For a Filipino artist based in Winnipeg born and raised in the Philippines, locality in the practice of arts within the diasporic Canadian experience is an entanglement of decolonial settlement and homing. I am the son of Waray and Bicolono parents. Both migrated from their villages to metropolitan Manila in the 1960s due to lack of educational opportunities, land tenancy, and typhoons that struck their hometowns. Their migrations circled back to my body when I left the Philippines first as an international student in 2013 and now as an (im)migrant artist/scholar in Canada. My oceanic routes from the Pacific to the vast expanse of the Prairies are living memories and embodied archives of the ferocious winds of the tropical typhoons to the lingering wildfire embers in the borderlands of Manitoba and Ontario. This year, I am honoured to be working with Filipina women who came to Winnipeg in the late 1990s and 2000s for a theatrical research project, “she called on the winds: Devising (Im)migrants/Climate Change, Theatre, and Power” to tackle questions around that migration along the everydayness of racialized and gender inequalities. But in my body is a migrant soul; in my feet is an itinerant artist. My he(art) is transnational. The ocean, rivers, and lakes that run through the viens of my imagination connect the survival of the here, there, and elsewhere of my liminal belonging. When I write, teach, and create theatre, I do it as an immigrant searching for home.
My everyday life-making is a liminal worldmaking in a city I now call second home.. I came to Winnipeg in the winter of 2021 while thinking of the dominant inequality that continues to deepen in the Philippines—which seems like an impasse. The harsh reality of social and economic disparities in the Philippines where according to Climate Tracker Asia “3.4 million Filipino families experienced hunger in the 2nd quarter of 2021” (Climate Tracker Asia) leads one to ask how we might give dignity to people in the periphery. This extreme poverty complicated by strong weather events that continue to strike the country each year forces Filipinos to refuse death from the brutal realities of climate injustice. For many Filipinos, this refusal would also mean migrating from various parts of the world. In 2018 alone there were 2.3 million overseas Filipino workers dispersed worldwide (Philippine Statistics Authority). This number of laboring Filipino bodies that flow in countries in the Global North will continue to increase.
My friend feminist historian Darlyne Baustista writes about the influx of women in Winnipeg in the 1970s that propelled the growth of Filipino population in the city. Darlyne sends this message, “The shift towards mass industrialization of the garment sector proved to be timed perfectly with the labour export policies under the Marcos administration. We now see how significantly the majority of women from the Philippines have immigrated and grown our city.” The apparatus of geopolitical migratory departures that the authoritarian former President Marcos Sr. initiated in 1974 through the Labor Code of the Philippines continues to support the economy through the perpetual remittances of (im)migrants sent to their homeland. The Filipina scholar, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas asserts that the migrant workers from the Philippines have turned into “servants of globalization” who work “across the globe—in Canada, Asia, and the Middle East—are not free; they are bound legally to work solely for their sponsoring employer” (x). How do we make sense of this troubling phenomena?
The promise and flow of Western-centric economic models embedded in the social, political, and cultural lives of Filipinos force them to easily give service to global economic enterprises as migrants. In my work as a theatre director and educator in Winnipeg, I reflect home in the diaspora with attention to the processes of migration and the history of servitude that comes along with it. I think of theatre as a practice of pedagogy and community building deployed for theoretical and methodological interventions. Taking advantage of the intellectual and creative wealth of the city, I wish to signal a transnational relationality that connects the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and Canada while thinking about a theatre that I teach and direct with our students and community members.
Several years ago, I directed Alunsina’s Love for our Hons. Acting Program at the University of Winnipeg. In this project students performed speculative stories of migration that intertwined the Philippine creation stories and narratives of Filipina women who left the Philippines to work in garment and textile industries in the city during the 1970s. Here, we rendered the Filipina migrants as celestial maidens and dieties capable of signaling political change within the Cold War era of the 1970s. They emerge as cosmic beings from Philippine pre-colonial temporalities.They embodied what the Filipina geographer Chaya Ocampo Go describes as “ancient ferocity” (227). These women have the capacity to transcend the binaristic nation-state borders and the encumbrances of colonialism and capitalist world to engender love in spaces of catastrophe.
