ACAM Dialogues Episode 07: An Interview with William Canero (Hosted by Isa S. You, feat. William Canero)
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ISA: The Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program would like to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded on the traditional, unceded, ancestral homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations.
Hello and welcome to the ACAM podcast. We hope that this podcast can be a way to continue building connections between ACAM students, staff, faculty and community partners, while also providing our community members with a platform to share similar work they’ve been doing during this time. I’m your host Isa. Our guest this week is William Canero.
WILLIAM: My name is William Canero. I use he/they pronouns. I’m a third generation Filipino Canadian, and my grandfather came here in the 70s. He worked on cars in the Philippines, and that brought him over to Canada where he worked on the railroads. This was back when Yaletown Roundhouse wasn’t a bunch of homes or condos but an actual rail yard that supplied all of downtown Vancouver. They introduced me to a few Filipino organizations. And I started working on the board of directors for the Katara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Collective Society, the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society. I do work with the National Filipino Cultural Center. And then I also am an organizer for the Joyce Street Action Network. It’s a long list.
ISA: In this episode we discuss the Joyce-Collingwood food hub, public engagement in city planning and the role of Filipino businesses within the community. Let’s take a listen.
So what is the Joyce-Collingwood food hub? And why is it at risk?
WILLIAM:
Yeah, so the Joyce-Collingwood food hub is a series of restaurants, businesses and grocery stores that provide amenities to the Filipino community. You are hard pressed to find affordable, cheap food that services both your stomach and your soul with the Filipino community. And for some odd reason. They’re all collected around Joyce Street. It’s not surprising to me. There’s a lot of Filipino organizations that work out of Joyce Street like one of them being St. Mary’s Parish, and then there’s a few that work out of Collingwood Neighborhood House. One of the societies that I mentioned, the Katara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Collective Society. We do a lot of work out of Collingwood Neighbourhood House because arts and cultural organizations don’t have a lot of opportunity for space in the city. We don’t have capital, we don’t own land. And so Collingwood Neighbourhood House is the affordable way to deliver programs and services to the Filipino community. So it’s already a space where organizations use and food has been built around that. You see that present with Plato Filipino, with Pampanga’s Cuisine. Whenever these organizations have an event or a big festival they have to cater for, they lean on these businesses to supply them. It’s affordable, it feeds the soul, it feeds the stomach. And a lot of people in the community seem to really enjoy it. So it’s, it’s meaningful to everyone who lives in the area and does work in the area. It’s at risk, because of the developments that occurred, I think, early 2020. The land owner who owns the site, where Plato and Pampanga’s is, it’s 5163 Joyce street. They put the land up for sale. And they sold it to this developer who was intending to redevelop the space into a 32 storey tower. It had this really interesting design where it was like a hexagon oval shape. That honestly didn’t look structurally sound, it was so weird. But that development was going to place all of those businesses, Pampanga’s, Plato, and then also a grocery store on the corner. It was going to gentrify it out of the area. They weren’t able to come back and the site that that developer had given, sorry, the development proposal that the developer had given to the city only included two spaces for businesses, but there’s six there, seven if you include Kay Market, and so it would have displaced a lot of what the community values as amenities, as spaces and places where they could feel like they belonged. Thankfully, that development hasn’t gone through. I’m still waiting for updates, me and the Joyce Street Action Network. So essentially what happened was, after we had kicked up a fuss with the town hall, about the displacement of these businesses, the developer tried to put up the site up for sale, but no one’s buying it. So we don’t know what’s happening. Someone could buy it in the interim, but we honestly don’t know. And we’re a little worried. And we’re hearing on the ground that people are worried as well.
ISA: So the fate of the food hub is still up in the air?
WILLIAM: That’s right. Yeah. It’s been in limbo for a little bit now.
ISA: Yeah, I see. And so what is your personal connection to the food hub if you have any?
