Culture of Resistance Versus Culture Vultures
Written by Fay Darmawi and Erina C Alejo
Friday, February 7, 2020, in the heartbeat of SOMA Pilipinas — the Bayanihan Community Center — community members, familiar and new, gathered for Culture of Resistance Versus Culture Vultures. The event is a screening of short films, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, that use arts and culture to promote community preservation and self-determination in the face of urban change. Culture of Resistance Versus Culture Vultures marks SF Urban Film Fest and SOMA Pilipinas’s first of many collaborations. Filled past capacity, the screening and panel furthers the community-based and led anti-displacement activation of San Francisco’s South of Market as the city’s designated Filipino Cultural Heritage District.
The evening started off with introductions of the panelists and distinguished guests, including Emory Douglas who sat unassumingly in the back of the room and to whom when introduced the crowd gave a resounding welcome. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, Emory was the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture and to this day uses art as a weapon for the struggle for civil rights.
The film program started with “Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers” — a portrait of the artistic and activist trajectory of the humble and respected Emory Douglas — to set the stage that resistance movements going on in the present day evolved from decades of activism that came before. However, the current conditions in which activists work brings new risks in deploying arts and culture strategies to fight for community preservation and self-determination. Positing how in hot real estate markets like the Bay Area and Southern California, highlighting local arts and culture can accelerate displacement as businesses and well-to-do newcomers flock to cities with diverse populations and thriving “ethnic enclaves”.
The locally produced animated web series “Priced Out” explains how unchecked market forces in conjunction with governmental policies work to incentivize market rate housing to the detriment of affordable housing, resulting in gentrification and displacement of vulnerable communities. This informational web series sets the context in which activists in Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo in the Los Angeles basin, and those in SOMA and the Mission District in San Francisco work. As the films screened that night show, examining the potential as well as the limitations of arts and culture as strategies for community control is needed now more than ever.
The tension between the need for artists to show their work in the art galleries of Boyle Heights and the Latino activists who want to decide what kind of businesses should exist in their quickly gentrifying neighborhood reveals the need for a unifying force beyond art and commerce. The films on the efforts of the grassroots community development and cultural arts organizations in the Japanese American community of Little Tokyo hint at the possibility of such a force. The Little Tokyo Service Center and the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center, and the Japanese American National Museum form a cluster that keep redevelopment and real estate speculation at bay through community organizing, cultural events, and ownership of land.
The program ended with a film on the importance of a permanent community center to offer space for assembly and celebration, a repository of stories and knowledge, and a fitting tribute to the Bayanihan Community Center itself — an enduring institution vital to the Filipino and Filipino- American community in San Francisco, located in the heart of San Francisco’s South of Market, and where we were gathered that night to support the work of grassroots community organizations keeping culture alive.
After the film screening, a panel moderated by Fay Darmawi, SF Urban Film Festival’s Founder and Executive Producer, featured Josué Rojas, Executive Director of Acción Latina; Grant Sunoo, Director of Planning at Little Tokyo Service Center; and Raquel Redondiez, Executive Director of SOMA Pilipinas Cultural District. The panelists all felt that there was no choice but to express our diverse cultures even at the risk of attracting investment that would result in displacement. Suppression of community identity meant complete loss. A culture of resistance meant the struggle to keep heritage, traditions, community relationships, property, and stories from being erased would continue for generations, and we felt fortunate that Emory Douglas honored us to remind us of that.
Dive into the panel discussion:
This event took place on February 7, 2020 at the Bayanihan Community Center in San Francisco, and was co-presented by SOMA Pilipinas. For more information about SF Urban Film Fest, visit our website.
