Category: Political storytelling

Kung Saan Man Tayo / Wherever We May Be

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Kung Saan Man Tayo will be screened virtually by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa from 4 to 9 February 2022.

In 2014, filmmaker Adrian Alarilla sent a camera on an eastbound circumnavigation of the world. The camera, named Enrique after Panglima Awang/Enrique of Malacca, was to tell the stories of seven overseas Filipinxs, as part of an ongoing corrective to the stories of conquest, plunder, and exploitation that begun five hundred years ago.

For a few weeks in the summer of 2014, while I was reading for my comprehensive exams, I hosted Enrique in Toronto, on the first stop of a journey that involved Paris, Tübingen, Bangkok, Singapore, and Melbourne.

Adrian wove these stories into Kung Saan Man Tayo, an 80-minute documentary released in 2021.

Continue reading “Kung Saan Man Tayo / Wherever We May Be” →

Who do we blame for untrammeled hyperurbanization in Manila?

Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Originally published on Facebook 1 October 2009, written in the wake of the massive flooding triggered by Typhoon Ondoy. This version was published 5 October 2009 on ABS-CBN News.com, as part of a special report on Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy), and reprinted  27 October 2009 on Focus on the Global South’s Focus on the Philippines.

We need to bring public scrutiny to bear on the big, if hard-to-answer, issues of unsustainable urbanization and land use planning.

It comes as no surprise that public anger in the aftermath of the Ondoy disaster has focused on corruption and incompetence among government officials: on how Arroyo’s Le Cirque dinner could have paid for disaster response equipment; how her son was spotted stocking up on booze even as people were dying in the rising floodwaters; and how unscrupulous politicians were taking advantage of the situation by plastering their grinning mugs all over relief goods. It is, after all, easier to lay responsibilities on names and faces rather than on structural causes.

There is, however, a critical aspect of the issue that evades easy association with names and faces, and is consequently not addressed by the public debate: the problem of untrammeled, private sector-led urbanization. Continue reading “Who do we blame for untrammeled hyperurbanization in Manila?” →