WILLIAM: Yeah. So I mentioned my Lolo in the very beginning. He came here in the 70s. We lived in the neighborhood, all the Vancouver East is like an immigrant neighborhood. Majority of the population that lives there identifies as a person of colour. It’s a space that I used as a kid frequently. I did camps there. I used Collingwood Neighbourhood House. A few of the people I know still live there. My Lolo passed away, so he no longer lives there. But he frequented that area quite a bit just because like you’re hard pressed to find amenities that supply the Filipino community. Of course, they exist. Like you could go to, oh, what’s an Asian restaurant you go to or an Asian shop? Oh T&T, you can go to T&T for some Filipino goods but you can’t find everything. Like there’s specific things that you absolutely cannot find a T&T which is just hard and sad, but like you sometimes you really do need to go to the Filipino store for it. And then also like dollar mangoes, like who can say no to dollar mangoes.
ISA: And I imagine the community aspect of going to these like smaller and local businesses would be very different from shopping at T&T, which is, you know, a chain.
WILLIAM: Yeah, you would hear your language, you would talk to people in the restaurant or in the grocery store. Sometimes you even like swap numbers and hear about job opportunities in the community. Like being in those spaces is so much different when you’re just an English speaker in comparison to a Tagalog speaker, because when you sit there and you listen to the ambient sounds of the restaurant or the grocery store, you can catch on so much more. People have left their cards, their business numbers, posters, events of everything happening in the Filipino community. And so these spaces act as informal cultural spaces or community hubs where you can find what you need in that moment. You can talk to the person sitting behind the counter, and figure out a pathway to get to where you need to go. If someone’s, for example, about to be deported. They have a card for an immigration lawyer. And Pato and Pampanga’s, I know that for a fact because I work across the street, if someone is needing a job, they’ll talk to someone who’s waiting in line. And they’ll find out about an informal opportunity where they can start up with this business or start up with this job opportunity. There’s so much you catch when you’re not just an English speaker, and it’s all present in these food hubs
ISA: Mm hmm. And the displacement, or the potential displacement of these businesses would effectively disperse the community in some ways. Would you say that’s correct?
WILLIAM: That’s right. And for a lot of the people who frequent these businesses, they don’t even, they don’t even live in the area. Joyce Street is such an important hub because there’s transit access. My mom, she did an hour and a half commute. I lived in Coquitlam. I didn’t live in the area, my grandfather did. So I went to go visit him. But my mom worked in Vancouver, downtown Vancouver when we lived in Coquitlam. And she did three buses, and two sky trains. And that third bus was literally just so she could go to Joyce Street to pick up Filipino food, because we didn’t have access to it back in Coquitlam. When it’s around a transit node, it makes it more accessible to Filipino community members. And in the academic research, we’re already seeing that people of colour are already spending more time on transit comparison to their peers of other identities.
ISA: Yeah, and my follow up question was how does class and race factor into the importance of the food hub?
WILLIAM: Yeah. So there’s a tangential story to that. So I work at Collingwood Neighborhood House as their Systems Change Coordinator, I work on anti-racism initiatives. And we were holding a food forest event where we had grown foods, and we were gonna cook up some good healthy meals on the front line for some people who were walking by and wanted to attend. And I saw a bunch of Filipinos with their kids walking by, and they just asked like, what’s going on? What’s what’s happening? And they said, oh, there’s free food. I said, all Tagalog, but there’s just free food. We’re having an event the community can join. And as soon as I said free food, I guess it’s like the immediate. Yeah, no, we gotta go. There’s this free food. You know, I don’t have to feed my kids later. That’s it. And before I had said that to the Filipinos, I had tried out some different ways of saying it to other people. And when I told them that it was like a community event, they’re like, oh, no, that’s okay. I’ll take a flyer maybe. And that’s cool, too. But there’s something around like food that’s free, easy to access that, like Filipinos are so into. There’s a reason for this story. And it was work I had also done in the city of New Westminster for the Homelessness Action Strategy. So I had worked on a team of three grad students who were working on a new strategy for the city of New Westminster, it was to re-en envision their Homelessness Action Strategy. And we had interviewed 20 something service providers, one of them was a service provider who does food hampers. And in that interview, I had heard from that service provider that the demand for multilingual services had gone up by 50%. Since the beginning of the pandemic, they needed more people who spoke more than just English to serve these food hampers and find culturally appropriate food. And that was like those two stories were a game changer for me and my personal organizing life as a Filipino organizer. Because I realized that I don’t hear the Filipino community saying we need food to feed our kids and put on our tables. And I don’t think it’s because it doesn’t exist. I think it’s because the services aren’t there in Tagalog. People don’t know how to access it, people feel embarrassed to access it, the ways in which you have to access the services and supports are only in English, so you don’t have the full picture. And so like the interplay between race and needs in our community, and poverty, is not as clear to me in the data. But when I talk to people, and I tell them, hey, there’s food and Tagalog, they’ll immediately jump at it. Like I had 10 People coming when all I said was “meron pagkain” and “come here, come here”. And there was 10 people coming. I only said like three words. And it was shocking to me. But I realized that this food hub, and these businesses and organizations that work here are so essential, because they provide these foods, they provide the services, they provide all of these programs to help the community and figure out ways where they can get connected so that if they do need something, they’ll come out and reach for it and it’ll be readily accessible to them because if we’re not present the community, that all goes away
ISA: And so, how are pressures from development and gentrification already being felt by people of the Filipino community?
