Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien. Langit Lupa (still). 2023. Image courtesy of the artists and 47 Canal, New York.
With contributing reporting by Malaya Conui (she/they), Jillian Stineman (she/her) and Lucy M.S.P. Burns.
Content warning: state violence, massacre, martial law
On Nov. 9 and 10, 2024, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien screened their newest experimental labor-activist documentary, Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth) (2023), at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown. The documentary braids personal testimonies from survivors of the violent Escalante Massacre with vivid phytograms taken from a sugar plantation in Negros, Philippines, raw 16 mm film, and theatrical performances by Escalante children.1 The weekend screenings and related programs were part of Camacho and Lien’s artist residency with Active Cultures, a public arts nonprofit in Los Angeles that explores the intersection of art, food, and ecologies through artist-led projects and programs.
The film screening was followed by a symposium featuring the filmmakers, Lucy MSP Burns (UCLA), Josen Masangkay Diaz (UCSC), and Joy Sales (CSULA), scholars whose research contextualizes the film’s events within the transnational Philippine liberation movement.
A coalition of anti-imperialist organizations, including Gabriela LA and the Malaya Movement, tabled at the event. They cautioned audiences to the imperative of end continuing U.S. militarism encroachment in the Philippines, including rejecting policies such as the Philippine Enhanced Resilience Act of 2024 (PERA), a bill that purports to “strengthen and modernize the U.S.-Philippines alliance through significantly increased U.S. security assistance,” and voting in agreement with the Philippine Human Rights Act (PHRA) which “imposes limitations on providing assistance to the police or military of the Philippines.” In support of low-wage workers, the organizations also promoted resources for housing-insecure Filipino Americans and opportunities to mobilize against unjust evictions.
The History of Resistance in Escalante
The Escalante Massacre took place on Negros Island in the central Philippines within the Visaya region. Divided into two provinces, Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental, this region is known for its haciendas, large estates controlled by wealthy landowners typically established during the Spanish colonial period. The emergence of haciendas in the Philippines was directly tied to the establishment of sugar plantations. In the early 19th century, settlers migrating from the nearby island of Panay began establishing these haciendas. Today, settler landowners and the following generations have built their wealth through the industry. The city of Escalante in Negros Occidental became prosperous through the sugar trade, exporting sugar and sugar products since the Spanish colonial period.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the price of sugar plummeted in the world market, triggering a severe socioeconomic crisis. As production slowed to a halt, half a million farm workers lost their livelihoods, and hundreds of thousands of children faced hunger and death. According the Philippines’ Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, Negros suffering was compounded by the landowners who used private militia to silence workers’ outcries. The heightening socioeconomic crisis, paired with state repression under former President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., saw the growth of people’s movements. This was seen particularly through the reestablishment of the Communist Party (1968, CPP), the founding of the New People’s Army (1969, NPA), and the work of the militant youth organization Kabataang Makabayan (1964, KM). The CPP, NPA, and KM led the Quarter Storm in the early 1970s, a period marked by demonstrations, protests, and marches against Marcos Sr.’s dictatorial regime. In a desperate attempt to hang onto power, Marcos Sr. declared martial law in 1972. The Armed Forces of the Philippines, the main force implementing the martial law, was heavily backed by U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. This military presence worked to secure U.S. strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Described as the “first island chain” in the Pacific, the Philippines is of interest to the United States because of its proximity to Taiwan and China’s Hainan province, the latter being an island with a major Chinese naval base. From 2015 to 2024 the Philippines was the largest recipient of U.S. military assistance, including ₱57 billion ($1.14 billion) in planes, armored vehicles, small arms, and other military equipment and training.
Martial law under the Marcos regime perpetrated terrorism in the Philippine countryside by ordering successive military operations that sent a stream of abusive soldiers who killed and pillaged their way through rural areas. As conditions worsened, more and more peasants and farm workers joined the people’s war, which was heightening in the countryside. With the growing New People’s Army and union organizing in sugar farms and mills, the island turned into a “social volcano” ready to erupt in September 1985. Five months later, in February 1986, Marcos was ousted by the EDSA People Power revolution.2
The Escalante march of Sept. 20th, 1985, was part of a coordinated hwelgang bayan (people’s strike) – a general strike held throughout the archipelago across different sectors and workplaces in Philippine society – against the Marcos regime. Led by board coalitions across the country, the hwelgang bayan stopped work and public transportation. In Negros, the strike froze public transportation, suspended classes, and closed down many businesses. Protestors congregated in Escalante starting Sept. 18th, intending to build a barricade on the national highway by the 21st.
However, on the 20th, protesters were met with violent pushback. Soldiers appeared in full battle gear and carried high-powered firearms. Firetrucks arrived with the Civilian Home Defense Force (CHDF) and pumped water until they ran out of supply. The CHDF then fired tear gas into the crowd and began shooting after Yubelyn Jaravelo, a young woman, threw a canister back. After the massacre ended, more troops arrived. The remaining survivors were sure they would die, but a door opened in the local market, and everyone rushed inside.
Truths Through Imagery
Langit Lupa is a film about the present as much as a radical remembrance of the past. It is a project that honors those martyred in the Escalante Massacre because resistance against the long-standing hacienda system in the Philippines is a continuous effort, and Negros Island remains a primary hotspot for political violence.
It opens in pitch black, roused by the heartbeat of a delicate, unseen bell before cutting into the lush landscape of Negros. This panorama lingers, highlighting the importance of the island’s topography and evokes a sense of foreboding regarding its fleeting pristine beauty tarnished by capitalistic greed.
Langit Lupa maps out the origins of the working-class struggle in Negros first through the exploitation of its natural environment: its hardwood coveted by the American-led Insular Lumber Company was deforested to make room for globally lucrative sugarcane plantations. Its introductory narrator poignantly describes this course of history as a “massacre of the jungle, massacre of the environment.”
As a documentary, it follows the struggles of peasant farmers who are unemployed during the three-to-four-month tiempo muerto, or dead season, for sugarcane crops. It showcases how this frantic livelihood and excruciating experience of tigkiriwi, a Hiligaynon concept of gut-wrenching starvation, was exacerbated during Marcos Sr’s regime.
Such a biting, desperate, yet collective sense of necessity culminated in demonstrations and the repressive massacre on September 20, 1985. Personal accounts of this day are enveloped in phytograms that cascade across the screen and come alive, protecting anonymity while making the violence abstract and its memory resilient. Moments in which a massacre survivor would pause their testimony to process the trauma offered tender authenticity. Camacho and Lien achieved an experience of intimate realism as audiences had a chance to embody these powerful voices and their stories in themselves.
Although the film encompasses violence and trauma, children play a pivotal role in storytelling. In their elimination game “langit, lupa, impyerno” [heaven, earth, hell], Escalante’s children chant about who will replace their dead and get stabbed in the heart. The filmmakers draw the film’s title from the children’s game, echoing the morbid realities of peasant life in Negros and its jarring normalcy via their nonchalance.
Their games and performances are themselves acts of radical remembrance. In one of these feats, the children walk in a procession from the plantation to the cemetery in replication of a commemoration ritual. The leader of this line bears a barbed wire halo, followed by those holding a stalk of sugarcane, a machete, a fishnet, and books. The halo links the martyrdom of protestors with sainthood. Moreover, the sugarcane, machete, and fishnet unite the working-class struggles of peasant farmers and fisherfolk. The books, Pasyon and Revolution by Reynaldo Ileto and Remaindered Life by Neferti Tadiar, symbolize knowledge gained from the people’s struggle, especially the preservation of the massacre’s memory amid the backdrop of historical revisionism in the current regime of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.
The film concludes with the children joyously rushing into the sea as if baptized into Escalante’s spirit of protest and promise of liberation.
The Symposium – The ongoing and historic struggle of the Filipino people
The symposium after the screening connected “Langit Lupa” to the ongoing resistance of Filipino workers and peasants fighting for fair wages, lower food prices, and genuine land reform. The Escalante Massacre was not an isolated instance of state violence. Nor was it divorced from the deep-rooted systems of U.S. imperialism and colonialism, feudal land ownership, and rotten power structures designed to exploit the land and labor of the Filipino people.
Camacho and Lien, along with interviewees and the aforementioned organizations, artists, and scholars, called upon Filipinos living abroad to take action against U.S. imperialism and present-day fascism in the Philippines. Audience members were urged to critically examine the role of art, performance, storytelling, and the uncovering of our histories in fighting for genuine change.
Opening remarks began with Burns, grounding the audience by acknowledging the occupied lands of both the Tongva and Palestinian peoples, expressing solidarity with the continued struggle for liberation and their refusal to surrender – a refusal that is setting us free.
Diaz framed Langit Lupa within the geopolitical crisis of globalized capitalism and U.S. imperialism. While martial law under Ferdinand Marcos Sr. is the most infamous and protracted era of martial law in the Philippines, it has been a tool utilized by the Philippine ruling class since the time of Spanish colonialism. Rodrigo Duterte’s authoritarian presidential regime (2016-2022) deployed martial law to counter resistance movements in Mindanao. Diaz calls martial law “a significant apparatus of control over and within the Philippine archipelago… defin[ing] governance itself as opposition to anti-colonial revolt” that ultimately serves U.S. imperialist interests.
