Let's celebrate Mother's Day with Manilatown @ Maritime!

Manilatown Archive & Flipping the Boat
present
Filipino-American Connections at SF Maritime
Sunday, May 12th at 1pm

 A national park by Fisherman's Wharf might not be the most obvious destination for people seeking connections to Filipino and Filipino American history. Yet San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park is rich with resources that speak to the heritage of the second-largest Asian-American population in the Bay Area and California. Join Park Ranger Sabrina Oliveros for an overview of these resources. These include exhibits that reflect the age of Manila galleons and the industry of Manila rope; collections that tell of 20th-century American colonization and Philippine immigration; and historic ships that root people in the experiences of first-generation manongs from Carlos Bulosan to Larry Itliong.

Please join the Manilatown Heritage Foundation for an afternoon of family-friendly education. And then after the talk you'll be in one of San Francisco's liveliest neighborhoods for outdoor fun and fabulous food with Mom!

Please register on Eventbrite

About Sabrina Oliveros
Filipina-American Sabrina Oliveros has worked in Exhibits and Interpretation at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park since 2017. A podcast she co-created, Better Lives, Bitter Lies, explores social histories of the San Francisco waterfront and won the National Park Service's 2020 National Freeman Tilden Award for Excellence in Interpretation and Education. Sabrina is also the curator of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation's current visual art exhibition, "Imagine Kearny Street."

About the Flipping the Boat project:

“Flipping the Boat'' is a community engagement project that speaks to the power and agency of Filipino and other Bay Area residents to navigate their boats, ships, communities and lives. This collaboration between the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and San Francisco’s Maritime Museum celebrates our sovereign ways of being and encourages us to take the helm of our community “ships” to direct our own destiny.

Each month, from April to July 2024 free intergenerational and family-friendly workshops will take place at the International Hotel Manilatown Center to teach people how to create their own miniature boats that will bear their dreams and wishes for themselves and for the city of San Francisco. Participants will be encouraged to let their boats stay at the Center as part of a growing exhibit of boats representing the voices of our community.

Also from April-July 2024, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and the San Francisco Maritime Museum will provide workshops and lectures focusing on traditional Philippine ancestral music and dance related to the maritime world, the Filipino-American connection to San Francisco maritime history, celestial navigation and traditional boatmaking.

On Sunday, August 4th we will invite all workshop participants and the larger community to join us at San Francisco's Aquatic Park for a special launching of our community boats into Aquatic Cove to symbolically reclaim our ancestral connection to the waterways, releases our wishes, and bring our boats back to our Manilatown home. Participants will be invited to walk with us from Aquatic Park, through North Beach and to the International Hotel Manilatown Center in Chinatown to commmemorate the 1977 I-Hotel Eviction, the most dramatic housing rights battleground in America’s History. We will recall the names and stories of the I-Hotel tenants (many of whom were merchant seamen, longshoremen and fishermen), and transition from a Commemoration event to a Reclamation event in which participants will actively reclaim our connection to each other as one San Francisco Bay Area maritime community.

"Flipping the Boat" is made possible from the generous support of the Center for Cultural Power, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workplace Development and Grants for the Arts.

For more information about Flipping the Boat or the Manilatown Heritage Foundation please contact us at: mhf@manilatown.org