Pulso Ng Bayan
URL: https://pulsongbayan.ca/ (link will open in new window)
Pulso Ng Bayan is a collective of Filipino artists and writers based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, dedicated to gathering, preserving, and sharing stories from the Montreal Filipino community. Founded by Andi Vicente, Jacqueline Colting-Stol, Deann Louise C. Nardo, and Marianne Métivier, the collective centers narratives of migration, home, and intergenerational resilience—ensuring that the lived experiences of the community are carried forward for future generations.
Rooted in care, memory, and creative resistance, Pulso Ng Bayan works to amplify voices that are often underrepresented in mainstream archives. Their approach is collaborative and community-based, inviting participants to reflect on the emotional, cultural, and geographic landscapes that shape Filipino life in Montreal.
Maglala: Weaving Our Webs of Home
From December 2, 2023 to January 28, 2024, Pulso Ng Bayan presented Maglala: Weaving Our Webs of Home at Maison de la Culture Côte-des-Neiges. The exhibit served as a multimedia cartographic archive of memories grounded in Côte-des-Neiges, one of Montreal’s most culturally diverse neighbourhoods and home to a vibrant Filipino community.
Maglala—meaning “to weave”—invited visitors to consider how stories, relationships, and shared histories interlace to form webs of belonging. The exhibition functioned both as a presentation of collected works and as a response in itself: an evolving archive that maps how the community preserves memory and paves the way for archival empowerment.The exhibit featured:
• Photographs
• Audio and visual storytelling
• Video clips
• Songs and poems
• Written reflections and yearnings
These anonymous submissions highlight the community’s hardships, desires, and daily grinds—moments of sacrifice, adaptation, celebration, and quiet endurance that shape Filipino diasporic life.
A Living Cartographic Archive
At the heart of the project is a digital interface created and maintained by Andi Vicente. Hosted on a simple WordPress platform, the site features a Google map view of the Island of Montreal, with a particular focus on Côte-des-Neiges. Community submissions are mapped onto this shared geography, transforming familiar streets and neighbourhood spaces into sites of memory and meaning.
Accessible at pulsongbayan.ca, the archive is designed to be intuitive and participatory. By mapping anonymous stories across the city, Pulso Ng Bayan invites community members to see themselves reflected in a collective history—one that honors resilience while acknowledging ongoing struggles.
Through this process, Pulso Ng Bayan fosters archival empowerment: the act of documenting ourselves, for ourselves. The project demonstrates that archives are not only institutional repositories, but living, breathing spaces shaped by community care and creative expression.
Building Collective Memory for the Future
Pulso Ng Bayan’s work affirms that migration stories are not singular narratives of departure and arrival, but layered experiences carried across generations. By centering Filipino voices in Montreal—particularly in Côte-des-Neiges—the collective creates space for dialogue, remembrance, and future-making.
Their ongoing work continues to cultivate a shared archive of belonging—one that pulses with the stories, struggles, and strength of the community.