I think this reverberates the contemporary times.
During the pandemic, for example, Filipina nurses in North America served as frontliners, as a result many of them died in the line of duty. Here in Winnipeg, the growing numbers of Filipino populations underscores a visibility of minoritarian communities that aims to thrive amdist racialization and other intersecting social oppressions. When I arrived in Winnipeg, I was stunned to know that there are three Jollibees, the popular Filipino fast food chain located in various strategic geographical points in the city. Given such density of Filipino population in the city, Tagalog a linguistic derivative of the lingua franca of the Philippines, Filipino, is one of the major minoritarian languages being spoken by 84,225 people in the province in 2021 (Statistics Canada 2021). There are about 957,355,00 Filipino Canadians living in Canada in 2023 and expected to rise few years over a million (Statistics Canada 2023). Filipino (im)migrants can be found in different provinces in Canada.
One may argue that the growth of the Filipino presence in the country compels us an urgent critical reflection on unpacking questions around home and homing as necessary subjects in theorizing a decolonial settlement especially in Indigenous lands. In doing such, we are able to engage in raising questions that problematize and complicate the history of Filipino migration in Canada along with some questions on indentured labour and servitude contracted by geopolitical migratory enterprise. I stand in the coordinates of many diasporic tensions within the continuing histories of migration fraught by colonialism and racial marginalizations. But I also think of possibilities of worldmaking that points us towards new routes of Filipino diasporic life-making through pedagogy, research, and community engagement as modes of cultural productions that aspire emancipation and solidarity. Because culture is also imperialistic, thus aspiration of thinking and making theatre has to resist imperial moments that re-centers muted voices and forgotten stories of the marginalized.
Perhaps it would be productive to ask: How do we bypass the classical European arts and the Western epistemologies that continually seek to articulate power and knowledge within the apparatus of white capitalism, imperial discourses, and colonialism? In Winnipeg, I forward the pedagogy and the practice of diasporic theatre, Asian theatre, and Asian Canadian theatre as an imperative intervention against coloniality and is necessary to evolve towards a praxis of reconciliation and decolonization.
There is no other way for us to
build a culture of transitions than by carving a deep pathway of decolonization
that demands radical reciprocity, relationality, and critical responsibility in
Canada, the Philippines, and beyond where my body continues to seek a belonging
within the here, there, and elsewhere.
References:
Genota, Quimby. "Food Security in the Philippines." Climate Tracker Asia, December 28, 2021, https://climatetracker.asia/fo....
Go, Chaya Ocampo. "Women of Storm Surges: Meaning Making as Cultural Process of Social Repair for Yolanda Survivors." Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, vol. 65, no. 2, 2017, pp. 227–256. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/6.... Accessed 15 May 2025.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work. 2nd ed., Stanford University Press, 2015.
Statistics Canada. "Filipino Canadian Proud with a Strong Sense of Belonging." Statistics Canada, 19 June 2023, https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/3883-filipino-canadian-proud-strong-sense-belonging.
Statistics Canada. Focus on Geography Series, 2021 Census of Population: Winnipeg, Census Metropolitan Area. 8 February 2023, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/page.cfm?lang=E&topic=10&dguid=2021S0503602.
“Total Number of OFWs Estimated at 2.3 Million (Results from the 2018 Survey on Overseas Filipinos).” Philippine Statistics Authority, 27 Apr. 2019, https://psa.gov.ph/content/tot.... Accessed 15 May 2025.
Dennis D. Gupa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre and Film, Faculty of Arts, University of Winnipeg. Dennis is a theatre director and applied theatre practitioner whose body of works cuts across various disciplines and cultures. They received their PhD in Applied Theatre at the University of Victoria and MFA in Directing at the University of British Columbia.