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104 VVVVVVVVVVV VVVVVVVVVVV 5 Building a Community Center Filipinas/os in San Francisco’s Excelsior Neighborhood ALLYSON TINTIANGCO-CUBALES Istood at the corner of Mission and Geneva around : on a Tuesday afternoon. I was told by several locals that this was the most dangerous intersection in San Francisco. There sits a bus stop right in front of Popeye’s Chicken. Various types of people stand underneath graffiti-tagged billboards advertising Courvoisier cognac and Wal-Mart in Tagalog. Chillin’ at the bus stop is a barkada, or a group of young Filipina/o friends. They are tsismising, gossiping in Tagalog, about some guy who thinks he’s better than them because he was born in the United States. Next to them stands three older Pinoys in their late sixties; they are conversing in Kapampangan. There are also several women with children. I overhear a lola, a Filipina grandmother, asking a young mother in Tagalog who takes care of her daughter when she is at work. In English, the young mother responded that she doesn’t work right now. The lola offered to help her find a job. Another woman in her forties stands by herself in a burgundy-colored polyester skirt suit with suntan -colored nylons, white ankle socks, and sneakers. She carries her imitation Louis Vuitton briefcase in one hand and a worn-out Christmas gift-bag in the other, presumably containing the remains of her lunch. The bus stop crowd looks like an intergenerational Filipina/o family party in which all the characters are present, yet they are grouped by age, gender, and language. They are all Filipina/o, they share the same bus stop, they coexist in the same space, they all live in the neighborhood together, but they maintain separation. This mini-ethnography of the bus stop is a microcosm of the Filipinas/os in the Excelsior neighborhood of San Francisco. This chapter is about a community of Filipinas/os who live in and around the Excelsior District, a working-class neighborhood in San Francisco that borders Daly City. According to the  census, San Francisco is home to over , Filipinas/os. Today, the greatest concentration of Filipinas/os in San Francisco live in the southeastern neighborhoods of the city, particularly in the Excelsior/Outer Mission, Visitation Valley, and Portola neighborhoods. This chapter looks at the experiences and needs of these Filipinas/os and describes BUILDING A COMMUNITY CENTER 105 the development of the Filipino Community Center (FCC), which caters to this community’s needs. In the first section, I begin by engaging in the discourse on “ethnic community ” within Asian Pacific American and ethnic studies. The second section examines the long and diverse histories, identities, and transformations of Filipinas/os in San Francisco to help establish their roots. The third section explores some of the major issues, circumstances, and tensions between Filipinas/os in this neighborhood. The final section presents the needs and experiences of Filipinas/os in the community, along with strategies that can be used to build and sustain the services provided by the FCC. Ethnic Enclave or Community: Locating Filipinas/os in the Excelsior Neighborhood In regards to understanding the experiences of Filipinas/os in the Excelsior, there is a great need to rearticulate the meaning of the term “community.” Scholars in Asian Pacific American studies and in ethnic studies have developed a wide field of scholarship around defining the meaning of, and concept of, “community” as a place of contention, change, development, and multiplicity. Over the past two decades, many scholars have conducted research on Asian Pacific American communities with or without geographical boundaries. They have theorized ways to understand how race, ethnicity, class, geography, generation, and culture affect how one person or a group of people negotiate meanings of “community.” Are the Filipinas/os in the Excelsior part of a community, or are they an ethnic enclave? In “Asian Americans in Enclaves—They Are Not One Community: New Modes of Asian American Settlement,” Chung chooses to use the term “ethnic enclave” instead of community “because it does not presume any internal cohesiveness .” Chung refers to these enclaves as “ethnic” because the title provides a cross between race and culture, while also acknowledging an “externally imposed ethnic identity (that) does not assume cultural and emotional homogeneity.” Although Chung makes a strong argument for the usage of “ethnic enclave” versus that of “community” for Asian Americans, this conceptual framework may have little relevance for Filipinas/os in the Excelsior...

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