Introduction

Nursing These Wounds, a series of panels hosted by KULARTS in the spring of 2021, has brought together artists, poets, scholars, activists, and nurses to, on one hand, investigate the colonial underpinnings of Filipinx nurses in the United States, and on the other hand to mourn the staggering loss of life that the Covid-19 pandemic has wrought upon Filipino communities nation-wide. While the panel Nurses in the Diaspora focused on the relationship between nursing and political activism as ongoing struggles informed by colonialism, racism, and healthcare inequities prior to and during the pandemic, Nurse Narratives in the Arts engaged creative work by poets and artists who aim to theorize a poetics and politics of care and migration, and recast the Filipina nurse with reverence, complexity, and agency. Nursing These Wounds as an interdisciplinary series thus asks how colonial history and the inheritance of historical trauma shape the lives of Filipina nurses today. Further, what is to be gained in conceptualizing and reimagining the histories, lives, and politics of Filipina nurses through art and performance?

Filipina Nurses in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Colonial Legacy

The statistics detailing the disproportionate deaths of Filipina nurses to Covid-19 have made the news and media rounds to widespread dismay, grief, and anger. As of December 2020, CNN reported that one-third of all nurses who have died from coronavirus in the United States were Filipino, despite Filipino nurses making up only 4% of the overall nursing population.¹ What accounts for the high presence of Filipino nurses in the United States, and their disproportionate death counts during the pandemic? Catherine Ceniza Choy’s 2003 book Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History explains how the U.S. occupation of the Philippines instituted nursing education programs that promised upward mobility and opportunities for travel to Filipina women but led to discrimination, lower wages relative to their white counterparts, and poor working conditions in American hospitals. The delusion of American manifest destiny established the Filipina nursing force in the United States—out of a self-bestowed benevolence and duty, American nurses educated their “little brown sisters” in Western medical practices, and Filipina nurses would be marketed to American hospitals as highly obedient and unlikely to stir up labor disputes. Current studies attempting to address the disproportionate number of Filipino nurses dying from coronavirus suggest this colonial lineage continues to inform the roles Filipina nurses are relegated to in American hospitals, and the extent to which their labor and lives are considered expendable—CNN further reports that Philippine-trained nurses are more exposed to Covid-19, as they are disproportionately assigned to ICUs, emergency rooms, long-term care facilities, and nursing homes compared to white American-trained nurses.²

When we untangle the statistics from the colonial lineage they are born from, an ongoing and contemporary reality comes into focus—that is, the American hospital industry has always considered the Filipina nurse, and broadly the Filipina body, as an expendable source of labor. Filipino/American communities’ continued view of nursing as a lucrative career path along with the genuine heroism of Filipina nurses at the frontlines of a global health crisis come into sharp contrast with the historical truth that the pandemic has wrought—the incommensurate number of Filipino nurses who have been exposed to and died from the virus is a direct consequence of the American nation-state’s exploitation and scapegoating of the Filipina as a producer and object of capital. While Filipina nurses’ labor provides necessary medical service and contributes to a global medical labor market, and while Filipina nurses do enjoy class mobility in American society through their profession, they remain subject to violent racialization and gendering by the white supremacist state which situates the Filipina within a white-black binary of racial, sexual, and class hierarchy.

Filipina Nurses vs. the American State: the Narciso-Perez Case

Empire of Care demonstrates the precarious position of the Filipina at the very foundation of American-led nursing programs in the Philippines during U.S. colonization, along with a more recent example of how Filipina nurses have always been and continue to serve as objects of both labor and carceral punishment for the U.S. state. In the chapter “Trial and Error: Crime and Punishment in America’s ‘Wound Culture,’” Choy details the trials of two Filipino nurses, Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, who in June 1976 were arrested and indicted for the poisoning of 35 patients at the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both Narciso and Perez had arrived in the United States in 1971 and were permanent residents at the time of their arrest and trials (Perez was four months pregnant). While they complied with the investigation and testified before the grand jury, the FBI harassed, intimidated, and threatened the women in the attempt to recuperate the bureau’s own reputation, along with that of the U.S. government, after America’s loss in the Vietnam War and unsuccessful cases involving Patty Hearst and Jimmy Hoffa.³ Choy describes how the media coverage of the case and sensationalized nonfiction books depicted Narciso and Perez as silent, dark, treasonous foreigners whose “soft voice” and “shy demeanor” belied the true faces of cold-blooded, mentally ill killers.⁴ Further, Choy includes the testimony of a prosecution witness in which he utilizes anti-immigrant and anti-black attitudes to seemingly protect Perez, stating that if she were to return to the Philippines and work as a nurse there she could do “a whole lot of good,” and inventing a black man in his account to deflect blame from Perez.⁵

