Never Give Up: A Review of Conrad Panganiban’s Welga
Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales
The Explanation
Too many people died in the last few years. My best friend. My students. My mentors. My mom.
So when I read the first line in the introduction of Conrad Panganiban’s book and saw, “Is this your first heart attack?” I felt my heart drop. My body went numb. A familiar dissonance settled in, the kind my body has learned to produce as protection. A survival mode necessary to endure loss without rest, without pause from the grief and mourning. That is why this review is six months late.
But the dedication page said, “Never Give Up.”
So here it is.
If not for publication or for the public, this is for Conrad. For his labor. For his art. For his heart.
I was on a plane home to SFO by way of DC and NYC when I saw a post about a book launch, Welga: A Filipino American Playwright’s Journey: A Collection of Filipino American Plays. I panicked. Wasn’t I supposed to write something for Conrad?
Shit.
I started texting him apologies as I was getting off the plane. (Not sure if he got them.) Then I searched for our original messages and could not find them. When I got home, there it was, a downloaded version of the book. I remembered starting it months earlier. I remembered stopping because I was overwhelmed with grief.
And I asked myself, why now? Why, after months, am I returning?
I realized I needed more time. Not simply to complete an assignment but to process my identities and my relationship to the stories in Conrad’s plays.
I was returning from DC where I had visited the first Filipino American exhibit at the Smithsonian, How Can You Forget Me? featuring three steamer trunks of Filipino farmworkers from Stockton. As one of the curricularists for the project, my relationship to that work is layered. I am there as a teacher. As a daughter. As a mother. As a wife to the son of a farmworker. As the best friend of Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, the premiere researcher of Filipinos in Stockton.
One of my favorite identities is being Dawn’s best friend.
In spaces that center Filipino farmworker narratives, I often hide behind that title, partly for protection and partly because of my insecurities. Without Dawn there to make sure I am doing things correctly, I often doubt myself. She was the historian. I was “only” a pedagogue.
Since Dawn’s passing, I have tried to continue some of her work while still doing mine. As curriculum director of the UCLA Foundations and Futures Multimedia Project, the first chapter I led was on Filipino farmworkers, bringing together fourteen authors and curriculum designers to develop an online resource for students, teachers, and families. I worked with the California History Social Studies Project on curriculum for AB123, which requires the teaching of Filipino farmworkers in fourth and eleventh grades. I co-wrote the teachers guide for Dawn Mabalon and Gayle Romasanta’s Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong. And I served as a producer for Larry the Musical.
Listing these relationships to the Filipino labor movement makes something clear to me.
I need to stop hiding behind Dawn’s shadow.
This work is my work too.
One more thing.
Some of Conrad’s plays take place in the Pajaro Valley. For the past two years, I have been under attack by right wing leaders there, people who do not know me or my commitment to the work. My service to Ethnic Studies teachers in PVUSD was abruptly cut due to accusations that I was anti-semitic. There was no proof.
What saved me?
The community. Families. Students. Teachers. Scholars. Leaders. Organizers. Ancestors. Watsonville is in the Heart and the Tobera Project saved me. After years of fighting, they won. They brought me back.
And I realized that at the very moment Conrad needed this review in August 2026, I was returning to Watsonville because I had learned from that community the very lesson written in his dedication.
Never give up.
The Review
Welga is not just a collection of plays. It is an archive of breath. It is a staging of memory. It is a reminder that Filipino American history is not a footnote but a pulse, a heartbeat.
Conrad Panganiban writes plays the way our ancestors worked the fields, with precision, with endurance, and with the stubborn belief that this labor matters. Across five plays spanning nearly a century of Filipino American experience, he does what the best Ethnic Studies educators do: he makes history feel like it is happening to you, right now, in your body.
Standing Above Pajaro opens the collection with a wound that has never fully healed. Set during the 1930 Watsonville Riots, it stages the impossible choices survival demands of Celestino Tobera, a Filipino farmworker seeking refuge, and Melissa Crawley, a white storeowner whose protection costs her everything. Panganiban does not let either character off the hook, nor does he let the audience off easy. He writes across the fault line of race and gender with a playwright’s restraint and a historian’s precision. For those of us who know Watsonville, who have been welcomed and attacked by that same valley, the play is not just history. It is a provocation. It is a prophecy. It is a mirror.
What Panganiban understands, and what makes this collection essential for Ethnic Studies classrooms, is that Filipino American history lives in bodies, in objects, in the spaces between generations. Remembering Them literalizes this through a barbershop chair in a museum, an object that holds the weight of every Manong who sat in it, every dream deferred, every story told to pass the time when time was all they had. Holed Up at the Delta bends time itself, weaving 1920s San Francisco with the present, insisting that the past is never past, that it is hidden in the walls, waiting for someone brave enough to knock. And Inay’s Wedding Dress tears open the intimate violence of diaspora, the way assimilation fractures families from the inside, the way a garment can hold a mother’s entire life and a daughter’s entire grief. I can very much relate to this.
Then there is WELGA.
I will confess something. When I read the introduction and saw Conrad name me as one of his professors at San Francisco State University, I felt the weight of that in a way I did not expect. Not pride exactly. Something more complicated. Something closer to accountability. Because WELGA is the play that most clearly carries the seeds of everything we tried to teach in that Filipino American Literature, Art, and Culture class, and seeing those seeds bloom on the page, in the mouths of characters Conrad created, in a story that is unmistakably his own, reminded me why we do this work in the first place.
