'Tao Po!': An exploration of the role of Filipino-Canadian neighbourhoods in anchoring and cultivating Filipino-Canadian community


Gabrielle Isabel Abando, University of British Columbia

Within the last fifty years, Filipinos have become one of the largest ‘visible minority’ groups in Canada, and yet Filipino-Canadian literature is still a budding field. To date, most foundational work has focused on the macro sociopolitical factors of Filipino-Canadian immigration or sociocultural factors of Filipino-Canadian experience. This paper aims to re-embed Filipino-Canadian literature in the everyday settings in which these experiences take place. Though literature extensively describes how Filipino lives stretch across space, rarely are such conversations grounded in the daily settings and spaces they occupy. Even less discussed is how and why these spaces become spaces that bind communities together – thus their importance. Understanding space as a dialectic between society and space, spaces must be understood in the context of their everyday making and remaking – the push and pull between the actors who occupy it. And yet, much literature on Filipino diasporic space is written in the retrospective: mourning spaces lost to us. Extensive work has been done on the policy and sociopolitical factors that enable gentrification of immigrant community space, but how are we to assert the importance of these spaces without understanding them as they are experienced every day? Despite being a ‘gateway city’ for immigrants due to its proximity to the Pacific, Vancouver’s Filipino Canadian community remains understudied relative to the East coast. As Vancouver rises to ‘global city’ status, the city is a real-time case study in how ethnic communities hold themselves together in a highly dynamic culture and cityscape. How the city handles the maintenance of these spaces, then, will be significant. As Vancouver’s own Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood, a commonly known ‘hub’ for Filipino immigrants, teeters on the edge of gentrification, capturing the space as it functions for the community offers invaluable insight into how immigrant communities generate their own space, what makes these spaces accessible, how space tends to these communities. With this in mind, the following project investigates the specific spatial mechanisms by which Filipino-Canadians feel attached to a space that imbues it with a community and cultural significance. This project uses a combination of ethnographic field notes and semi-structured interviews with Filipino-Canadian Joyce-Collingwood residents and regulars analyzed through qualitative coding methods. Anyone who identifies themselves as a member of the Filipino-Canadian community and is a Joyce-Collingwood resident or regular (measured by visiting the neighbourhood at least once a month) was eligible for participation. Participants were asked about their daily routines in the neighbourhood, personal stories of connection that take place within the neighbourhood, the role of the neighbourhood in facilitating their feelings of belonging both within the Filipino-Canadian community but also within Canada more generally, and whether or not the small businesses and centralized local community feel of the area differs to larger Filipino chain restaurants scattered throughout the city. Ethnographic field notes supplement interview data, collected by the author, herself a recent Filipino immigrant, and were taken over the course of five months. This project is a work in progress, but emergent themes include: transit accessibility, intersections with class, spatial visibility as identity affirmation, feelings of community camaraderie, and community agency. Most vitally, this research stresses the importance of understanding these spaces holistically; that the preservation of only immigrant businesses is not adequate to sustain these safe havens for immigrants. Rather, they must be understood as an integrated whole.

This paper will be presented at the following session: