Finally - My City of Los Angeles Award for Filipinotown Arrived!

 It's a bit late but it's great that I got this City of Los Angeles Award from Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell of the 13th District.



I have a short piece included in the anthology, Filipinotown: Voices from Los Angeles, edited by Carlene Sobrino Bonnivier, Gerald G. Gubatan, and Gregory Villanueva.  The 292-page book is a collection of personal essays, letters, news clippings, poems, maps, pictures and other documents that chronicle the history of Filipinos in the heart of Los Angeles City - Filipinotown. It's fascinating history and the editors did an excellent job presenting it in a creative and interesting way.

I missed the book launch because of I was out of town, and I was also unable to accept this award.  Someone hung on to it, then it and the other awards (of those absent) disappeared, but a year later it surfaced and was mailed to me.

Hurrah and thank you Carlene! (That's her picture above right.)

The citation reads:

On behalf of the City of Los Angeles and the constituents of the 13th District, I would like to congratulate you on the launch of Filipinotown: Voices from Los Angeles. This literary work has come to fuition as a result of your hard word and creative contributions. Thanks to your efforts, the story of Historic Filipinotown will forever live on in the pages of the book. Best wishes on continued growth and success! 

February 2015

Mitch O'Farrell
Councilmember 13th District



Here's a quote about the book from the Asian Journal:

"FILIPINOTOWN: VOICES FROM LOS ANGELES has literally become the talk of not just Filipinos in Los Angeles, but of people up and down the West Coast and on to New York and Washington, D.C. Academicians, musicians, artists, historians, and poets, as well as community activists, are calling this book revolutionary. 

The stories are quirky, revealing, hilarious, tragic, and sometimes angry.  There are over 40 of them, mostly told in first-person, mostly non-fiction. There are poems and reflections and some startling historical reproductions of news articles, including a rare editorial piece by Carlos Bulosan, originally published in a now-defunct magazine, about the plight and the courage of Filipinos in Los Angeles during World War II.  By way of contrast, and as an example of the collection’s diversity, one of Johneric Concordia’s spoken word pieces throws down the challenge to find out “What’s Happening in My Town.” The stories encompass generations, from the early 1900s to 2014. 

The book’s cover is an eye-catching front-to-back color photo of Eliseo Silva’s mural of the history of Filipinos in America. It is a passionate creation that embodies the visual arts set in Filipinotown. Now this anthology will complement the mural as an expression of the literary arts about Filipinotown."

The book is available at amazon.com. The second edition includes a Teacher's Guide.

Read also
In Honor of P.C. Morantte
In Honor of Bienvenido N. Santos
In Honor of N.V.M. Gonzalez

Tags: literature, Filipino American, anthology, history, Los Angeles, Filipinos in Los Angeles, Filipinotown, Carlene Bonnivier, Mitch O'Farrell

This is all for now,
Cecilia