WELGA is a Filipino American coming-of-age story, yes. But it is also a pedagogy play. It is a play about what happens when history becomes relevant, when students stop asking why does this matter and start understanding that it already does. Maxi Villones, the history teacher at the center of the play, is not a savior. She is something harder and more honest: a teacher trying to reach students whose lives are already full of lessons the curriculum was never designed to hold. When she assigns her class to research Larry Itliong and the 1965 Delano Grape Strike, she is doing what the best Ethnic Studies educators do. She is not simply delivering content. She is insisting that her students see themselves in history, and that history sees itself in them.
This is the pedagogical heart of the play, and it is where I feel Conrad’s time in Ethnic Studies most deeply. Johnny Montalban, the teenage bucket drummer who wants music more than a diploma, is not a bad student. He is a student whose genius has not yet found a form the school can recognize. His education happens on Powell Street, in the rhythms he plays for strangers, in the way he reads his mother’s exhaustion and calculates what it costs. When he finally encounters the story of the Manongs, something shifts. Not because the information saves him, but because recognition does. He sees in Larry Itliong the same refusal to be told that his labor does not count.
That is the gift of this play for Ethnic Studies classrooms. WELGA does not ask students to memorize dates. It asks them to feel the continuity between a Filipino farmworker standing in a grape field in Delano in 1965 and a Filipino American teenager standing on a street corner in San Francisco in the present, both insisting on being seen, both asking to be paid what they are worth, both told by institutions that their dreams are unrealistic. It also pushes the students who are reading or watching WELGA to see themselves in relation to the characters. Not in a cathartic way but more dialogic. Panganiban makes that continuity visceral and somatic. When the students perform their history lesson at the care home rally, when they chant Welga in the streets for Johnny’s mother Carmelita, the past and the present collapse into each other. The Manongs are not metaphors. They are methods.
I have spent my career arguing that Ethnic Studies is not a subject you teach about. It is a practice you do with your community. WELGA makes that argument in dramatic form better than most academic essays I have read, including some of my own. It is the play I wish existed when I first started teaching, the play I will assign, the play I want every Ethnic Studies teacher in California to read alongside the AB 101 and AB 123 standards they are now required to implement.
And I want to be clear about what I mean when I call this craft. Conrad is not simply retelling Filipino American history. He is doing something technically precise and emotionally generous. The play-within-a-play structure, the way the students inhabit the bodies of Itliong, Vera Cruz, Dolores Huerta, is not a gimmick. It is a dramaturgical argument. A thesis statement with evidence to prove its value. It says that the only way to truly learn this history is to speak it, to embody it, to let it move through you. That is what theater does that a textbook cannot. That is what Conrad, after decades of community theater, after Sinag-tala and Bindlestiff and CIRCA Pintig, after all those years of building Filipino American performing arts from the inside out, knows in his bones.
I know it too, though I have learned it differently. I learned it sitting in rooms with teachers in Pajaro Valley Unified, trying to help them find the words and the frameworks to bring Ethnic Studies and Filipino American history to students who had never once seen themselves in a curriculum. I learned it walking through the Smithsonian’s How Can You Forget Me exhibit, standing in front of three steamer trunks that belonged to Filipino farmworkers from Stockton, and feeling Dawn beside me even though she was gone. I learned it the hard way, in the years when my own work in Watsonville and Pajaro Valley was attacked, when the community that Conrad writes about in Standing Above Pajaro was the same community that fought to bring me back. Watsonville saved me. The Tobera Project saved me. And reading WELGA, I understood something I had not fully articulated before: that the lesson of the Manongs is not only about labor rights. It is about what it means to refuse erasure. To keep showing up. To do the work even when the institutions designed to support you have turned their backs.
Carmelita Montalban is not a peripheral character. She is the moral center of WELGA. She is the one whose body pays the cost of a system that extracts labor without accountability, whose silence is not passivity but survival, and whose voice, when she finally speaks at the rally, is the voice of every caregiver, every domestic worker, every Filipina mother who was told to be grateful just to have a job. When Johnny reads her journals, when he sees documented in her own handwriting the hours she was denied breaks, the overtime she was never paid, the threats made to keep her quiet, the play becomes something more than coming-of-age. It becomes testimony. And it becomes a witness. It becomes what we in Ethnic Studies call a counternarrative, a story that insists on being told even when powerful people would prefer it stay hidden.
Conrad wrote this play as his MFA thesis at San Francisco State University. That fact matters. It means that WELGA was born inside an institution, nurtured by professors and cohorts and late nights wrestling with craft, and then sent back out into the community where it belongs. It was staged at Bindlestiff Studio, performed at a high school in Elk Grove, given a staged reading at Teatro Espejo in Sacramento. It traveled. As the best Filipino American art always does, it found its people. And now, in this collection, it has a permanent home.
That is what Conrad has given us with Welga: A Filipino American Playwright’s Journey. Not just five plays. Not just a record of one artist’s development across three decades. He has given us a portable archive, a curriculum, and a love letter to every Filipino American who ever sat in a theater or a classroom and wondered whether their story was worth telling. The answer, in every one of these plays, is the same. It is the answer written on the dedication page. Never give up. It is the answer the Manongs gave when the conditions were impossible and the odds were not in their favor and history was not yet watching. Never give up. It is the answer Carmelita gives when she finally speaks. Never give up. It is the answer Conrad gave when he sat down after his heart attack and decided that what he most wanted to leave behind were these stories, told this way, for this community.
Conrad never gave up. And so the stories live.
With love and solidarity and Never giving up,
Professor Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales