Streets of Diwata Incident

Our history as a people and as a diaspora is fraught with discrimination, displacement, and erasure by colonizers and white supremacists.

In these times full of divisiveness and fueled by hate towards “the other,” we, as a community, should hold strong to what our immigrant ancestors have sacrificed to build, to our heritage and culture, to the rights and freedoms that we have.

Our repeated and ongoing attempts at reclaiming that which was lost, which was stolen from us, and healing ourselves of our ancestral and ongoing trauma are met with hostility and viewed as an attack and act of rebellion by the very system and ideology that has marginalized us. A system and ideology that is falsely, out of fear, trying to protect itself from those it has disenfranchised and stolen from, including this land we live in.

This, sadly, has not gone away. This is something that is still happening to us up to this day. In fact, it just happened at the Streets of Diwata mural painting event on October 24, 2020 where an entitled white man on an electric wheelchair who, for reasons that are only clear to him, considered it his right to disrupt the event by complaining about the murals that were being painted and tried to erase it by hosing it down with water. He also sprayed water on our production organizer and one of the muralists. Being hosed down and erased is a source of our trauma. Being hosed down and erased reeks of asserting supremacy, authoritarianism, and racism. It is an indelible part of American history, our history.

Show your support and solidarity, come and view  the Streets of Diwata murals at historic Bonifacio Street and Lapu Lapu Street in San Francisco. Amplify your voice and take a self guided tour then fill out a survey. 

These acts, no matter how small, are radical and significant. 

The fact that we exist in spite of it all is revolutionary.