UCLA

On April 12, 2016, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a resolution to create SOMA Pilipinas, the city’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District. With more attention to the idea of establishing and preserving cultural districts, this research interrogates: How do strategies practiced by SOMA Pilipinas challenge legacies of displacement and dispossession of the Filipino American community in San Francisco? How do their efforts behind the creation of a cultural district reclaim and reimagine space for the Filipino American community and other historically oppressed people that call the South of Market home? The following study is a historical, narrative and spatial analysis of the development of SOMA Pilipinas from the perspectives of Filipino youth, families, seniors, workers and allies through archival research, content analysis, participant observation and thick mapping. The story of SOMA Pilipinas shows us the possibilities and challenges in community planning that centers culture and adds to the conversation on the role of state and local governments to preserve ethnic, immigrant and “othered” neighborhoods.