Kwentong Bayan Collective Analysis

Kwentong Bayan. This phrase is in Filipino, but in English it is roughly translated to mean “community stories”. The Kwentong Bayan Collective created a community based comic book project called the Kwentong Bayan Collective: Labour and Love. This come book project has pieces in the Blackwood Gallery where though comic book strips, audiences have the ability to see stories of caregiver programs and the learn the realities of them. Through the stories we learn the struggles of racialized women in Canadian history, the communities that were created among these groups, the love that was spread, and the empowerment of women through their fight to change policies for the better. The piece that I was focused on in the exhibit and will be focusing
I found this to be quite interesting because it provides the audience with a lot of background knowledge as to what occurred way back in the past, and information like this allows a person to recognize how much things have changed. Straight forward explanations of these women and their histories are immediately presented, and I find this information to be quite relevant. It presents the audience with a better understanding of the past and provides them with a history they probably did not learn in school. As mentioned by one of the speakers at the exhibit, due to the White Settler Policy, the Canadian government recruited European women to come as domestic workers and immediately provided them with Canadian citizenship. However, as you go down the timeline, it is mentioned that women from Guadalupe, Jamaica and Barbados were eventually brought in, but they did not receive a citizenship immediately and they had to go through a points system to determine their privileges (Kwentong Bayan Collective). If they were not needed or skilled enough they would be deported because they were only temporary workers and not there permanently. A past such as this one shows how racialized women were minority and had to work much harder and go through a longer process to receive their citizenships and permanent resident status. In later years domestic workers came together and campaigned for better policies (Kwentong Bayan Collective). This activism between the women in the community is an act of decolonization. They are taking policies that were made due to colonization and transforming them to better them economically, socially, and politically, so there would be better policies in the future. I find these acts did not go unnoticed. “Domestic work is all about reproducing lifestyles and status; it’s the cultural