sweldo — Rey Velasquez Sagcal

Sweldo (Wages)

These paintings are part of an ongoing series of work reflecting on my father’s bout with cancer and of the immigrant journey in America as experienced by a Filipino family.

My parents and I migrated from the Philippines to the United States in 2004. Lacking the immigration documents required to continue his engineering profession, my father found under-the-table work renovating houses. Through this physically strenuous job—sustaining accidents repeatedly—he was able to provide a living for my family and a brighter future for my older siblings left behind in the Philippines. While this work proved beneficial, I am also convinced that years of constant exposure to carcinogenic chemicals from polluted work environments contributed to my father developing cancer.

These paintings show my processing of contradictory terms. Though my father’s work was life-giving for my family, bodily pain and disease also resulted from it. While in my family’s eyes’ my father was employed in noble work, his occupation as a laborer was/is seen by society as “low-skill,” “low wage,” and a “dirty job” that only desperate immigrants would be willing to do. Immigrants classified as low-skill workers such as my father are often viewed as mechanical parts. They are deemed valuable for their capacity to be a useful tool—to be a hammer, a nail, a piece of lumber. I aim to challenge this dehumanizing objectification and to reclaim such object-metaphors to uplift and dignify Filipino immigrants and other immigrant communities. Rather than being disposable parts, immigrants are integral to this society—we are the hammers, the nails, the lumber helping to build the structure and the promise of a better America.