Introduction

The Home We Made was a project that documented the issues of Filipino im/migrant workers living in New York City. In 2023, I met the staff of Damayan Migrant Workers Association, an organization led by Filipino migrant workers and focused on championing workers’ rights and combating labor trafficking. I spent the summer and fall attending their events—legal clinics, health screenings, members’ meetings—as a volunteer. Utilizing an illustration technique that borrows ideas from both reportage and anthropological fieldwork, I captured the organization’s sense of community and protectiveness.

Simultaneously, I worked with Professor Premilla Nadasen’s class, Building Worker Power, in the Barnard College History Department, to create a historical timeline for Damayan’s twentieth anniversary. The timeline, published both online and in print, fills in gaps in Damayan’s own historical archive and demonstrates illustration’s potential for filling gaps in under-documented histories.

The collaboration resulted in two divergent but complementary approaches to depicting the realities of Filipino im/migrant workers. The timeline, published by Damayan, was more straightforward and featured portraits of some prominent members of the organization. My private drawings, which I have come to call my “Field Notes,” deliberately avoided depicting people, focusing instead on spaces, objects, and handwriting. My Field Notes recorded a population that was undeniably present in New York but made invisible by a lack of media coverage as well as threats to their safety. These became the building blocks toward a larger visual essay about Little Manila in Queens, from my perspective as a recent migrant from the Philippines.

Research

I volunteered at Damayan events, overseeing registration, clicking through slideshows, and cleaning up. This allowed me to sit in at meetings and observe Damayan’s community-building strategies. During Damayan’s events, the staff would open with the same directive: stories told in this room do not leave it. This was to protect the privacy of attendees, many of whom were undocumented, seeking help out of a trafficking situation, or had ongoing legal cases. Barred from traditional methods of documentation, I turned to drawing, which led me to design my own note-taking system: I would not draw their faces or defining features, or take down names.

Reportage drawing is defined by art scholar Dr. Louis Netter as “the contemporary practice of drawing people and places in situ from observation, memory, imagination or some combination thereof” (208). It often works within self-imposed rules or parameters to maintain intimacy with a subject or induce discovery (214). In avoiding drawing people, I drew objects and rooms, and mimicked handwriting on boards and signs; when the director asked attendees to describe the typical Damayan member, she wrote their responses on the board and I drew those too.

Reportage drawing is typically the published product itself, but in this project, drawing served privately as my Field Notes, mnemonic devices for journaling my experience with Damayan. This was also inspired by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s philosophy on drawing as a form of note-taking, in how it “intervenes in the reckoning of reality in ways that writing and photography do not” (13). Drawn on 3”x5” index cards, the smallness and vignette-like nature of my Field Notes emphasize the privacy and anonymity being granted to the human subjects.

I worked to create drawings that “come across as fragments that are suggestive of a world beyond, a world that does not have to be explicitly recorded and is in fact all the more “complete” because it cannot be completed” (Taussig 13). I captured food brought by members, forms and pens crowded on folded tables. The trays of home-cooked food, frequently emptied by the end of the day, speak to the nourishment, and comfort, the community provides to itself. The ever-present stacks of paper—attendance sheets, registration forms, agendas, questionnaires—suggest the ceaseless administrative work that a non-profit must do to locate funds and stay organized.

COLLABORATION WITH HISTORIANS

The director of Damayan informed me that they were in the planning stages of creating a historical timeline with Barnard Professor of History Premilla Nadasen. I proposed turning it into a visual project, and it became a collaboration involving me, Professor Nadasen, and her class of ten undergraduate students.

The students looked through Damayan’s archival documents, many of which had to be manually scanned. We constructed a list of twenty milestones in the group’s history of migrant worker organizing. We crafted an alternative approach to the timeline by giving wider historical context to each event as well as how they connected and led to one another, rather than viewing them as isolated achievements.

The students and I interviewed a dozen members of Damayan who were present for some of these events. The questions emphasized their physical presence and experience: what was it like in that moment? How did you feel? What happened next? The focus on sensory—and sentimental—details became a helpful guide for illustration, especially whenever photographic evidence was lacking.

