In Tagalog, balikbayan refers to someone who returns home to the Philippines, an identity that’s celebrated. A “balikbayan box” is a care package that Filipinos living abroad send back to their families, often containing food, toiletries, and clothes. The tradition was popularized during the ‘70s under the Marcos regime, in which Filipinos living abroad were encouraged to send goods and earnings back to the Philippines to help boost its economy. Today still, many Filipino-Americans send balikbayan boxes back to their families in the Philippines.
This week, the boxes show up at the new show at the Living Gallery, near the Myrtle-Broadway station, called “Balikbayan: Coming Home to Your Whole Self,” which was put on by the Tsismosas Collective, a group of six Filipina artists that dates to 2022. The group is trying to reclaim the stereotypically negative tsismosa in order to show work that grapples with themes of identity and what it means to return home, whether that is a physical place, the Philippines, or somewhere inside.
Christianne Padilla, a Brooklyn artist, by way of Denver, who is part of the group, had put together an interactive balikbayan box for the show, wrapping it with duct tape just like her mom did when Padilla was a kid.
“This is where you see your reflection in different fragments,” Padilla says about the boxes. “And it’s to understand that all of these tiny pieces of yourself, make you who you are in the moment, and ‘you’ in this moment is the best version of yourself.”
The word tsismosa, meaning one who gossips, originally derived from the Spanish word “chismosa.” It was introduced to the Philippines during its more than three centuries of Spanish rule, a time when Filipino culture relied on oral tradition, and women often used gossip as a way to exchange news, stories, and warnings, or discuss difficult topics.
“It’s a word that is used to mostly degrade women,” says Padilla. “As an all-women collective, we’re reclaiming this word in two different ways, as a way to spread oral traditions, and rethink degradation.”
“We took that cheeky word and turned it upside down,” chimes in Alitha Alford, 38, an East Harlem artist who is also part of the collective.
“The pieces are so colorful and earthy, and I feel like it really describes what the Filipinos are, they’re the salt of the earth,” Alford says. “They’re wonderful, loving. Like everybody that meets a Filipino is like, ‘Man, I love them!’ They make you feel like you’re at home.”
Casielle Santos-Gaerlan, 29 and a Park Slope native, says the group chose to debut the show during Filipino American History Month, which is October, because they say the history is widely unknown to the average American, even though they cite the popular idea that Filipinos were among the first group of Asian immigrants to land in the U.S. The month celebrates a date in 1587 when a Spanish galleon docked in what is now Morro Bay, California, carrying the first Filipino man to land on what would later be U.S. soil.
“We’ve been here for a long time. Why don’t we know about that?” asks Santos-Gaerlan. “And I think it’s because we wanted to assimilate. I think it’s because we wanted to kind of camouflage or morph into the American identity when we didn’t stand in our light of being Filipino.”
Among Santos-Gaerlan’s contributions to the show is a print called No History, No Self, along with oil paintings that show reimagined images of women that look like her.
When she was told her work was reminiscent of Gauguin she said, “yeah, but that was a white man who went to Tahiti and painted all these women. And this is a complete different transformation. This is coming from my perspective, it’s coming from my gaze.”
“We could be thousands of miles apart from our ancestors, but we all are one in a way,” says Christie Rafol, a 33 year old watercolor painter from Queens who is also part of the group. “We are all humans. We’re all on planet earth. So that really is, for me, it’s beyond just being a Filipino, it really is more about the larger collective.”
“Balikbayan: Coming Home to Your Whole Self” runs at the Living Gallery, at 1094 Broadway, through Oct. 27.
Photos taken by Lauren Hartley for Bushwick Daily.
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