In these accounts, we see how the white American imagination renders the Filipina as simultaneously submissive, responsible, inscrutable, dangerous, duplicitous, and evil, all within frameworks of colonialism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-blackness. The FBI’s case against the two nurses leaned on these same rhetorics about the enigma of the Filipina, and Narciso and Perez were convicted and imprisoned in 1977 for poisoning and conspiracy. Philippine- and American-based support groups were able to raise legal aid to file a motion to dismiss the case, eventually clearing and releasing the nurses from prison in 1978 due to the original case’s circumstantial evidence, lack of motive, and questionable testimonies.⁶ However, the Narciso and Perez case would continue to have lasting effects for Filipina nurses all across the country—they experienced death threats and job termination as the American public, patients, and hospitals alike had grown wary of this villainized foreign-born professional group.

¹ Shoichet, Catherine. “Covid-19 is taking a devastating toll on Filipino American nurses.” CNN, December 11, 2020. < https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/filipino-nurse-deaths/index.html >
² Ibid.
³ Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care. Duke University Press, 2003.
⁴ Ibid, 147.
⁵ Ibid, 151.
⁶ Ibid, 165.

Introduction

The first part of this essay examined how the disproportionate percentage of Filipina nurses who have died as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a legacy of American imperialism that has endangered the lives of Filipina nurses, both in the context of their workplaces and against the American carceral state. The United States’ post-World War II occupation of the Philippines instituted Western nurse education programs that in turn established a global source of labor, and subsequently continues to relegate Filipina nurses to positions in hospitals where they are more likely to be exposed to unsafe working conditions in comparison with white, domestic-trained nurses. While Filipina nurses are discriminated against as a racialized, gendered labor group, the 1976 case against Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, who were wrongly arrested and indicted for the poisoning of 35 patients at the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, demonstrates how Filipinas’ treatment in the workplace is directly related to the U.S. state, who in charging these nurses, established and proliferated a national atmosphere of xenophobia, racism, and misogyny. The second part of this essay will examine the work of Jason Magabo Perez and Jenifer Wofford, whose forays in film/performance and illustration challenge the aesthetic forms of their respective genres and mediums to reclaim agency, personal narrative, and transnational histories for the Filipina nurses at the center of their projects.

“YONIE NARRATES”: Against the Documentarian Form

Neither Narciso and Perez have spoken publicly about the case, a reluctance which is understandable given how the American media depicted them in racist, sexist, xenophobic tones. While Choy’s work has become a canonical sociological text on the history of Filipino nurses’ relationship to American imperialism, Nursing These Wounds emphasizes not only the histories and politics that frame the trajectory of Filipino nurses in the United States but also on creative works that aim to reframe individual and group narratives. While the social sciences offer statistics as a snapshot of current conditions, which then provoke interpretations of the histories and politics that have created those conditions, the creative works highlighted by KULARTS through its nursing series aim to complicate and expand understandings of the Filipina nurse as, on one hand, embedded within and subject to colonial histories and, on the other hand, complex agents of their own nonlinear narratives that do not always fit perfectly within predetermined trajectories of historical trauma, or national or identitarian redemption. These works also employ aesthetic genres that often depict national history or identity, but the artists hybridize or subvert those forms to critique the political narratives embedded within the artwork.

Such a reframing was offered by the son of Leonora Perez, poet and scholar Jason Magabo Perez, whose forays into experimental filmmaking and performance attempt to rethink the forms of ethnography, interview, and research, moving toward what he calls a critical and lyrical imagination through which he provides a venue (film) for his mother to tell her story in an associative way, as opposed to a linear and predetermined script. In a film entitled “YONIE NARRATES,” Perez records his mother, now elderly, reading from her prison diaries. The editing of the film is minimal, and Perez allows moments that would otherwise be cut to remain in and even structure the piece—swivels of the camera from Leonora in the foreground to himself and crewmembers behind the scenes, Perez himself walking through the background behind Leonora, his mother scolding him for giving her the letters out of order, exchanges between mother and son in which he interrupts her to ask her to elaborate or instructs her to add more pauses in her reading, a shot of Perez seated on the floor, highlighting portions of the script as Leonora watches over his shoulder, seated in her chair. Leonora continually goes off script, prompted by her son, and the film concludes with her off-the-cuff remonstration of the American Dream and American justice:

