The Washington DC show explores the history of a community in search for their American dream
In 2005, Antonio Somera was cleaning out the basement of a building in Stockton, California, when he discovered 26 steamer trunks stacked together, seemingly untouched for decades. Their contents, he would soon learn, belonged to Filipino migrants who arrived in the United States as early as the 1910s.
Among the items was a white pillowcase embroidered with the words “HOW CAN YOU FORGET ME” in red thread. Though small and decorative, it gestures toward a larger meaning: a reminder of the lives these migrants left behind and a marker of the new ones they were forging across the Pacific. The same pillowcase is also the namesake of the exhibition How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories, currently on view at the Washington DC’s National Museum of American History.
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