Building the Barangay

Foreword

Rick Bonus

Like many diasporic communities, Filipinxs struggle to find community wherever they go. Whether it’s for mitigating against the loneliness of isolation, dealing with the agonies of family separation, or searching for care and support in good or not-so-good times, those of us who have traveled far away from our homeland because of force or consequence know that community will somehow provide a warm and nurturing space. This understanding of the power of community surely extends into the generations that proceed after immigration and migration, those whose ties to our homelands may be defined in much more complicated terms. Community gives us a place, provides us with a process, and certainly finds ways to link our lives together to keep us connected across times and spaces in spite of separation and movement. It constitutes potentials to articulate our desires and anxieties, recognize our needs and values, as well as reckon with our historical invisibilities and contemporary battles.

I reflect on these thoughts of diaspora and community to signal the reasons why we started this project of “building the barangay.” Barangay names the community that brings us together and the space that, hopefully, will connect, nurture, and empower us. Our observation that museum artifacts or, more appropriately, “cultural belongings” should not be treated merely as objects for display and items that should statically stay in storage was the impetus that set the stage for a more dynamic connection with such belongings. How can we make meaning out of these belongings? What stories can we tell about them, what can they teach us? How can we connect with each other – build and nurture communities – using the belongings as our common entry points, our sites of conversation and deliberation, and as instruments for and extensions of our processes of connecting and re-connecting? How do keep alive our quest to engage with our cultures no matter where they or we are placed?

We are excited to find the answers to these questions, and we are even more enthusiastic in anticipating how you can be a part of our barangay. Wherever you are located and even if you live and work in multiple locations, consider this as an invitation to collaborate with us in building multiple communities, centers, and collectives where we can cultivate limitless ways to discover meaningfulness within the larger worlds that we inhabit and, as a result, find each other within the bonds of our manifold histories, our continuing journeys, and our transformative struggles in the diaspora.

Kumusta at maraming salamat po!