A new documentary by a third-generation San Franciscan is putting Gold Rush-era anti-Asian violence and the destruction of San Francisco's Manilatown on screen through the eyes of community archivists trying to keep those histories from being erased. The 35-minute film, "From the Ground Up," sponsored by the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, premiered in March at the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and is showing again next week, with the next screening scheduled for 7:30pm on April 16 at the Clarion Performing Arts Center. **Who Gets Erased** The film follows four community archivists: artist and activist Leon Sun; Manilatown Heritage Foundation executive director Caroline Cabading; and Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee of the South Asian Radical History Walking Tour. The project centers the people doing the work of preserving memory from below, rather than the institutions that have historically let whole communities be flattened, displaced, or forgotten. Sun's photography captured the lives of everyday people in movements like anti-Vietnam War protests and Black-Asian solidarity. Sun told Axios, "Archiving is sort of like the gas stations on the way to keep you going forward [and also] a trail that you can look back on to see what happened in the past." The line lands like a practical description of survival: memory as fuel, memory as evidence, memory as a route through the wreckage. **What They Had to Build Themselves** Quan started working on the film a few years ago while delving into archives like the Bay Area hip-hop collection at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland. Quan told Axios, "Giving credit to archives doesn't really come naturally," and said people often "pick and choose things" without thinking through how the materials are preserved. She said archives are crucial to filling in gaps for marginalized communities, especially as attacks on DEI continue to escalate. "If we don't save our own history, no one else is going to do it," she said. That line cuts straight through the usual institutional performance. The people most affected by erasure are the ones forced to do the labor of preservation themselves, while the systems that produced the gaps keep moving on. The film's existence points to a familiar arrangement: communities doing the work that official memory never bothered to do. Cabading said many people today are shocked to learn there used to be a thriving, 10-block-long Filipino neighborhood adjacent to Chinatown. She said Manilatown is where her grandfather first found solace as an immigrant in the early 1900s, and that her aunt and uncle were part of the human chain that defended the I-Hotel against urban renewal plans. Cabading told Axios, "You have to remember on the community's behalf," and said young Filipinos often feel empowered when they find out they are part of "at least two generations of warrior stock." **Against Urban Renewal and Forgetting** The documentary also places organizing itself inside Asian American history rather than treating it as an add-on. In the film, Ghosh says, "Our traditions are not just about like Bollywood or samosas. We wanted to push that narrative to show folks that organizing is as much part of our culture as anything else." That framing rejects the sanitized version of culture that leaves out resistance, defense, and collective struggle. The article says that for the four subjects of Quan's film, archiving is more than preserving; it is honoring Asian American resistance. The film's focus on anti-Asian violence, the destruction of Manilatown, and the defense of the I-Hotel against urban renewal plans places the weight where it belongs: on the systems and projects that made communities fight to remain visible at all. The screening on April 16 at the Clarion Performing Arts Center gives the film another public run, but the deeper story is already in the material itself. The archives, the photographs, the oral histories, and the community memory all point to the same hard fact: when power decides what gets kept, people at the bottom have to build their own record just to avoid being erased.