Today, the Filipino people find themselves as collateral damage in the heightening aggression between the U.S. and China, with numerous increases in U.S. funding of militarism in the Philippines. As recently as April 2024, PERA was introduced to the U.S. Senate, promising $2.5 billion in U.S. military aid to the Philippines over the next five years.
The mass mobilization and summit in July 2024, where community members from across the country gathered in San Diego to demand the cancellation of the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), demonstrated collective resistance against the U.S. war machine. The 2024 RIMPAC exercises — a biannual series of joint war games between 29 nations — occurred amidst the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and its pivot toward the Asia-Pacific to counter China, using the Philippines as a pawn. Activists exposed the economic, environmental, and sociopolitical consequences of this wide-scale militarization, highlighting the rampant gendered violence and displacement that occur during prolonged military occupation. Diaz notes that “these coalitional movements lead a resistance against the war machine that is transnational, multi-sided and attuned to historical, present and all of its possible features.”
Sales analyzed the migration and formation of Filipino communities overseas as a result of forced displacement caused by the deep-rooted crisis of colonial legacy and U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. The Filipino migration story is one of displacement from the countryside to the cities abroad. Filipinos are exported to countries like the U.S. as exploited laborers in search of a livelihood that is robbed from them in their homeland. Instead, Filipinos find themselves facing racialized violence and state neglect from both the Philippine and U.S. governments. All while their remittances prop up the Philippine economy.
As a member of the Malaya Movement, Sales uplifted the fight against historical revisionism. From the revolution against colonialism and the anti-martial law movement to the labor movements within the migrant community today, Filipinos have a long history of liberation struggles and labor activism. Sales describes this historic and present-day organizing of migrant Filipinos as a “form of protection, as a form of community building, as a form of mutual aid, mutual assistance, and also as a form of raising their political consciousness and political work.” Amidst willful state neglect and violence, Sales adds that we must learn this history and take lessons from these experiences. To mobilize the people in the fight for change, Sales insists on the necessity of genuinely understanding the people’s demands, as this understanding is key to recognizing what fuels resistive action toward social change.
Burns discussed the narrative devices used in “Langit Lupa”: the juxtaposition of violence and massacre – of the land and of the people – with hand-manipulated animation of plant matter and children’s interaction with other natural elements, reflecting the significance of land and water to life for the people of Negros. Camacho and Lien diverge from conventional “talking-head” style documentaries. Instead, as Burns pointed out, the filmmakers take direction from the community, addressing the anonymity requests amidst retaliatory state repression under Duterte and Marcos Jr. Additionally, this style allows viewers to immerse themselves in the stories of those who experienced the hwelga.
When asked about balancing the line between humanizing the subjects of Langit Lupa, both in real life interaction and in film, and analyzing them through an extractive lens that is common within academia and the arts, Camacho responded by discussing what it means to be artists and activists working within profit-driven, neoliberal institutions. “I consider myself certainly an organizer and activist, first, [and] an artist second.” Additionally, Camacho said, “This is the foundational [question] for all cultural workers in the mass movement of the Philippines. The first question is for whom? After you answer that question, for whom? If your answer to that question is the people, and you are doing this to serve the people, then you know who you’re accountable to.”
Closing Remarks
Through uncovering and uplifting the experiences of community members who survived the Escalante Massacre, “Langit Lupa” provides a space for negotiating pain, trauma, and life after death through art and performance. The Philippines’ social, political, and economic crisis is ever-worsening. With this screening and symposium, scholars, artists, and organizations called upon the community to take up the fight alongside Filipinos in their struggle for genuine and lasting change.
When asked what audiences should take away from the event, Camacho shared: “Folks are already doing this work, [and] have been across generations… There are incredible organizations in LA [you can seek out]. These forms of work and forms of struggle are connected, all of these different global struggles and problems connect to root problems: militarization and landlessness, poverty and houselessness, and forced migration. Doing work here with the unhoused, for example, strengthens movements in the Philippines because it’s all connected. Get involved with local work because it matters!”
- Phytograms are images produced using the internal chemistry of plants and photographic emulsion.
- EDSA stands for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major freeway to Metro Manila, where protestors had demonstrated for three days against the Marcos regime.
A special thanks to the Fall 2024 cohort of Asian American Studies 176 for their contributions in the interviews and photography of this article.