“There’s no American Dream. It’s bullshit. That’s it. Because I don’t believe in American justice. There was no justice when we were on trial. And the thing is, I didn’t want to be a U.S. citizen. I really resented that. That’s why I didn’t get my U.S. citizenship for a long time, because I said I don’t want it, because I don’t believe in justice. There was no justice in this country. Because I wanted to take your grandma and grandpa back here, so they can stay with us, that’s the only thing that forced me to become a U.S. citizen. If they were not alive before, I would not be a U.S. citizen and I would just stay as immigrant so I can stay here permanently. That’s the only reason. But up to now, I still don’t believe there is justice.”¹

The camera zooms out from Leonora’s face, and just as Jason begins to prompt the next segment of filming, she candidly states, “They might arrest me, huh?” at which point the entire crew raucously laugh. She continues, rifling through the pages of her letters, “Because I don’t believe it. They have no justice. I should say I was discriminated. This is true.” The film then fades out in slow motion as Leonora taps the pages on a hard surface, a gesture that might signify a closed case, contrasting the film’s own tentative grasp of itself as a form of interview or documentation. In fact, by constructing a nonlinear narrative with his mother about her experience in Ann Arbor, Perez sidesteps the ways in which documentary, ethnography, and interview particularly of marginalized subjects can be dehumanizing, demand a reproduction of victimhood, and replicate the very same disciplinary tactics of state violence that Perez wishes to critique. Perez explained during the Nurse Narratives in the Arts panel that he hoped his film provided more space for variations in affect, tone, laughter, seriousness, and pause for his mother to tell her story: “Instead of trying to discipline her to stick to script and tell the story, [I wanted to learn] how she comes up with vocabulary to draw power from it.”²

By allowing his mother to demonstrate her own narrative style, Perez provides an aesthetic venue for her to instate agency over her story, but to also refuse both a predefined victimhood and redemptive narrative around American citizenship, justice, and belonging that the documentarian aesthetic form can often enforce. In fact, the film’s rough cut and inclusion of more off-the-cuff scenes destabilize the documentary form that traditionally is understood to present unquestionable truth, despite heavy editing processes according to the filmmaker’s personal and/or political agenda. While another filmmaker might have inserted Leonora’s eventual exoneration into a narrative of immigrant success, Perez presents how his mother forcefully resents the American citizenship she eventually pursued in order to petition her parents to come to the United States. She disparages the false promises of the American Dream in the shadow of the American government’s failure to provide justice after she was wrongfully accused of the Ann Arbor poisonings and subsequently villainized in racialized, xenophobic tones across American media. Experimentation in narration and performance of this personal history, and in the visual medium used to capture that retelling, thus allows for the subversion of the documentary aesthetic form, but also of the ideological narratives attached to Filipino nursing as an American colonial project. Further, while Leonora disparages the American state for what it did to her, her performance of this refusal before the camera establishes a verbal and visual agency that the stereotype of the Filipina nurse does not account for.

Moments of Return: States of Liminality and Iconography Transformed

In the illustration work that San Francisco-based artist and educator Jenifer Wofford presented during the Nurse Narratives in the Arts panel, there is a constant tension between the sterile vs. the personal, the institutional vs. the domestic, and the mundane vs. the whimsical. Wofford admits to a personal obsession with liminality, “states that are neither solid nor liquid, the portal of a doorway, moments of transition and immigration,” and attributes these motifs in her work to being mixed race.³ Further, her work depicting Filipina nurses is inspired by her mother’s career as a wound care specialist nurse in Portland, Oregon, both the woundedness and healing of the body serving as central metaphors for Wofford’s illustrations of nurses in simultaneously mundane and otherworldly spaces. While her mother’s personal history has been a point of access to broadly explore Filipina nurse narratives in her work, Wofford also attributes a graduate class she took with Catherine Ceniza Choy at UC Berkeley as central to figuring out who she makes her work for and why, thus establishing both personal and political stakes in her illustrations, while still allowing for experimentation in narrative and form.