The collaboration and the use of illustration were meaningful for Professor Nadasen and her class. “I think the illustrations were extremely important,” she said. “Historians sometimes try to bring order to history where the order is less evident at the moment when people are doing the work.” The use of a singular long, flowing illustration, according to her, “made evident that the path is not always straight and that organizers are figuring things out day to day. And sometimes there are crests and sometimes there are lulls in organizing. And so, I really appreciated the representation.”

"TWENTY YEARS OF DAMAYAN"

The illustration in Twenty Years of Damayan was deliberately more conventional compared to my Field Notes. Following input from Damayan staff, it highlights members who had made significant contributions to the organization, such as its founder, current executive director, and longtime members. This shift to explicit representation was necessary to honor their wishes, and to build trust and community with Damayan members. In return, I was able to propose experimental and generative approaches to the timeline.

The long, multi-layered format itself communicates the fluidness of historical events, one into another, and the context of each milestone. The Field Note methodology strongly informed the approach to the timeline; while the digital version occasionally features photography, the visuals are largely illustrated, emphasizing memory and a larger collective narrative as opposed to individuals or individual events. Archival research and our interviews, translated into illustration, helped fill gaps left by incomplete photo documentation.

With the twenty events as my roadmap, I illustrated two 80-inch-long visual timelines with colored pencil on paper, then stitched them together on Photoshop.

I designed the print version in a format I termed a “Z fold.” Readers flip through a horizontal pamphlet that emphasizes the dual timelines. They unfold the upper page to reveal the text written by the students. The format ensures Damayan’s accomplishments remain the focus of the publication, while allowing readers to learn more.

The digital version, also designed and coded by me, displayed the text accompanied with multimedia material, including audio clips from our member interviews, whose portraits I illustrated.

LITTLE MANILA PROJECT

After the launch of Twenty Years, I returned to my Field Notes. There was potential to continue exploring absence and negative space in illustration. This interest brought me to Little Manila, a Filipino im/migrant enclave in Queens, New York. Despite being inhabited for decades, the city only formally recognized it as “Little Manila” in 2022. Today, it encounters threats of gentrification and is weakened by gerrymandering.

I explored Little Manila and created Field Notes with the same techniques I employed in Damayan. I avoided people and recorded structures, shops, and signage.

Having learned how to interview from my time with Barnard History, I spoke with some residents—many of them members of Damayan—in order to visualize maps of Filipino workers' subway routes and the way political district lines cleave the Filipino neighborhood into pieces.

My subjects—buildings, roads, entire maps—were much larger in scale compared to Damayan’s tables and hallways. While my Field Notes in Damayan headquarters served to protect the identities of its vulnerable members, the same technique in Little Manila helped emphasize its enduring presence in New York as its inhabitants are sidelined by mainstream media.

REFLECTIONS & FUTURE

I had first contacted Damayan with the vague agenda of raising awareness about their organizing efforts. I gained access to staff meetings and unpublished archives, but also formed important connections with members, which moved me to illustrate their story in a way that contrasts with the often formal and detached nature of mainstream journalism and history. In prioritizing the anonymity of a vulnerable population, my illustrations were still arguably factual—everything was something I'd personally witnessed—but they moved beyond traditional photojournalism because they all called attention to what, or who, isn't depicted.

The experience led me to explore Little Manila with invaluable insight. Limited by time and budget, I directed my focus to the loud—bright signs, stocked stores, the looming elevated track—to highlight the quiet, and composed a profile of a town at risk of disappearing.

In these cases, illustration became a tool for protection, for filling gaps, and for bringing nuance and vibrance to an otherwise straightforward chronicling of places and events— important for any history of Filipinos in New York.

A small but final note: while excerpts were pulled from our interviews with Damayan members for publication, the audio and transcripts would remain the organization's property. This was an agreement between them and Professor Nadasen that was initially resisted by Barnard College. In upholding the agreement, the members' ownership of their stories is reinforced.

"The goal is to further Damayan's work," she says, "...and just because we're gathering the stories doesn't mean those stories belong to us."

References

Nadasen, Premilla. Zoom interview. 20 Feb. 2024.

Taussig, Michael T. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Netter, Louis. “Mapping Experience in Reportage Drawing.” Journal of Illustration, vol. 3, no. 2, Dec. 2016, pp. 207–31. https://doi.org/10.1386/jill.3.2.207_1.