Balikbayan Blues: Unfolding a Collective Consciousness Neither "Here" Nor "There"

The 21st century city has been and will continue to be re-shaped and re-defined by the socio-cultural factor of international migration and the accompanying politics of ethno-cultural difference. Balikbayan Blues: Unfolding A Collective Consciousness Neither “Here” Nor “There” will set out to examine the implications of the politics of difference and the persistence and plasticity of culture through the context of the SoMa district in San Francisco - a city home to the second largest community of Filipinos in America. A study of such dynamics will frame an analysis of the Filipino balikbayan box, utilized as a metaphorical tool in exploring new methods of building, situated within the negotiation of a collective memory of the homeland and responsive adaptations to the host locale. The architecture that emerges is neither here, nor there and neither completely fiction or faithful. Instead, the spaces that materialize are something in-between; in perpetual mutation.