“Girls, in general, have been raised in a way that they—well, we—have always had to be pretty, nice, and respectful. And the minute you bring your voice out there, it is often considered as an aggression....By using music... especially the singing part...you can build strength and confidence.

Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary, a choral-opera written by composer Matthew Welch and commissioned by SFGC, takes its name from the published diary of Filipina-American Angeles Monrayo (her diary spans from 1924-1928). The opera pulls a thread from her eloquent personal reflections and anecdotes to fashion a young woman’s coming-of-age story and tale of immigration to the US from the Philippines during the American-Philippine Colonial Era. Her tale is set as a metaphor for the unique cultural forming of Philippine-American diaspora and also as a mirror held up to our current socio-political issues of equality in immigration, labor, gender, and culture.

About Scene Four: “Joe Calls Me and You Greens”  In the fourth scene, presented here, our protagonist Angeles Monrayo is coming into her own, as she explores fun and romance with her friends. Long after living in a Strike Camp (scene 1), Angeles and her god-sister Mary, along with their families, have moved in together into a small apartment in Honolulu. Angeles takes a romantic liking to Joe Flores, their ukulele playing downstairs Filipino neighbor. Angeles and Joe explore a relationship, often in the company of Mary, telling of the poverty and lack of privacy continuing from the Strike Camp. Mary and Angeles chat about Joe, and how they cannot figure out where in the Philippines he is from, as he has abandoned his native tongue for the American English and local Japanese (from a prior immigration wave of indentured-servitude from Japan). Both Angie and Joe play ukulele, and they all celebrate their time together by singing popular American songs as a trio. Joe and Angeles grow closer into an innocent romance, yet their age gap points to the rarity of young women in the Filipino immigrant population at the time, a shocking 14 men to every 1 woman.  - Matthew Welch, 2020

Tomorrow’s Memories: A Little Manila Diary is made possible in part by a grant from The Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund that also is supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.