Inaugural Grantee, Balay Kreative March 2020

March 27, 2020

Meet Erina Alejo: Balay Kreative's Inaugural Artist Grantee!

Recently, I learned that I am Balay Kreative’s inaugural grantee. It is a great responsibility I will carry with the help of my community and your support. Thank you to the Balay Kreative staff and Programming Board, and especially to my family and the SOMA community— the youth, families and residents who teach me so much about life. The funds will help support the photo book I have been working on for A Hxstory of Renting.

It is so humbling to continue supporting and witnessing Balay Kreative’s trajectory as one of several emerging champions for the arts in San Francisco’s SOMA Pilipinas Filipino Heritage Cultural District, my home community of over 20 years. Many of us community members in summer 2019 participated in several community input roundtables to learn about and give input to the impetus for what was to become Balay Kreative. Gina Mariko of Make It Mariko and Balay Kreative staff, writes about their planning process which they presented at the December event launch.

Photo by Mogli Maureal, Balay Kreative Launch at Alloy Collective, December 11, 2019.

Graphic design by cat jimenez for balay kreative.

Balay means “home” in various non-Tagalog Filipino languages, including: Binukid (Northern Mindanao), Cebuano (Visayas and Mindanao), Hiligaynon/Ilonggo (Western Visayas and the SOCCSKSARGEN administrative region), Ilocano (Northern Luzon) and Waray-Waray (Eastern Visayas). Personally, I think the organizational name is a brilliant way to address the polyculturalism of the Filipinx identity. It also helps educate me as a Tagalog person about how much I don’t know and would love to learn about the diversity of the archipelago’s 170+ languages. (Fun fact: did you know some of the greatest Philippine cinema comes from the Visayan region, particularly during the First Golden Age in the 1940s and 50s?)

Balay Kreative as an arts organization, led by Program Manager Kim Acebo and her team, carves its own path along with its foremothers and siblings that contribute to arts and culture for Filipinxs and the allied community in SOMA, including but not limited to: Kulintang Arts, Inc. (Kularts), Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA), Kearny Street Workshop, Filipino American Arts Exposition’s Pistahan Parade and Festival, San Francisco Filipino Cultural Center, Filipino Arts and Cinema, International (FACINE), Bindlestiff Studio, Arkipelago Books, Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, Undiscovered SF and Kultivate Labs— the list goes on— a collective of people and culture bearers that raised me and a lot of SOMA community members.