I went to the screening of Curtis Choy’s film, The Fall of the I-Hotel (2005, 58 minutes) at the Oakland Museum of California last night with a sense of obligation to my research for the Activist Imagination project. I left with reverance and lots of food for thought.
Some impressions:
• I sort of thought that by default, early APA graphics would borrow heavily from established visual languages of resistance (such as Chicano graphic arts or social realism). Surprisingly, the mural on the outside of the I-Hotel was very cartoonish. More Vaughn Bodé than Diego Rivera.
• The film also included a beat-infused poem by Al Robles. Which maybe means that Robles was at least equally influenced by San Francisco’s literary history than other essentially activist or APA forms. Which leads me to a new line of thinking: of course APA art can look or sound any way. Does this seem was more so in the old days than now (when everything seems so hybridized and postmodern)?
• Shots of the original Kearny Street Workshop storefront inspired me to think, If I could go back in time and check it out, one thing I’d want to know is what Cooper Black (the typeface of KSW’s original signage) conveyed in the 1970s. Today, it’s so retro, goofy and playful (and judging from the pop culture references on the Wikipedia entry for Cooper Black, “budget”), it’s hard to imagine what it signified in the context of the I-Hotel.
• The struggle to save the I-Hotel could signify the birth of APA activism, but the gestation of a movement of this magnitude went far beyond this one building. The I-Hotel happened to be the right time and place (a pretty great congruence of ‘Asian’ and ‘Pacific’ in Asian and Pacific American, right?), following over a decade of displacement — those manongs were the last 50 of the 10,000 Fil-Ams displaced from Manilatown (as Al Robles explained) — and of course, the historical moment.
There wouldn’t have been an I-Hotel struggle without the post-1965 immigration wave and the 1960s youth movement, which in turn wouldn’t have emerged without the 1950s civil rights movement and the collapse of old-world-style colonialism around the world.
I think some people view activism today with a sense of futility, and the 1960s and 1970s seem like a golden era when change was possible. But we have to keep in mind how political change evolves over time.
In the 1990s, I thought the times were similar to the 1950s: obsessed with technology and consumerism, revolution seemed distant, if not impossible. I was wrong. The picture-perfect nuclear family was only middle-class white (male) America’s narrative. The 1950s marches and boycotts were certainly more consequential, but the 1990s were not without their acts of mass resistance in LA and Seattle. (So instead of, How do we create a revolution now, a better question would be, How do we continue and amplify the struggle for racial, gender, and class justice in addition to facing emergent issues — immigration status, the global “north-south” divide, environmental justice — with a united front? What does this mean for APA activists?)
• One last note about history… I know the impact of the 1965 immigration act is far-reaching, but had to be reminded that it made possible the birth of the APA movement. And working backwards: Yes, as I wrote in “The Stone Age,” the history of APA art is short — as so, the history of Asian Pacific America as we know it now. (Next year, Kearny Street Workshop celebrates its 35th anniversary — and to all of us immigrants and decendants of immigrants, let’s also celebrate the 43rd year anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.)
—
The screening was followed by a panel with Emil deGuzman, Curtis Choy, Al Robles, and Dr. Estella Habal. I would have liked to ask them:
Why was art so important in this particular struggle? Clearly a screening on the 30th anniversary of the I-Hotel demonstrates the importance of media, and the organizers in the film evidenced rigorous organizing tactics. So why was it important to have murals and screenprints?
[ Judging by a response to a different question, the answer probably would be something like, "Self-expression is an act of defiance. We were asserting our oun human-ness in a time where we were being told that we didn't count." Having seen and sat on numerous panels where the "why does art matter" question was asked, invariably by people who already believe it matters, this answer's fine. Still, I wouldn't mind being surprised by some new insight here. ]
My second question would have been:
For future APA activists, what are key issues and how must our tactics change?
I can surmise on possible responses, but as usual, I’d rather leave the strategizing to the strategizers.
—
Watching The Fall of the I-Hotel was a contradictory experience for me. On one hand, the shots of the final evictions made the event more real — the brutality of the police department was terrifying, the spirit of resistance electrifying. On another hand, the historic footage matched my pre-exisiting “memory” of the event. Even though I was born in 1977, the same year as the evictions, I must have seen clips of the film or photographs from other sources. So the film is important and worth watching, but it also cannonizes this event… And I imagine that it has a similar effect for everyone else of my generation.
This brings up a host of issues for me as a visual artist: How do we tell what’s real? How we assimilate visual images into memory, and who do we tell them apart? How do we contend with the limits of representation while continuing to struggle to control our means of self-representation?
[There's some really interesting film theory that relates the cinematic apparatus to our psyche... For more, check out the essays in The Dream of the Audience, catalogue for the Teresa Cha exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum.]
So here are some photographic impressions. I snapped these from my seat in the theater.
Setting. My poor woman’s Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Richard Hongisto, sheriff. He spent 5 days in jail for contempt for resisting eviction orders, and later reluctantly oversaw the evictions.
While so much of the film was so distinctly 1970s — the cars, the activist’s facial hair and clothing styles — riot cops look relatively the same.
