At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the flame-bladed sword piercing the sun, the baybayin script on the wall and the bundles of sampaguita blossoms hanging from triangular banderitas across the ceiling are not merely festive decor, but markers of culture, memory and collective resistance.

MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy, co-curated by SOMA Pilipinas and Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, features artwork by over 20 Bay Area Filipino American artists. The exhibition, Goldberg writes, “honors the generations who held their ground and made the city theirs — through protest, through art, through unrelenting care. … Filipino presence in San Francisco is not symbolic — it is structural, embodied, and alive.”

In English, the word makibaka translates to “to fight.” In the 1970s and ’80s, amid president Ferdinand

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