WILLIAM: That’s a good question. So the Joyce Street Action Network, through Sammie Jo Rumbaua, she’s leading a series of workshops called Voices on Joyce, where she has community members. She’s building capacity and community members to speak out on things that matter to them in their lives, come to public hearings, training them on like, what are the rules and procedures, training them on feeling comfortable in their bodies and saying it on camera over the phone, to reporters, etc, that that has not previously existed in the Filipino community. And I sat on their first workshop. One of the things I heard at that first workshop were three Filipina seniors who were saying that they were about to be displaced, and that it wasn’t their first time being displaced. Affordability in their community, or in the neighborhood has gotten to ridiculous levels. And she was telling me, one of them was telling me that she had moved six times since the beginning of the pandemic, where a rent moratorium should have been in place, you know, like rent shouldn’t have been increased, people shouldn’t be evicted. But she had moved six times anyway. Because no one was there to help her through any of the renoviction processes, or like, what is what you need to know as a renter living in Vancouver. This is a woman 65 plus years old, who only speaks Tagalog, who needs help, obviously doesn’t. She hasn’t, hasn’t been able to access it. This space is so essential, because there’s so many Filipinos here. 14% of the population is Filipino, but a majority of people who are accessing this space, are accessing it from like other parts of the Lower Mainland who go distances. And so if we push out those seniors who were already in the neighborhood, or the people who are already here, they’re going to come back. Because this is this is where their Kababayan is. This is where their community is, even if that senior I was telling you about has to move out, she’ll still take a train over to this community. But that just means she’s gonna have to spend longer in her day trying to access it. And moreover, she’s going to be pushed further away from the resources that she already uses, like maybe programming, maybe events, maybe good food.
ISA: So what are some challenges businesses or the community organizations advocating on their behalf are facing?
WILLIAM: Yeah, I thought about this. And like a broader context. Because it’s not, it’s not just organizations that I sit on. It’s actually around 21 to 24 Filipino organizations and societies out of Vancouver, and that doesn’t include the churches, there’s many more Filipino churches. But if I could, like say one thing that we need, it’s probably like governmental support. You seldomly find grants that can cover operational costs, programs and services. There was one food hamper run by a Filipino that I know of. Aside from that, there is no other one. And like, I think in large part, that’s because all of the grants that are available to us are literally just programs specific. They’re not operational, you can’t pay staff with the grants. It makes it hard. And so there’s a huge capacity gap for Filipino organizations who see the important work that needs to be done, but just don’t have the funding for it.
ISA: And in the listening room, I remember you mentioning how a lot of the work is being done by volunteers and people who are putting in unpaid labor, right?
WILLIAM: Yeah, a good example. That is the amount of time that you need to put in for applying for grants doesn’t get factored into the grant itself. So you can’t factor in Oh, I spent X amount of hours writing this grant. This is how much my time and labor costs. Can you pay me once we get the grant and you can’t add that in. So that’s volunteer labor.
ISA: Yeah. And so, how might an intangible cultural asset recognition or designation help?
