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The Flame and the Street Name

By Rodel Rodis

The recently unveiled proposal to build a privately financed Flame of Liberty monument atop an International Heritage Education Center on Treasure Island is a worthy project that deserves the support of the Asian American community. It should have been erected a century ago as the Pacific equivalent of the Statue of Liberty.

Like Ellis Island in the New York harbor, San Francisco has been a gateway for immigrants who were also “your tired, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Significantly, these words of Emma Lazarus emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty were directed to those who crossed the Atlantic, not the Pacific Ocean. Too many entering through our Golden Gate were rejected, discriminated against and persecuted by descendants of European immigrants, whose own parents came through Ellis Island, but who felt no kinship with “homeless, tempest-tossed” newcomers from Asia, or those who trekked on foot from across the border.

Philippine-born U.S. citizens Dennis and Lynda Normandy conceived of this monument seven years ago, and nurtured and developed a project that would include a 200,000 square foot, four-tiered inter-active museum with a genealogical research library, theatre and gallery. On July 11, 2001, they unveiled their vision to the public and pledged that they would raise the $125 million for the project from private donors.

But instead of receiving universal support, the Normandys’ project has been subjected to mean-spirited criticism.

Chronicle columnist Rob Morse attacked the plan in his column headlined “Let’s not ‘arm’ San Francisco,” deriding the project as “monstrous” and ridiculing it as one that is “right out of Planet of the Apes.”

After describing the project in their Sunday Chronicle column, Matier and Ross reported criticisms of the project in their Monday column. “The idea is outdated and out of touch. The Golden Gate Bridge is symbol enough,” wrote Richard Morasci, reflecting a sentiment repeated by others who wrote letters to the editor opposing the project. But what significance does the Golden Gate Bridge — the premier choice for suicide jumpers — have to immigrants?

“We don’t need an arm on Treasure Island, we need a middle finger,” wrote Phil from Concord.

The suggestion may be quite appropriate. After all, it is the political message that has historically been extended to Asian immigrants.

I completely empathize with Dennis and Lynda, as my own project was subjected to a similar broadside. Last year, then-Supervisor Leslie Katz and I became the target of Chronicle columnist Ken Garcia when we proposed the renaming of Phelan Avenue to Marasigan Avenue. In his column headlined “Renaming Street Is PC Gone Wacky,” Garcia denounced our proposal as “the latest outbreak of buffoonery.”

Garcia agreed that “Mr. Phelan was indeed a racist, a man who once ran on a slogan of ‘Keep California white’ and [who] worked overtime to exclude Asians from the political process.” Senator James Phelan was the principal architect of the Asian Exclusion Act of 1926. Nonetheless, Garcia opposed the name change because “San Francisco is going to have to rename half the city streets to bring the politically correct standards of today to bear on our leaders of yesteryear.”

Garcia ignored the fact that Asian Americans comprise more than 40 percent of the 37,000 students who attend classes at the main campus of City College of San Francisco on Phelan Avenue (“the Phelan Campus”). Facing a street named after an anti-Asian bigot in a heavily Asian American campus is like foisting a Ku Klux Klan Boulevard on Harlem.

But Garcia was not content to tweak the “PC gone wacky” line. He went on to suggest that “the conquering Filipina hero” Violeta “Bullet” Marasigan did not deserve to have a well-known San Francisco street renamed after her, as a “community center” in Daly City, he wrote, is “possibly a more appropriate municipality to honor her.”

Violeta Marasigan died in a tragic automobile accident just over a year ago. With decades of community service, including her leadership in organizing the Asian tenants at the I-Hotel in the 1960s, and her work in organizing Asian youth and World War II veterans in San Francisco, this 1995 KQED Woman Warrior award winner is acknowledged to be a true Filipino American hero.

Both the flame and the street name proposals share a common desire to honor Asian American immigrants who have contributed to the fabric of America. Both have been attacked by the vanguards of the old San Francisco who care for the “leaders of yesteryear” and not for the need of our current generation to have role models and monuments that welcome our presence in America.

Rodel Rodis, vice-president of the San Francisco Community College, is the only elected Filipino American public official in San Francisco .