A Reflection On Building a Filipino Festival
By VIRGIL YALONG
Imagine for a minute a job where you are asked to perform immeasurable tasks with limited resources on hours that go well into the night and stretch into the early morning, going day to day not knowing how much you have progressed, if at all. Then finally after months have passed and your exerted efforts of nearly half your life are seen and experienced by the public for exactly eight hours. Eight hours that can go by as quickly as a second and yet somehow last forever. With the time marked by agonizing, stressful moments of disaster after disaster which you must fix with a Macguyver-type flair and a mixture of brilliant tact and circus pomp so that other people can enjoy your exhausted eight hours of festivities and never really know the truly miraculous wonders you pulled out of your hat that day. Then finally you find sleep and reacquaint yourself with your bed after months of not knowing each other, so that you can wake up the next day and start the rotation all over again. And the funny thing is, when you wake up, you smile because you love, LOVE what you do.
This is the life of a festival builder, a volunteer with a heart for its people, a community leader, faceless and unrecognized, but as essential to the system of government as water is to life. I can’t remember the first time I volunteered for anything or even what the event was for. Volunteering and community service was something that was ingrained in me from an early age. Now at a round about age I find myself still volunteering and still serving the community that I grew up in. This time I am serving as a festival builder for the Filipino American Arts and Culture Festival in San Diego also known as the FilAmFest, a festival that we hold literally down the street from where I grew up. I joined the festival along with a group of childhood friends who also share the same training and principles of community service. With our experience working in the community we were ready to do work, expecting to help set up and move tables and chairs around. We came in on the third week of August and the festival was to be held on the first Saturday of October. Seven weeks until the festival and our first meeting with the organizing committee had six people, the three chief organizers and us. A number of volunteers had been stretched too thin and dropped out. During that sit-down we were told exactly where the festival stood at that point and where they wanted to take it from there and how our involvement as volunteers can help. After that meeting, in confidence with my two friends we sat down again to contemplate whether or not we would take on the over-bearing task of what seemed to be an almost sinking ship. We knew at the time that taking up the challenge we would be in over our heads but surviving by the skin of our teeth was where we thrived and we relished the chance to do the impossible and improbable. This was our calling and we accepted the task and got to work the next day.
It was the FilAmFest’s third year of existence and our first time being on the staff. We were assigned to coordinate the entertainment program on two stages. Beyond that we would help around with marketing and some fund development. It was pertinent for us to bring in all the resources we have collected in our young lives and for the first time we felt a collective strength of friends, family, and co-workers rally with us to help build the festival. We saw the growth of our little neighborhood festival rise from hundreds in attendance to 8,000 strong. Naturally after that we stayed on for the next year’s festival committee again under the entertainment banner with some extra duties attached. That year being our second we were able to work out some kinks and restart from a new angle based on the year before. We kept most of our staff and began rebuilding the festival motivated by the success of the past year. With a new and longer time frame our little group of three volunteers each spearheaded an aspect of the festival to outreach to the community. We had special surprise performances around San Diego by our headlining performer international singer/songwriter Kitchie Nadal to help market the festival which also included a special guest appearance at my high school alma mater Morse High. In that year our 8,000 strong in attendance had attracted a tremendous count of over 12,000.
By this time the FilAmFest’s rapid growth had put the entire Organizing Committee on the community radar. It was made known that we were a group of college age community volunteers and young professionals working with a group of senior community leaders to build what is now the largest Filipino Arts and Culture Festival in San Diego. Despite the well-known problematic and self-defeating quarrelling within the Filipino community that pits provinces, genders, social agendas, and ages against each other, somehow this motley crew that was thrown together and representing all the way from Illinois to Louisiana and back to California found a common ground of which the FilAmFest rests its foundation. I have come to know these characters over the years, worked with them, partied with them, and worked with them some more. Not a day goes by that one of us will mention to another how much we would rather be doing this than our regular day jobs, which consists of artists, social workers, and teachers. By chance my little group of three friends that walked into that first meeting three years ago expecting to help set up chairs were embedded into the Organizing Committee each under our own niche to build the festival again in its fifth year. This work has afforded me the chance to see and meet new people everyday and be introduced to some interesting personal philosophies on life and the spirit of the Filipino American community.
Sometimes I am asked why I volunteer and give so much to the community. I wondered that myself and asked the same question to other community leaders and festival builders that I know including our own Festival Director for FilAmFest 2008 Lily Ann Villaraza, the Marketing Coordinator for the Festival of Philippine Arts & Culture (FPAC in San Pedro,CA) Kat Carrido, and Hip Hop MC Geologic of the Blue Scholars (based in Seattle, WA). Answering my questions through email each of these individuals summed up their answer in the same tone despite being from separate corners of the U.S. Lily Ann Villaraza wrote, “I do it because I was inspired by others who shared with me their passion for others outside of their family [and] for the community and I saw how it fulfilled them. I see family and community as one.” Kat Carrido shared the same sentiment saying, “It’s a ‘soul purpose,’ if you will. I have a responsibility to my ancestors and all they have done to get me (and our people) this far; and for the youth, the future.” Finally Geologic summed up the value of our community like this, “I am nothing without my community. Every individual, whether they acknowledge it or not, is part of a community and plays a role in whether things change or stay the same. I have a guarded optimism. I’m a dreamer but also a realist. Even when things look bleak, repression breeds resistance and I’m a firm believer of the collective power of the people!” So why do we volunteer? We volunteer because it’s a part of us. It’s a deepened relationship with the community that sparks a want to give our best. It is our contribution, whether minute or vast, to building up from where we once were, to change, to make that difference.
In passing I read a note from Geologic who heard his friend say how it’s a great time to be Filipino right now. And in turn he answered back, “Nah man its ALWAYS been a great time to be Filipino. We just needed some dancers and a boxer to legitimize it.” It was in this short conversation that I found the theme for this year’s FilAmFest and presented it to the rest of the staff. Honoring the Past, Building the Future. It is the idea that we were meant to take up the banner and carry it with us until the next generation was ready to take it further. In recent events we have seen many Filipinos accomplish a lot and as a whole we have experience a renewed vigor and love for our culture. In 1986 the nation of the Philippines felt it in the power of the people. Years before, the Katipunan would inspire the generations to come. And now the passing of Cory Aquino, an icon in Philippine history reminds me of why we are the land of the morning. The sun is setting on a great generation of Filipinos and will rise on a new generation in the morning. Yes it is a great time to be Filipino and just as much it is our time to be great.
note: This article was written in response to the Festival activities of 2009 and after the Manny Pacquiao fight over Miguel Cotto and the crowning of yet another west coast dance team on MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew.
About the author: Virgil Yalong is a three year volunteer with the FilAmFest. He began volunteering with helping to coordinate the Entertainment and currently is the Marketing Director and Lead Designer for FilAmFest 2009. He also helps host the Bayanihan stage and goes by the stage name Big Virg. Virgil can be reached at vyalong@hotmail[dot]com.
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