"Balikbayan" Dramaturgy
On October 11, 2014, Jennifer Laude, a Filipino trans woman, was killed by US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton, whose presence in Zambales was made possible by the Visiting Forces Agreement.
In September 2020, then President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his misogyny and whose regime was marked by extrajudicial killings from his drug war and anti-communist crusade, granted Pemberton absolute pardon, cutting short his time served by four years. Months prior in the same year, during the height of the pandemic, the Congress railroaded the passing of the anti-terrorism bill amidst rampant red-tagging of activists and dissidents; LGBTQIA+ protesters were arrested, detained, and harassed by police.
Under the current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the largest Balikatan Exercise took place in 2023, a military exercise that was bolstered by counterterrorism training since the War on Terror campaign by the US. His father, former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., serving as the blueprint of violence and repression for Duterte, formalized the export of Filipino labor through the 1974 Labor Code in an attempt to stimulate the struggling economy, resulting in the human trafficking of Filipinos to this day.
This is the political milieu that informs the narrative of “Balikbayan. Through the protagonist Stella, a trans woman, whose motivation is to find her missing sister Katrina, supposedly teaching in Texas but ended up as a victim of tokhang in the Philippines eleven years later, the play tackles the entanglements of the US War on Drugs and Terror, neoliberalism, and extrajudicial killings under the Duterte regime, and how women, both trans and cis, are subjugated and dehumanized by the same system.
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