While the series Nurse Drawings (2006) included line drawings depicting Filipina nurses as somewhat disembodied, depersonalized figures against nebulous, corporeal, blob-like settings, upon green, sterile paper, the series Point of Departure (2007), her MFA thesis project, moved toward a kind of disjointed narrative that told a story with gaps, dependent on the sequencing and interpretation of the audience’s viewing. Wofford arranged 40 gouache paintings in the style of graphic-novel panels, such that they could be read horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.  The visual throughline of the series depicts a move from the lushness of an island to the sterility of a medical space, as a Filipina nurse leaves her home in the Philippines, goes through standardized education, and settles into an industrialized, Western setting. The apparently linear narrative crosses into magical realism, as a panel of the nurse looking out of a window from a sterile office bleeds into the next panel of a giant durian floating in the sky; another panel depicts a nurse becoming subsumed into branches, which transform in the next panel into a swarm of bandages. Along with the whimsical nature of the panels’ sequencing, gaps between the panels create a sense of opaqueness in the narrative, gesturing toward the limitless inner life of Filipina nurses whose diasporic histories are rich in geographic, political, and personal differences. Further, the gaps offer opportunities for the audience to fill in the blanks and construct their own narratives and interpretations.

In the previously discussed series, Wofford’s work experiments with conceptions of linear narrative through illustration and the panel form, allowing for play, imagination, mysticism, themes of migration, and longing to emerge in her depictions of the lives of Filipina nurses, most often viewed in the sterile, Western medical setting. In addition, her further works are explicitly political and root themselves in specific moments in American, Bay Area, and Filipino history and policy. The bus stop posters, Flor 1973–1978 (2008) from the SFAC “Art on Market Street” kiosk program center the character, Flor, a Filipina nurse who immigrated to the United States. The series contextualizes Flor’s life within the years of 1972, when Marcos declared martial law, 1973, when NASA launched Skylab, the first U.S. space station, 1975, the Thrilla in Manila boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and 1978, the assassination of Harvey Milk. Flor considers these events at the same time that she comments on the pivotal and mundane moments of her life, including her aunt encouraging her to pursue nursing while she is still a young girl in the Philippines, her move to California, downtime with her coworkers, menial paperwork, caring for her patients, walking up steep San Francisco hills in the fog, seeing snow for the first time, and sending money and balikbayan gifts back home. In this juxtaposition of personal recounting vs. historical events, Wofford not only continues to establish the complexity of Filipina nurse narratives, but also elevates their personal stories to the same level of importance as major historical and political events. While American society often views Filipina nurses as faceless automatons within the healthcare system, Wofford’s work quietly insists on the richness of those nurses’ inner lives, along with their historical and political meaning.

Further, the portrait MacArthur Nurses VI (2013) performs a reclaiming of an image that is iconic to the ongoing colonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines—the white American soldiers depicted in the famous photograph of General Douglas MacArthur and his staff landing in Leyte on October 20, 1944, thus marking the American reconquest of the Philippines from the Japanese during World War II. Wofford replaces MacArthur and his men with Filipina nurses, wading the water in white uniforms, their faces ranging from stern to stoic to melancholic. In her preface to her work, Wofford explained that the famous photograph is often cropped to exclude Philippine president Sergio Osmeña and diplomat Carlos Romulo, centering MacArthur as a singular hero in what had actually been a “collaborative” moment, a narrative which is further destabilized by the claims that the photograph was restaged to intentionally depict the Americans in a heroic light. Continuing to explain her decision to replace the American military officials with Filipina nurses, Wofford stated: “Whether it was fictionalized or not, there was this moment of return, of somehow making good on a promise, but I wanted to upend that and make that narrative about something else that I was more interested in.” Thus the artist not only highlights the legacy of Filipina nurses and depicts them as heroic, perhaps tragic figures, but also offers commentary on the “promise” of American colonialism in the Philippines as an apparent force of heroism, goodwill, and manifest destiny. The establishment of Western nursing education programs in the Philippines promised travel opportunities and upward mobility to Filipino nurses, but as the Narciso-Perez case and the treatment of Filipina nurses during the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate, Filipina nurses only became representative of the ongoing surveillance, control, and punishment of Filipinos broadly by the U.S. state. Nonetheless, Wofford insists on turning the heroic spotlighting upon the Filipina nurses of her portrait, revealing the hypocrisy of the original image of MacArthur, and suggesting the ability of Filipina nurses to survive and combat the struggles they encounter, whether that be in the process of migration, xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and labor maltreatment in American hospitals and American culture, or at the hands of the American government.

