Manong

Referencing and reimagining the legacy of Filipinx migration to the United States, this project explores overarching themes of the diaspora — family, labor, faith, and mortality—as centered on the life and experiences of my ailing mother.

What began as a wider meditation on the legacy of Filipinx labor in the United States has slowly shifted onto my mother and our family’s place within that sociopolitical history. I reflect on her journey—emigrating from the Philippines as a recruited nurse in the late 1980’s—while exploring themes of mortality, faith, separation, and home in the diaspora.

In February 2023 my mother, Myrna, was involved in a car accident after losing consciousness at the wheel. Medical tests revealed a tumor growing in her brain causing the momentary loss in cognitive and motor function. I correlate the state of her rapidly declining health with the many years of heavy stress and physical wear from her career. I think of her bodily sacrifice not only to the institutions she has supported, but to the family she has given and sustained life to. These photographs, made between Mississippi and New York, are an attempt to hold on to my parents—to my ailing mother herself, albeit in futility. I negotiate with and reconcile the uncertainty of our time together, grappling with my fears and anxieties associated with living, aging, and dying in an adopted homeland.

Thinking of the physical, psychological, and spiritual toll labor places on the body—burdened by the weight of capitalism, racism, and mythology—I work from a place of overlapping truths across generations in the diaspora. Migrants of the Manong generation worked the vineyards, orchards, sugarcane fields, and pineapple farms of the American West Coast in the early Twentieth Century. Nurses were outsourced to fill the U.S. healthcare gap of the 1960’s. Subverting the gaze and black-and-white language of FSA photography, I bridge the experiences of those pioneers with Filipino-Americans today, humanizing and echoing collective notions of dreams and memories as it relates to migration and labor.

Photography becomes a means of visualizing my mother’s prayers and, by association, the prayers of many other Filipinos who have bought into the American Dream: a synchronous hum of hope, pain, joy, and despair. And love—the most fervent prayer of all.