WILLIAM: So it would help. Not from its immediate designation, but from the policies programs. and proposals that come after it. So a designation of like this space as, oh, here’s a plaque. Here’s where the Filipino community is, take it and go, doesn’t really do much for us. Like we don’t, we don’t need the recognition that this is a Filipino space, we already identify this as a Filipino space. The thing we need is protections for these businesses and supports for the organizations who do the work and community. And that’s what we’re hoping an intangible cultural asset designation gives us. Thankfully, there’s new legislation that passed in the municipality where the planning department of the city of Vancouver is going into research phase where they’re going to figure out okay, if this is an intangible cultural asset, how do we how do we protect that from broader impacts of gentrification? And that’s, that’s still being researched right now. We’re following it. And we’re hoping that it does good for the community. But there was a recent, not really change, but something that happened with the City of Vancouver, it’s in the Vancouver plan 2050. But essentially, they’re specific designations of sites that are ethno-cultural groups that have certain protections that come with an ethno-cultural group designation. So one of those being Punjabi market, Chinatown, Little Saigon. Those areas are ethno-cultural designations in the Vancouver plan. But when you look on that map of where ethno-cultural designations, the Filipino community is nowhere to be found. There is no little Manila. There is no little Cebu there’s no designation for the Filipino community, despite us being the third largest ethno-cultural group in Canada. So it’s, it’s surprising to me. I hope more is to be done. But like, it forces us to rely on the intangible cultural assets designation much more, because now that’s our only protection. If we’re not an ethno-cultural group, we’re gonna have to fight for it, we’re gonna have to fight for designation.
ISA: Do you think part of that is potentially due to, like, the Collinwood Food Hub having a relatively shorter history compared to other spaces? I don’t know. Because I’m thinking, I know, the Joyce Collingwood food hub has existed before Plato Filipino, but you know, Plato Filipino has only been there for five years. And so would part of that challenge be due to the relatively shorter amount of time that the Joyce Collingwood Food Hub has existed compared to places like Chinatown or Punjabi Market?
WILLIAM: Yeah, you have a good point. It runs on this idea of the right to the city. And I’ve been running around with this for a little while, thinking about it late at night figuring out, like, whether we do have this, right, this righteous claim to say that this is Manila town. And I think there’s a nuance there in what Filipinos have, 1) provided the city in terms of our labor, our skills and our capital. And then 2) how long we’ve actually been here. So yes, the St. Mary’s Parish has been a Filipino organization for a long time, and it’s created this Filipino community around it. Plato and Pampanga’s has done the same. The ones up the street, and there’s many more Filipino organizations and restaurants, the Sari Sari store, which is a grocery store. But do all these stores make up… If all these stores were gone… Would this still be Filipino to like a Filipino community? And my answer would probably be yes. Like, regardless of whether they’re here or not, my answer would be yes, this is still Filipino town, they provide services and amenities. But these organizations, these spaces don’t make up … are not like the whole sum of the parts of the Filipino community. And I think where our our claim to this being like a Filipino hub, stems in the idea that Filipinos have been here since like the 18th century, we’ve came as essentially slaves. The Spanish colonizers when they brought us here during the Spanish occupation of the Philippines, and we’ve been in Vancouver and British Columbia since like the 1790 Manila Acapulcod Trade Galleon. When we were brought as sailors, we jumped ship and we literally just stayed with the indigenous peoples of Canada. It’s, it’s been our history, we haven’t created a, like the same kind of space that you identify with, like the Punjabi Market or like Chinatown, where there’s architecture, there’s murals, there’s, there’s, there’s symbols and art that codifies like that this is the delineation of this community. And I think in large part that’s, that’s due to the way Filipinos have, like, left their homeland and adopted this new homeland, but still maintain their culture through things that aren’t tangible. And that’s how that intangible cultural asset is so important. There’s this really interesting quote, I read in a book somewhere, and I’ve been trying to flip through that book for aeons, but I couldn’t find it. It’s essentially like you can separate the Filipino from their land, but you’ll never be able to separate them from their stomachs. We might not build like, like archways or might not build homes that have our particular architectural flair from the Philippines, but we’ll still have that that cultural memory of what is food what feels like, like family, what what feels like being at home in your body, like that feeling comes with us as we migrate. But our architecture doesn’t come with me. We can’t… I was just about to say we can’t pick up our home and bring it to Vancouver. But there actually is an interesting Filipino icon where like, they will literally lift up a home and move it from place to place after a typhoon. It’s called the Bayanihan spirit, we will lift up the house and then move it. So I can’t say that we won’t physically lift up our house, but we can’t, we can’t cross a river with it. We can’t cross the sea with it or an ocean, trying to find a better analogy. It’s lost on me now.
