Portable Landmark

On an unseasonably warm mid-March evening, Janna Añonuevo Langholz spoke to a crowded hall at the Bard Graduate Center about “ways of being within an environment that has been destroyed.” As a Filipino American artist who surfaces forgotten—and often suppressed—histories in public space, Langholz isn’t without company: The designer Cheyenne Concepcion built a temporary monument to St. Malo, a nineteenth-century Filipino settlement in Louisiana, at Astoria’s Socrates Sculpture Park in 2022, and Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts, a grassroots group in Woodside, has a handful of placemaking projects in the area. But Langholz’s work as “caretaker” of the Philippine Village, the site of a forty-seven-acre ethnographic exhibition that was part of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, is of special importance to me, not least for its forensic quality. In addition to archiving and documenting the lives of the 1,200 Filipinos who were part of the exhibit, Langholz goes in search of the unmarked graves of those who died during the seven-month-long fair. Sometimes the burial sites are on private property. “[The owners] told me that they get a lot of ghost hunters, but since I didn’t look like one, they didn’t mind me coming,” she said.

Despite growing up in St. Louis, Langholz didn’t learn about Philippine Village until she read Sarita See’s The Decolonized Eye (2009), which discusses the site, in grad school. Langholz decided to seek it out herself. Trying to find the locations of the expo’s 130 temporary buildings in what’s now an upper-middle-class suburb was a disorienting experience. “I started thinking about how to make sure no one would get lost there again,” she recalled. In 2021, she fabricated an official-looking plaque inscribed with the marker “Philippine Village Historical Site” and took a selfie with it. After she began taking the sign with her wherever she went (she logged her travels on Instagram), people in St. Louis’s Filipino community, and even tourists from out of town, asked if they could be photographed with it, too. “Everyone who came to hold the sign and carry it with me through the neighborhoods became part of a collective monument,” she reflected.

Langholz pushed, and eventually convinced, the city to install a permanent historical marker in the area. “I didn’t previously have experience with local government, but it didn’t feel much different than being in grad school meetings,” she said, with a nod to those in the room. “Hopefully by the end of the year, I can finally retire carrying the sign around.”