¹ Perez, Jason Magabo. “YONIE NARRATES.” < https://vimeo.com/266775818 >
² Nurse Narratives in the Arts. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMShmW-cWdQ >
³ Nurse Narratives in the Arts. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMShmW-cWdQ >

Introduction

While the first part of this essay examined how the colonial legacy of U.S.-founded nursing programs continues to affect the working conditions and safety of Filipina nurses, the second part focused on the creative works of Jason Magabo Perez and Jenifer Wofford, whose projects in film/performance and illustration, respectively, experiment with aesthetic forms to restage Filipina nurse narratives in ways that are at once deeply personal, transnational, and subversive against backdrops of American nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. The third and final part of this essay continues to contemplate Perez’ and Wofford’s works, this time using Filipinx scholar Neferti Tadiar’s concept of “remaindered life” to frame Filipinx creative and cultural production broadly as quotidian practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism. In their dailiness, Filipinx performance and artmaking thus offer technologies that evade the protocols of Western meaning-making and productivity, positing not only modes of survival but also new languages that might disrupt and replace existing hegemonic orders.

Art and “Remaindered Life”

The case of Leonora Perez and Filipina Narciso and the Ann Arbor hospital poisonings casts a shadow upon our understanding of the Filipina nurse in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the artwork of Jenifer Wofford allows us to recast the Filipina nurse in all her complexities, ranging from the embeddedness of her personal life within larger political and historical moments, to her heroism against the backdrop of American colonialism and militarism. Jason Magabo Perez employs the documentary form, but ruptures it, offering it as a venue for his mother to explore how memory, oral history, storytelling, filmic techniques, and affect can destabilize or refuse linear narratives about state surveillance and control. “YONIE NARRATES” ends with Leonora Perez’s refusal of American citizenship, and by extension American belonging, serving as a direct response to the false promise of both the American Dream and the failure of American justice, and as a reminder of the precarious position the Filipina nurse holds in the United States. That is, the Filipina nurse is a source of labor, her body read as both essential and expendable machinery in the medical field, and she is also a scapegoat, subject to historical structures of capitalism, racism, misogyny, and colonialism, the American state and public poised to villainize her at any convenient moment. Wofford’s work pushes against the stereotypes of the Filipina as a faceless automaton within the medical industry and demands both narrative agency, complexity, and recognition of individual and group narratives. The villainization of Filipina nurses along a racialized, colonial script manifests not only in public scrutiny, but in physical violence, as Perez pointed out in his introduction to Nurses in the Diaspora, when he linked his mother’s case to the recent attacks on Asian people across the country, provoked by the pandemic and Trump’s racist scapegoating to cover up his own government’s mishandling of the crisis:

I am terrified for her because these recent waves of anti-Asian, patriarchal violence exist along the same continuum and state imaginary of white supremacy and its attending productions of vulnerabilities and precarities of working class Asian diasporic women. None of these happenings are isolated historical events or incidents. Rather, they are endemic of broader, structural historical forces of racism, misogyny, capitalism, and colonialism. What I also invite you to think about or look for or to seek out is what professor Neferti Tadiar suggests as what gets remaindered or excessed or surplussed out of moments like this. What is seemingly lost or slightly out of frame for us to imagine? What love, what practice, what dreams, what visions of liberation are not so easy to notice or be noticed in this wake, in the heaviness of this grief, amidst the whitest of white noise and aggressive white liberalisms?¹

Insisting on the embeddedness of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic within overarching structures of inequity and historical violence, Perez invoked Tadiar’s concept of remaindered life which she describes in the essay, “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ and Remaindered Life under Empire,” thus alluding to the complex personal narratives that seep out of our structural analysis, put on display in creative work in particular. In this way, art and performance that attempt to reclaim historical and political narratives might offer “visions of liberation” against the fatalism of statistics and structural analysis, despite our collective mourning in the wake of white supremacy. Tadiar continues that remaindered life consists of practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism, and technologies that evade the protocols of Western meaning-making and productivity. Gesturing particularly to the Filipina subject who understands her own body as a mechanized technology within the hospital industrial complex, Tadiar suggests subversive and creative possibilities that such an understanding of one’s body and labor within structures of capitalism opens up:

I too have written on the different ways that Filipino women in particular participate in their own expert and exchange, as a medium of exchange, the way they and their families speak of their bodily lives as collateral for loans they take to gain overseas placement, while they themselves offer that very bodily life as the ante they risk in the cosmic gamble of overseas adventure that they embark upon. Rather than simply an ideological effect of capitalism, these practices of self-lending draw on the same seemingly anachronistic “political economy” and ontology, which the extant practice of spirit-mediumship, in its instantiation of fungible, extendable, divisible, alienable, transformable, and combinable selves, continues to be based on as well as renovate.²

