Poetry In History: Writing About the I-Hotel

In celebration of APIA Heritage Month, we’ll be running a special Poetry in History series once a week in lieu of our Friday prompts.  For each post in the series, we’ll highlight an important period in Asian American history and  conclude with an idea that we hope will provoke you to respond. Today’s post is about the fraught history of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown.

In 1977, San Francisco’s Manilatown community suffered a huge blow with the final eviction of the mostly Filipino American residents from the International Hotel (or I-Hotel).  This followed  almost a decade’s worth of protest and community struggle in the hopes that the building, which had housed many Filipino immigrants throughout the years, would not become yet another victim of the city’s gentrification projects.   For years after the final residents were removed, the building — and later, the site — stood empty, the hole a yawning reminder of what had been lost.  One of the major voices speaking out against the fall of Hotel belonged to the poet, musician, and activist Al Robles. The I-Hotel was a recurring theme that wove throughout his work and took on breath, shape, and life through his poetry.  Robles’ nephew wrote the following on the recent anniversary of his death:

“In the I-Hotel he [Robles] traveled up the stairs and the doors opened to those small rooms; the smell of rice and adobo and fish was there; the face of the manong was there—he knew the face—it was the face of his father and mother and ninong and ninang. He sat across from the manongs and in their faces he saw the motherland, in their hearts and minds he journeyed and tasted what he described the “thick adobo tales of their lives”. Those elderly men were alive and in Uncle Al’s poetry they became young again.” (Tony Robles, “Still Hanging onto the Carabao’s Tail”)

The I-Hotel was eventually rebuilt into a community center.  The new building, opened in 2005, houses the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and is a hub for political and arts events.  Al Robles passed away in 2009, but his legacy continues to be celebrated.  Other poets have since followed in Robles’ footsteps, writing about their relationship to the city of San Francisco, and to the “ground zero” that was the I-Hotel site.  One such poet is Barbara Jane Reyes, whose poem dedicated to Robles is forthcoming in the first issue of Lantern Review. In her book Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes touches on the shape of this wound, invoking the evicted bodies whose physical rootlessness signifies a history fraught with forced erasures and displacements.  In her poem “calle de sección ocho, casas de abuelos y de abuelas,” her speaker invites us to enter the hole in the ground where the hotel once stood

“the unused hole in the ground located at the corner of kearney and
jackson across from celluloid god’s patina café may one day contain
supportive tenant services and artifacts of blue men’s billy clubs in the
meantime just gawk at it and take polaroids don’t hold your breath
few descend into the hole it’s been 30 years”

Manilatown itself becomes a ghost with a cavity in place of the organ that was the I-Hotel, which by the end of the poem is revealed to be a type of inverted sanctuary, inhabited by “ghosts and discarded things,” made remarkable for its absence — its existence etched out in the negativity of its space, the way that it tunnels into the earth rather than rises up from it.

Vince Gotera has also written of the I-Hotel. In his poem “Madarika,” (which is written in the voice of a resident of the Hotel), he writes:

“Remember everything about this room: the smell
of old linoleum, the faded curtains,
the bugs. And when your grandkids ask about
the O.T.’s, the original manongs,
you tell them how we talked today. Tell them
Francisco Velarde was here. Lolo Panchito was here.”

Like Reyes, Gotera returns to the site of the hotel so that, by the end of the poem (excerpted above), we see that the building frames the speaker’s life.   Gotera, however, not only leads us to excavate the tricky space of memory, but inhabits it, taking on the persona of a manong.  For Gotera’s speaker, the I-Hotel is not simply a building — its shape and height, the textures of its walls and furnishings, the things that gave it physical definition — define him as well: “This room’s all the home / I got,” he says earlier in the poem, and “Look around you. This is all there is.”  The act of remembrance, then, becomes almost sacred in light of this: in choosing to remember the building, its individual rooms, the reader or listener participates in the preservation of a community’s historical narratives, working against the vacuum created by the hotel’s destruction.

For this week’s prompt, here are a couple of exercises inspired by the poetry that has been produced as part of the I-Hotel’s legacy:

1. Write  a poem that centers around the negative space of something that has been physically lost — an erasure, an absence, a black hole, a pit, a wound, or scar in a body.  Investigate its textures, making use of the tools of craft (such as form and image).  How might that space be envisioned as a kind of world?  What new iterations of memory and narrative might entering into that space produce?

2. Write a poem that enacts the preservation of an important voice or event by means of revisiting a geographical location or physical structure.  Play with the slipperiness of time: how might that place, as it is remembered, differ from the nature of the place, in the present, and how might the memory of that place have, itself, evolved, over time?

More Resources:

Online

Philippine American Writers & Artists, Inc. (PAWA) Site

Manilatown Heritage Foundation

Manilatown Archival Project

Manong Al Robles [Tribute site run by the Robles Family]

Documentary Film

Choy, Curtis.  The Fall of the I-Hotel.  1983 (revised 1993 and 2005).

Poetry

Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry.  Ed. Nick Carbo.  Coffee House Press, 1995.

Reyes, Barbara Jane.  Poeta en San Francisco.  Tinfish Press, 2006.

Robles, Al. Rappin’ With Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark: Poems. University of California, Los Angeles, 1996.

Fiction

Yamashita, Karen Tei.  I-Hotel. Coffee House Press, 2010.

Historical Print Resources

Habal, Estella. San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement. Temple University Press, 2008.

Children’s Literature

Robles, Anthony D. (Ill. Carl Angel) Lakas and the Makibaka Hotel.  Children’s Book Press, 2006.