From Manila to Manitoba (review)

"From Manila to Manitoba" is an outstanding example of what community-based exhibits can accomplish. The product of both a formal and an informal set of collaborations between the Filipino youth group Aksyon Ng Ating Kabataan (ANAK), the University of Winnipeg's Oral History Centre, and The Manitoba Museum, the core of the exhibit is built around a set of oral history interviews conducted between 2009 and 2010 by volunteers from ANAK. However, in many ways the project goes back even further than this. As Curator Sharon Reilly of the Manitoba Museum pointed out, the origins of this project can be traced back over the course of three or four years when two students at the University of Winnipeg—Maureen Justiniano and Darlyne Bautista—became dissatisfied because not a single course in the history of the Philippines was available at the universities in Manitoba and became intrigued with the possibility of taking what they were learning about oral history techniques and applying them to a research project on their own community. Both also became involved with The Manitoba Museum, where as student volunteers/interns they honed their museum skills and developed many of the ideas that have borne such excellent fruit in "From Manila to Manitoba."

A careful balancing of information and interpretation is the hallmark of this display. Given the general lack of knowledge concerning Filipino history in Canada, it was deemed absolutely necessary to provide some basic information on modern Filipino history—in this case, from the 1940s through to the "People Power Revolution" of the mid-1980s—as the crucial context for understanding the push and pull factors of Filipino immigration to Winnipeg. Naturally, though, this is really just the background to the exhibit's larger concern, the origins and subsequent development of the Filipino community in Winnipeg. And, in the course of telling this story, the exhibit does not shy away from documenting the community's original divide; a divide that was clearly class based, with university-educated professionals and their families representing the majority of the first wave of immigrants, while working-class immigrants arrived later and played a very different set of roles in the host society.

It may come as a surprise to many Winnipeggers to discover that it was medical doctors, nurses, teachers, and other professionals who were at the core of the city's first Filipino community, with some arriving as early as 1959. As the transcribed interviews and blown-up newspaper clippings that provide the lion's share of the exhibit's information make clear, many of these first Filipino immigrants had arrived in Canada via the U.S., where they had received training or done internships, and ended up staying on in Winnipeg, sometimes after relocating from another Canadian center. This group dominated the small Filipino community both socially and numerically until the late 1960s when the first group of Filipina garment trade workers arrived (interestingly enough after a sojourn in the Netherlands) to take up positions in Winnipeg's schmatta trade. The exhibit provides an excellent, but all too brief, overview of the garment trade in Winnipeg and the crucial role that recruited Filipino labor played in keeping that industry going in the 1970s and well into the 1980s when, despite protests from, among others, the Filipino workers, the garment trade moved offshore.

"From Manila to Manitoba" also does an excellent job of following the changes in Canada's immigration policy; changes that ultimately allowed the local Filipino community to expand beyond its dual roots of professionals and garment trade workers. Between the effect of Canada's 1976 immigration law provisions related to family reunification and the strength (and flexibility) of familial relationships in Filipino society, the years from 1976 to the early 1990s saw a massive increase in the size of the Filipino community. Interview transcripts are put to excellent use here as both the nature of family/kinship structures among Filipinos and the depth of family feeling are described not in the cold analytical language of the...