Thus, Tadiar suggests that if Filipinas, or any minoritarian subject, are all inescapably embedded within structures of racism, capitalism, misogyny, and colonialism, quotidian practices of agency within those structures might allow for those subjects’ survival, in addition to their resistance and revolt against those existing structures. While these practices are unintelligible to the state and its colonial and capitalistic mechanisms, art and performance allow new languages to emerge to express them as modes of survival and resistance. Remaindered life as an aesthetic and political principal might then include a film produced in collaboration between mother and son with all its editorial seams on display, an elderly Filipina nurse going off the cuff and refusing to read a preordained script, even her resentment over her own naturalization to a country that failed her. Remaindered life might also be practiced in whimsical illustrations of Filipina nurses that remove her from the facelessness and antiseptic setting of the Western colonial medical industry, and place her within the limitless of her own diasporic imagination or within iconographic images of American-Philippine history. Further, remaindered life might also allow for what Choy describes as a residual consequence of the Narciso-Perez case—a heightened consciousness among Filipino nurses in the United States of “themselves as an immigrant, foreign-trained professional group in need of more complete awareness of their rights and obligations as foreign-trained nurses working in the United States.”³ Artwork and performance offer languages for the inarticulable and unintelligible, while also subverting the very structures and mechanisms that are incapable of reading such practices as legitimate.

This heightened consciousness extends from how Filipino nurses view themselves and their daily lives to how they view their positionality in relation to that of other migrant and racialized labor groups, as the same systems of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy shape the oppression of other communities who face parallel struggles against white supremacy, and with whom Filipinos might foster solidarity. For her contribution to the Nurses in the Diaspora panel, scholar, nurse educator, and grassroots activist Claire Valderama-Wallace shared how her work with GABRIELA Oakland and as a nursing professor extends into arts-based activism, as she encourages her students to utilize murals and performance to uplift and fight for Filipinx communities, but also to interrogate how they are imbricated in parallel struggles and how they might assist other domestic and international movements, from Black Lives Matter to sterilizations at the U.S.-Mexico border, to the plight of migrant domestic workers abroad: 

As Filipinos, we have resisted colonization for centuries, and we continue to. So I feel like it’s a core part of my role as a nurse educator to connect nursing students with movements to see these shared struggles. How are Filipino nurses seafarers and teachers? How are domestic workers connected? How are we connected to the ongoing mobilization of Amazon workers? Missing and murdered indigenous women? What are our connections? Colonialism asks us to see these as separate and isolated, but we know they’re connected, just as we are all connected.⁴

Thus, Nursing These Wounds offers multiple entry points to begin to reconceive our understanding of Filipino nurses’ historical relationship to American empire and how that relationship affects their safety and livelihood today. By combining historical perspectives, socially engaged visual art and literature, community activism, and accounts of the mechanisms of the health industry, we begin to see a fuller image of the Filipina nurse as not merely a statistic in the wake of the pandemic or a faceless victim of the global labor market. Rather, the Filipina nurse is a complex, historical figure, who in her daily struggles and survival embodies a politics and poetics of care, critiquing the oppressive systems she’s embedded within and actively combatting them for herself and her community.

¹ Nurses in the Diaspora. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F-Lueqc6zA >
² Tadiar, Neferti. “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ and Remaindered Life under Empire.” Qui Parle, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2015, 153.
³ Choy, 165.
⁴ Nurses in the Diaspora.

Part 1: An examination of how Nursing These Wounds, a series of panels hosted by KULARTS in the spring of 2021, has brought together artists, poets, scholars, activists, and nurses to, on one hand, investigate the colonial underpinnings of Filipinx nurses in the United States, and on the other hand to mourn the staggering loss of life that the Covid-19 pandemic has wrought upon Filipino communities nation-wide.

Part 2: Exploring the work of Jason Magabo Perez and Jenifer Wofford, whose forays in film/performance and illustration challenge the aesthetic forms of their respective genres and mediums to reclaim agency, personal narrative, and transnational histories for the Filipina nurses at the center of their projects.

Part 3: Continues to contemplate Perez’ and Wofford’s works, this time using Filipinx scholar Neferti Tadiar’s concept of “remaindered life” to frame Filipinx creative and cultural production broadly as quotidian practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR