Barbara Jane Reyes

Tony Robles, ‘Filipino Building Maintenance Company’ (Poor Press Publications, 2009)

Last weekend, I participated in a spectacle of a Filipino American History event at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where, for the entire day, admission was free courtesy of Target Stores. Interesting, this corporate support of an otherwise invisible but ubiquitous population and our obscure commemorative month. In the noisy museum lobby, a four-hour literary reading took place, and amid the bustle, Tony Robles handed me his chapbook of poems and short stories, Filipino Building Maintenance Company. I have known Tony for over a decade now, during which our paths have crossed all over the San Francisco Bay Area Asian and Filipino American literary scenes, from City Lights Books to Kearny Street Workshop to Eastwind Books, from UC Berkeley to Poetry Mission in the back room of the Dalva on 16th and Valencia.

[Tony Robles at POOR Magazine's Take Back the Land Ceremony/Eviction Protest, August 2008. Photo by Jen Fogg.]

Some of you may know Tony as Anthony D. Robles, author of the children’s books Lakas and the Manilatown Fish (2003), and Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel (2006), both published by Children’s Book Press, and both telling the story of the Filipino American boy named Lakas, who becomes policitized as he learns the San Francisco of his elders, the Manongs, Filipino American West Coast laborers during the first half of the last century. Some of you may know Tony as the nephew of the late luminary Manong Al Robles, and indeed, Tony counts Manong Al as one of his greatest influences in literature and in life. Tony is also the co-editor of Poor Magazine, a “literary, visual arts based community organization founded by a previously homeless, currently at-risk, mother daughter team,” and “which provides vocational training, creative arts and literacy education, new and multi-media access to very low and no income adults and children in the Bay Area, with the goal of deconstructing the margins of class and race oppression.”

10.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (12)