“Up Against the Wall” Theater Reading

“Up Against the Wall” Theater Reading

Writers to Read Works at Echo Park Library and at Unidad Park in Filipinotown

Rene Villaroman 

Managing Editor

www.pinoywatchdog.com

Painter and muralist Eliseo Art Silva (www.eliseoart.com) and writer, novelist (www.seekingthirst.com) and teacher Carlene Bonnivier are meeting for the first time today. Although they had been communicating with each other for weeks through e-mails, the two had not met in person. So on this summer afternoon, Carlene arrives at Salakot Grill and Restaurant on Beverly Blvd., ahead of Eliseo, giddy at the prospect that she will finally meet the young, multi-awarded painter in person. Eliseo and Carlene are collaborating on a project dubbed “Up Against the Wall,” a theater reading event where Carlene’s writing students – present and former residents of Historic Filipinotown – will share their experiences while residing in the district in prose. The readings will be held at the Echo Park Library and in front of the Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana mural that Eliseo painted on a wall at Unidad Park on Beverly Blvd. at Union Street, in Historic Filipinotown.

Eliseo and Carlene’s works are rooted in a common place, a district in Los Angeles that has been designated Historic Filipinotown in 2002, in honor of the former enclave where Filipino immigrants lived during the early 1920s until the 1950s. Between the two artists, Carlene had a longer relationship with the place, having lived there as a young Fil-Am girl in the 1940s until the 1950s.

Eliseo, now in his 30s, immigrated to the United States in the early 90s and studied art at the Otis College of Art and Design on 6th Street. He was 22 years old and a junior at Otis when he painted the 150 x 35-feet mural on a wall in what was then a large community garden called the “Candy Chuateco Community Garden.”

The garden had 50 plots tended by residents of that neighborhood, including Filipino American WWII Veterans, and sponsored by Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA) for 12 years, until the lot owners decided to sell the property to the City of Los Angeles, which it converted into a park. “That mural created the park,” Silva tells this writer. “If there was no mural, that would have been a parking lot.”

Carlene had spent her growing years in the Temple-Westlake area in a lot that is now occupied by L.A. Derby Dolls Roller Derby Arena.  She recalls that her mother was the only single Filipino woman she ever met in Los Angeles. “She’s the only one I ever saw,” she related to Pinoy Watchdog “And so, we’d be downtown, and she’d see some Filipinos, she’d be talking with some of them, and invite them to come over to our house,” Carlene recalls. “So happy they were to be home with the children and a Filipino woman in this little house with one bathroom on Temple, and they then became friends.”

She tells of the days when they would visit the Filipino farm workers on weekends in Delano with the older girls to dance and sell tickets for a school. “I know it sounds pretty cheap, but (laughs) we just did it to raise money. And when I saw where they lived, I was only, I think, 11 when I went there, I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking. I was so angry.” Tears begin falling down from her turquoise eyes.

She recounts the Filipino farm workers were sleeping on mattresses that were not mattresses. “They were sleeping on springs or just hard wooden boards in bunks that were like those in Auschwitz. Filthy places, that didn’t have water; it was unbelievable.”

When I interviewed them, Eliseo had just planed in from Sitka, Alaska, where he had painted a mural for that city on parachute cloth, and he explained in detail how he worked on the project and how he won the commission over 8900 competitors, about a 1000 of whom where Filipinos. I then steered the conversation toward Historic Filipinotown and its Unidad Park mural, and Eliseo launched a mini-discourse on his core patriotic beliefs. “In Filipinotown, we want to be visible, but we don’t want to do it because it’s hard – it’s easier to assimilate than to be visible,” he began.

“I think being a muralist for me is an advantage,” Eliseo continued. “First of all, I like to look at the bigger picture; very few Filipinos are in that position where they are forced to look at the bigger picture. Then the other things too; you have to combine the images in the picture; they don’t go together because images have their own subjectivity; every image has its own interpretation.”

Eliseo said that most of the time Filipinos “don’t create images; they write text; and the other thing is, we localize our history; our perspective is localized. We don’t see it in a global perspective.” 

