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 >