Project Manong, a 1970’s housing and service project developed to serve Filipinx elders in Oakland, California, offers a window into the grassroots organizing efforts and political consciousness of Filipinx American activists in the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipinas (KDP). While the “national democratic” struggle to oust Marcos was a key source of politicization for KDP activists, so were their “manong” (Ilokano term of respect for a male elder). The community elders who utilized Project Manong’s services were not only victims of displacement and housing insecurity, they were also veteran labor organizers who survived police repression and threats of deportation during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This image depicts the joy of building intergenerational bonds that linked two generations of Filipinx radicalism in the Bay Area.
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
First held in Seattle, Washington in 1971, the Far West Convention brought together Filipinx student activists from up and down the West Coast. Throughout the Far West Conventions eleven year history (1971-1982), KDP activists played a leading role. Participants of the Far West Conventions had the opportunity to take part in a range of workshops, ranging from issues of Ethnic Studies, immigrant rights, labor organizing, and anti-martial law activism. As a result, the Far West Conventions provided an important means for the KDP to introduce Filipinx youth to their “dual line”: socialism in the U.S. and support of the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines.
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
First held in Seattle, Washington in 1971, the Far West Convention brought together Filipinx student activists from up and down the West Coast. Throughout the Far West Conventions eleven year history (1971-1982), KDP activists played a leading role. Participants of the Far West Conventions had the opportunity to take part in a range of workshops, ranging from issues of Ethnic Studies, immigrant rights, labor organizing, and anti-martial law activism. As a result, the Far West Conventions provided an important means for the KDP to introduce Filipinx youth to their “dual line”: socialism in the U.S. and support of the National Democratic Movement in the Philippines.
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
For a ten-year period (1974-1984), Sining Bayan (People’s Art) served as the cultural arm of the KDP. It was led by Ermena Vinluan, a UC Berkeley Student in the early 1970s who had previous experience working with Teatro Campesino, a Chicano theater group that was linked to the United Farm Workers (UFW). In Vinluan’s contribution to the KDP’s recently published collective memoirs, A Time to Rise, she notes, “Our work was in the broad agitprop tradition, in which productions are designed to educate and politically activate the audiences.” In total, Sining Bayan put on twelve productions of seven different and original plays. The image above is a poster for a performance in 1978 of Mindanao, a “drama about Muslim and Christian Filipinos banding together to save their farms and ancestral lands from land-grabbers and corrupt politicians” backed by the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship.
Artwork by Rupert Garcia.
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
KDP activists had a profoundly historical understanding of their struggle against the U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship. In fact, they understood their political work as an extension of Filipinx freedom fighters who formed the Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan, Katipunan for short, a revolutionary movement that fought Spanish and later U.S. colonizers. The poster reveals how they used history as a central organizing tool, particularly through elevating the political example of leadership of the “unfinished revolution of 1896,” such as Katipunan leader Andres Bonfacio.
When the KDP formed, a key aspect of their political work involved supporting the “National Democratic Revolution” led by the Communist Party of the Philippines, both its above-ground and underground formations. The New People’s Army (NPA) was one of the many organizations that the KDP supported via building popular support in the U.S. in the form of political education workshops, or through fundraising, which is depicted in the poster. The KDP’s support of the NPA - a guerilla force that was spreading rapidly at the outset of Martial Law, with squads operating in over half of the provinces in the Philippines - offers a window into the Filipinx American community’s relationship to the politics of armed struggle and their support of political prisoners.
Artwork by Rupert Garcia
The Anti-Martial Law Coalition (AMLC) was a sub-group within the KDP that focused on raising awareness of the egregious human rights violations committed by Ferdinand Marcos and his repressive regime. One primary organizing goal of the AMLC was to stop U.S. Aid to Marcos. At the outset of Martial Law, the U.S. government provided the Philippine dictator with $40 million dollars in military aid; this allocation reached $100 million annually by the end of the 1970s. In the AMLC’s grassroots organizing, political education projects, and efforts to lobby members of Congress, the AMLC articulated a central message: the U.S. funded the Marcos Regime’s enormous capacity for state violence and with the elimination of U.S. aid, Marcos’s reign would unravel. The numbers of victims of Marcos’s repressive state apparatus is alarming. As the above image shows, by 1977, the Marcos regime held upwards of 50,000 political prisoners in arbitrary detention. By 1982, that number would grow to 70,000; a statistic that does not include the 230 “disappearances” of political prisoners. While the AMLC used “people’s trials” as a tool of political education, they would anticipate a future civil suit filed by the families of two KDP members, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, whose June 1981 murders in Seattle were orchestrated by the Marcos Regime.
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection
Teresita Bautista Poster Collection