ISA: And so what I’m getting is the claim to the Joyce Collingwood food hub would need to come… there would need to be emphasis on the intangible cultural assets and the culture in the community there rather than focusing on the physical space itself.
WILLIAM: That’s right.
ISA: I see. And, like, can we and should we draw parallels between places like Chinatown, and the Punjabi market, and Joyce Collingwood?
WILLIAM: Yes, in the sense of these are cultural groups that are looking for supports as equity denied communities, there’re histories of colonialism, from their hometowns, or like the original places of migration that have forced them to be here now. And they’re communities that have been retraumatized by racism in Canada. And so, that designation of an ethnic cultural group like Punjabi Market or like Chinatown, is seen similarly to like Filipinos in Canada. A good example of that is the way that the Philippines had declared war on Canada just to send us back our trash. So Vancouver, ships off all our dirty garbage to Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines and leaves our home communities to make up for the trash. Like there will literally be pickers going through and sifting that garbage to try and see what is salvageable and part of that is Vancouver’s trash. This is modern day colonialism, we’re leaving groups who honestly just need financial supports to create a better life for themselves and recycle this sustainably. But now we’re repurposing colonialism to this like, nope. Here’s our garbage. You deal with it. We don’t want it. Yeah. I don’t have a good way of sugarcoating.
ISA: How might the city plan in a way that takes into account the needs of the Filipino community?
WILLIAM: Yeah. So the city in their 2050 Vancouver plan had tried out this new thing. It’s called a city navigator. They started with neighborhood houses, community centers to be the be the, like third party to figure out what is it that’s actually needed in the community? What are things that the Vancouver plan should consider? If we had done this specific policy, or this route, specifically. It’s called scenario planning, where you give the community a scenario. And you say, how would you react if X, Y and Z happens? Or how would you react if there were drones flying in the sky? What would your community say? And it was an interesting way to plan for communities. And they tried it out in the Filipino community. So I was one of the scenario… I was a city navigator for the city of Vancouver for the Filipino community, we did engagements in Tagalog and English, we had like a broad cross section of the community we had or nonprofit leaders, we had seniors, we had kids. And, that sort of methodology of having a Filipino navigate the community for the purposes of a larger policy to see what would work and what wouldn’t is, is how I’m expecting the city to go about doing things in the future. It could be tweaked a little bit, like we could like not do scenario planning, because I think people didn’t react well to scenario planning. But there are other avenues of planning with communities than what we’re doing now. Because what we’re doing now is here is a development sign, here is your, here’s your notice, for development come to the public hearing, if you have time, we don’t have childcare for you, we won’t make time for you, if you have work between nine to five, or if you have another job after five, we won’t have another language accessible for you. That’s essentially what they’re doing now. And how the city navigator program was accessible was this community navigator knew what times people were available. They had a list of contacts that are already in the community who generally might not have been accessible through just a sign and a poster of a notice. And it’s, it’s the methodology of planning that you think would be enshrined into law. But it’s not like the only thing that the city of Vancouver has to technically do is just put up the sign and give you a notice. Like they don’t even have to have it in another language. Oh, they have to have it in French, but they don’t have to have it in Tagalog. Yeah.
ISA: And so what you’re saying is like, there really needs to be an emphasis on consultation with community members and working with community organizations. And part of that is also like, funding with organizations as well. Right?
WILLIAM: Yeah, one of the good things about the city navigator program was they gave funding to the nonprofit I was working for. It was the national Filipino Canadian Cultural Center. And through that funding, they were able to carry out programs that actually helped people learn Tagalog. So like, it’s not just an investment into having a better city. It’s an investment into the community as well. So having these like interlocutors the city through these, these more equitable planning processes is like two birds one stone, in my mind. It’s just where I see planning going for public engagement. And I hope the city gets there. I really do.
