and our elders. In Ontario, this is a largely profit-driven sector where over half of long-term (LTC) care homes are under private ownership–the highest rate in the country.[5]
In these ”lower-tier” healthcare jobs, PSWs are underpaid, rarely secure full-time positions and have less access to sick leave. Long before the pandemic, PSWs were forced to take on two or three part-time or casual roles at different LTC homes to make ends meet. This contributed to the devastating COVID-19 outbreaks at LTC and retirement homes where it was reported that 80% of COVID-19 deaths occurred from March to August of 2020.
Since then, the Ontario government has identified an important issue: there are not enough staff working at LTC homes–a situation which PSWs have already been calling attention to for years. The solution that the government offered in 2020 is an accelerated, tuition-free PSW program that will take half of the original time to complete.[6]
While the shortage of PSWs may be eased by these incentives, the fundamental reason for the shortage will still not be addressed. PSW work (like many devalued jobs held by women of colour) requires a complete overhaul.
As we come out of this crisis, perhaps there is an opportunity to step back, reimagine and plan: what if these places centred the dignity and health of workers and the Canadians that they care for?
We look to the women working in healthcare as PSWs, caregivers and nurses, many in our own community, who advocated for solutions to this crisis years before the pandemic: better wages, increased staffing, job security and more resources in hospitals and care institutions. Instead of undervaluing the work of Filipino women and rolling out temporary, quick fixes (like the programs to accelerate PSW recruitment), what if we made these jobs valuable and fulfilling by guaranteeing job security, access to benefits and safe working conditions? It has been all too commonly thought that the conditions of Filipino women working as caregivers or PSWs are ”migrant issues” or issues for the Filipino community to tackle. The COVID-19 pandemic in Canada has reinforced our perspective that the rights of Filipino women that we have been calling for are not just our issues, but larger issues that Canadian society must confront.
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[1] Dryden, J. (2020, April 26). Filipino workers at meatpacking plant feel unfairly blamed for Canada’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/cargill-high-river-jbs-brooks-deena-hinshaw-1.5545113
[2] Statistics Canada. (2016). Census of Population, Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-400-X2016360. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dt-td/Index-eng.cfm
[3] Statistics Canada. (2020). The Social and Economic Impacts of COVID-19: A Six-month Update. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.891989/publication.html
[4] Tal B. (2021, January 19). Canadian labour market dichotomy — deeper than perceived. CIBC Economics – In Focus. https://economics.cibccm.com/cds?id=7737970b-204e-477f-8f4b-e0f643f60a3c&flag=E
[5] Rits, M. (2020, November 19). Elder Care Should Not Be About Making Profits. Jacobin Magazine. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/ontario-canada-long-term-care-covid-coronavirus
[6] Agrba, L. (2021, September 16). The push to fill Canada’s critical PSW shortage. Maclean’s. https://www.macleans.ca/society/health/the-push-to-fill-canadas-critical-psw-shortage/
For many, home can be simply defined as the country or place that you live in. For some of us in the Filipino Canadian community, Canada might be considered as home because our families have been living here for the last 60 years. For a lot of us, Canada might just be the place where our lolo and lolas, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles decided to work and live in permanently. For many young people who were born and raised here, they know of no other home.
However, it is no secret that this country was not built for us. We want to be clear that while the title we have landed on is “This is Home”, we only seek to assert our discussion about what home is and what it can be. This is not to be confused with assimilation or co-optation into this white-settler colonial society. To talk about home in Canada is to understand that Canada is in an ongoing battle against the right to self determination and sovereignty of the Indigenous Peoples of this land. As progressive Filipinos who were uprooted because of colonialism and imperialism, we know that our fight against colonialism continues even here in this country and on these lands, alongside the Indigenous communities.
As a capitalist, white-settler, colonial society, Canada is a country built through the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples and on the backs of immigrants, migrants and working class communities. As people of colour, though we are highly skilled and visible in numbers, Filipino Canadians have been systematically relegated to the margins. We have been in Canada for over 60 years, yet we are still seen for the most part as outsiders and as migrants to fill low-waged sector work. Similar to other communities of colour, our existence is only deemed acceptable when we adhere to the ”model minority” stereotype. Canada calls itself ”multicultural” but our culture is largely reduced to food and karaoke. Canada proclaims itself as a champion of democracy but we are expected as immigrant and as a community to simply assimilate and not question or upset the status quo.
This is the very reason why even after generations of Filipinos being born in Canada, it is more convenient for many in our community to call the Philippines home. In everyday conversation, questions such as ”taga saan ka sa atin?” (Where are you from in the Philippines?) always come up. Though it is true that this reflects our deep ties to our ancestral land, this also indicates that we, as a community, have yet to fully recognize and claim our growing roots here in Canada.
Home, as implied by novelist Carlos Bulosan, is where the heart is. Canada is the destination for a lot of Filipinos who made the careful and life-changing decision to leave the Philippines. It is where they imagined their dreams would be fulfilled. We understand that in its current state, Canada is not ours. But it is ours to help build towards a society that serves the needs of all people regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and ability; towards a place where we as a community can determine and participate in all aspects of life. For us at the Magkaisa Centre–as progressive Filipinos in so-called Canada–this is home.
The Magkaisa Centre
The Magkaisa Centre houses the Philippine Women Centre of Ontario (PWC-ON), the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance of Ontario (FCYA-ON), and SIKLAB Ontario. We are a community-based, grassroots, and volunteer-led organization that aims to educate, organize, and mobilize the Filipino Canadian community to learn about our issues in Canada as transnational workers.