Experience Community, Culture and History in the Making

Upcoming Events

Past Events

May 2023

25th Annual Flores de Mayo Celebration

For the past few years, SOMA Pilipinas has partnered with Canon Kip Senior Center to co-host the annual Flores de Mayo/Santacruzan Festival!

The 25th Annual Flores de Mayo Celebration program was held in Forum at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), preceded by a procession through the Yerba Buena Gardens.

December 2022

20th Annual Parol Lantern Festival

Inspired by the theme, “Illuminating Our Legacy to Light Our Path”, over 2,000 attendees visited the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts and the Yerba Buena Gardens, where parol lanterns shined brightly to honor our ancestors and bring hope to all of us.

Photos by Come Plum Photography and Tommy Lau.

July 2022

SOMA Pilipinas’ 6th Anniversary: ART IS POWER!

In July, we celebrated SOMA Pilipinas 6th Year Anniversary by highlighting our first SOMA Pilipinas District Gateway and other incoming public art projects with special guests, San Francisco Arts Commission’s Director of Cultural Affairs Ralph Remington, California Arts Council Executive Director Jonathan Moscone, newly elected California State Assemblymember Matt Haney, and Rachel Lastimosa.

Photos by Sean Santos.

May 2022

Annual Flores de Mayo

We celebrate the springtime with a colorful pageant parade featuring the beautiful seniors of SOMA Pilipinas. Also known as the Santacruzan, this parade is held all over the Philippines to commemorate our religious traditions. The procession was followed by a short program of cultural performances.

Photos by Nix Guirre

December 2021

19th Annual Parol Lantern Festival

Celebrating its 19th year in SOMA, the festival featured a gallery of specialty parols, alongside live music, cultural performances, and a showcase of Filipino holiday treats. The festival culminated with a ritual dance performance and a parol lighting ceremony.

Photos by Mogli Maureal

Parol Workshops

To kick off the holiday festivities, we hosted low-cost, family-friendly workshops at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to teach our community the art of making their own parol lanterns.

The parol lantern is the quintessential Filipino symbol of holiday spirit, bringing hope, peace, blessings, and light to the season. The practice of creating parols brings together intergenerational communities, providing education on traditional cultural artistic practices and opportunities for connection. Elders share their skills and stories of parol making, while younger generations learn more about their community, culture, and power of identity through art-making.

Photos by Rachel Lastimosa

July 2021

Gateway Designs at Moss Street Block Party

In partnership with SF Parks Alliance, we showcased gateway design proposals by Franceska Gamez, Mike Arcega, Macro Waves, and Riz Gache at the Moss Street Block Party. Community members gave us their opinions on the designs while enjoying cultural performances by local artists and performers.

Photos by Nix Guirre

May 2021

Anti-Asian Hate Response

Our Response to Anti-Asian Hate

We held self-defense workshops, panel discussions, and artist circles in response to anti-Asian violence.

April 2021

SOMA Pilipinas Five-Year Anniversary

More Than a Cultural District: SOMA Pilipinas is Community-in-Action and a Cultural Movement

SOMA Pilipinas celebrates five years as San Francisco’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District on Thursday, April 29, 2021, 4-6pm PST at new art and wellness pop-up Kapwa Gardens. The cultural heritage district honors the over 120-year Filipino history and living legacy of making home, celebrating culture, building community and fighting for economic and racial justice. Embodying the spirit of bayanihan, SOMA Pilipinas supports a community-in-action in the highly gentrified South of Market neighborhood — the technology capital of the world for the last decade.

SOMA Pilipinas was officially established as SF’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District in 2016 and was among the first selected for state designation by the California Arts Council in 2017.

In its first five years, SOMA Pilipinas has raised the visibility of the Filipino community, helped increase funding for Filipino artists and established baseline funding for cultural districts to protect vulnerable communities and preserve San Francisco’s cultural diversity.

Working with residents and other community groups, SOMA Pilipinas worked with community groups to block the development of luxury condos that would have shadowed Victoria Manalo Draves Park and preserved the Gran Oriente as a Filipino historic landmark and cultural asset for generations to come.

The cultural district has earned numerous accolades: receiving the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant, being honored for their revitalization work by the Architects International Association SF and being recognized for their work in building sustainable and equitable communities by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

January 2020

SFUFF Culture of Resistance Versus Culture Vultures

SOMA Pilipinas partnered with the SF Urban Film Fest to put together the event "Culture of Resistance Versus Culture Vultures" which presented several film shorts and was followed by a panel discussion. The event sought to explore how arts and culture can be used as both tools of resistance to gentrification and displacement of working-class and BIPOC communities, as well as avenues for commodification, speculation, and the aiding of gentrification.