ISA: Yeah, and what would be some of the stakeholders or potential like pushback or tensions with that kind of consultation or programming?
WILLIAM: It’s less predictable. There’s a longer time planning process for it. So if you’re, if you have to engage with every single ethnic group, within a planning area, because the Filipino community isn’t the only big one in Joyce Street, like the biggest one is the Chinese community, and the Filipino community is next. And then there’s the white population. There’s also like a sizable Spanish speaking community in Joyce Collingwood and so if you have to engage with all of them in different languages, it could delay the planning process a bit. But in my mind, that’s a trade off we have to accept if we want people to, to actually feel like this is their city that they have a say into what is being built around them and feel like their voice is meaningful. I imagine this was like an equitable planning process like that I don’t, I don’t see another pathway.
ISA: So how have members of the community responded to the threats to the Joyce Collingwood food hub?
WILLIAM: So the Joyce Street Action Network held a town hall that received 1000s of views online, and we didn’t really anticipate that we were going to receive this, this level of support, it was actually kind of heartwarming, it all centered around this youth group, Sliced Mango Collective, they have a zine coming out, it’s really good. But they had kicked up a fuss about the displacement of these businesses, using the same language as intangible cultural assets. These are amenities that are needed in our community. And again, it received 1000s of views. And that’s been the first time that I’ve seen that many Filipinos in the same space. In a long time, of course, it was the middle of the pandemic. And the only space I saw was like my four walls, but it was more Filipinos I had seen before the pandemic too. So. Yeah, it was worthwhile. And I think that identification of community, this has been like a community building event that has been shaping Philippine politics in Vancouver ever since it happened. Another example is the theater project I mentioned earlier. So I was working on Buto/Buto: Bones are Seeds, a theatre project run by the National Filipino Canadian Cultural Center, and the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society. They did a joint collaboration for about two years, and they created a theater piece about it. But that story was actually centered around the stories of newcomers and migrants who are Filipino, newcomers and migrants who come to Canada. And you have like a series of the stories laid out in like this neat line. And one of those stories centers around the story I told them about like my, my Lolo living in that community. And, like never really being a part of it. But like, like still being part of this, like Filipino community who meets every so often goes to church provides like opportunities to other Filipino community members. brings family home, and it’s a pathway for them to come to Canada. And those stories are told in that theater production. And I didn’t think it would be told but there’s been this like, like collective consciousness in the Filipino community around like, what is what is it that we want? And what are the things that we’re demanding of the government? Because obviously, there are problems that we’re facing that aren’t being dealt with and that was heard and that that theater production, but like there’s this like collective conscious now we’re having meetings with the city now. We’re talking with academics about what are indicators to watch out for for the Filipino community for their needs, their wants, their asks. How do we, how do we start talking, talking to politicians to figure out this is a policy that’s needed in this community, like nurses, where people are about to be deported. How do we have that conversation? What is the pathway to that conversation? And it’s starting this new organizing wave. I’m thrilled it is happening, but it is exhausting. I’m hoping to rest eventually, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
ISA: And what can members of the community do?
WILLIAM: Yeah, I mentioned Sammie Jo’s Voices On Joyce. So she’s building the capacity of Filipino Community members to speak to their political representatives and speak on public hearings. We’re going to be sending politicians this quiz on what is an intangible cultural asset, so that we can build better policy around it so that the Filipino community can be better protected. We’re hoping to disseminate that before the election so people can make an informed choice about who they should be voting for. If you’re interested in the stuff that Joy Street Action Network does, if you have care and concern about these cultural food assets, you can sign our open letter to ask these potential city councillors to take the quiz, post the results so that you can be a more informed voter.
ISA: You just heard an interview with William Canero, organizer for the Joyce Street Action Network and board member for the Kathara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Collective Society & the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage Society. You can find out more about him and his work in the links in the show notes.
Thank you for listening to this episode which was made possible by the Chan Family Foundation’s generous support. If you have an idea for an episode of the ACAM podcast, we’d love to hear from you. Send us your ideas by emailing us at acam.program@ubc.ca. To be notified when the next podcast episode is released and to stay up to date on all things ACAM, please follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @UBCACAM and like us on Facebook at Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies UBC.
Kathara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Collective Society