At the Unidad Park mural, Silva had to make that connection. The mural had to connect to the neighborhood; connect to the larger discourse. “In a way, mural is a mini-museum. How many pictures do you need to create a museum? It takes a lifetime to create one museum, but I am creating one museum after another,” Silva said. Silva had been commissioned to create more than 100 murals to date.

He focuses on Jose Rizal, the Philippine national hero and one of the dominant figures in the Unidad Park mural. “He’s our national hero. He’s a key to being visible in the mainstream; but he is not visible in mainstream because we are not doing the job of making him mainstream. We don’t think like Americans. (Our idea of) being American is being a good citizen, being invisible and assimilated.”

“Our perspective is so much localized, and our history has so much potential in the context of American civil rights,” Silva added.

Carlene is capitalizing on her Historic Filipinotown roots by working to keep her experiences and others like her’s recorded in a collection of writings she has originally titled “Filipinotown, USA – Collected Stories and Neighborhood Maps, Los Angeles.”

In a nutshell, Carlene had invited former residents of the area – a whole assortment of people of various ethnicities, including Mexican-Americans, European Jews, African-Americans from Louisiana “who spoke French and cooked a lot of French food,” Oklahomans, and people from all over the world, and Filipinos, of course, like two very prominent ones, Gerald G. Gubatan and Gregory Villanueva, to put into writing their experiences while living in the district during its heydays.

 Some of these writings will become part of the readers’ theater performance at the Echo Park Library and at the Eliseo Art Silva’s Mural at Unidad Park this month.

The following is a raw example of a narrative submitted to the “Up Against the Wall” project by the author, Gregory Villanueva, the first Filipino-American elected to the College of Fellows of the American institute of Architects:

“In my 1940’s world, where I never saw a Filipino woman, the future “Filipino Town” Impact Area ran from Main Street taxi dance halls, pool halls and bar shops… through murky and creaking Bunker Hill apartments … celebrating quietly but grandly with clinking coins in Macintosh suits at the corner Carioca Café on Figueroa… then along that very special spine of Temple Street which bound us all together….past secluded upstairs rooms in houses of “ill repute” and fragrant live poultry and fruit markets, five and dime stores….the dark, sticky and sweet smelling Granada Theater with two films and countless Mighty Mouse cartoons for 25 cents….a few empty lots with huge, fat and untended palm trees covered with Blue Bell flower vines which everywhere smothered fences, sheds, garages, whole houses and two story apartment buildings …. There at Colton and Beaudry was Holy Rosary Catholic Church and open air Martins Market (before they disappeared or were relocated across the street by the new five level interchange and the freeway). During fiestas, these streets were filled with multicolored kids and families along with mariachi music, toss games, all kinds of food and confetti filled eggs. At night we sat on front porches listening to the radio and watching hypnotized as the neon lights rose up and exploded atop the Richfield Tower. In the morning we were awakened from all directions with countless roosters crowing incessantly. There was Filipino Alley with integrated couples and a few kids along Boylston (which now lies under or looks over the controversial “new Belmont high School/now Academy/Park …Now, an unbelievable view of the city!). past active oil wells which punched through so many dirt filled back yards…down the backside western slope of Court Street to Glendale Blvd….highlighted by the trolleys and that underwater diving/SMOG Suit Icon at Temple/Glendale. I don’t remember ANY grass in ANY yards!!! I do remember those ubiquitous green/red painted grounds…and squatting Filipinos trying to grow bitter melon in gravel.

In that day some Flips were dashing in white/maroon tennis sweaters and white pants coming in elegant polished cars from the country clubs near Santa Barbara as bartenders, chauffeurs, waiters and houseboys. They gathered like peacocks at the Echo Park Tennis courts behind that beautiful library!

And there was Echo Park Lake……ECHO PARK LAKE!!!!

We can show our support to the unheralded efforts of these two Fil-Am artists by attending the “Up Against the Wall” event at the Echo Park Library on October 15 and at the Unidad Park on October 22. We could also make a donation to the fund for the restoration of the mural, which is on-going, by contacting Carlene at cbonnivi@gmail.com and Eliseo at eliseoart@earthlink.net.