Nurse Unseen is the Filipino’s mother, auntie, brother, cousin, friend and neighbor

Nurse Unseen Executive Producers Carlos Velayo and Fil-Am Comedian Jokoy (1st and 4th from left) pose with AAPCUS Vice President Angel Yap-Quinsay of Fil-an Creatives and Director Michele Josue (2nd and 3rd from left). (Photo by Xenia Tupas)

The nurse unseen, the invisible Filipino nurse, is woven into the fabric of our lives here in the United States and worldwide.  She could be your grandmother, mother, auntie, friend or neighbor. He could also be your brother or cousin. 

What started out as a tribute to Dodo Cueva, the auntie of director and screenwriter Michele Josue has become a film documentary that every Filipino can relate with. Nurse Unseen, an independent production, followed  the lives of several Filipino American nurses since they left the Philippines and how they adapted in their new home away from home.

A love letter or a tapestry of many voices, a collection of beautiful and compelling voices is how Josue described her work because nursing and the Filipino nurses in our community are everywhere, multi-generational and couldn’t be centered on one voice. The Emmy award winning director comes from a family of nurses, from her great grandmother, grandmother and aunties.

Indeed, the film speaks of the legacy of Filipinos in nursing in the US for over a century, how they work hard in the frontlines, in the hospitals, clinics and nursing facilities and how they cope with work fatigue, exhaustion and complexities of life.  And then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 which turned the world upside down and stretched the limits of the resilience of the Filipino nurse.

The making of the project has been very personal to Josue, who was born and raised in the US. She proudly said that “there are many instances the film explores the Filipino American experience in a super genuine way, got to know the history,  and closer to my aunt and coming from a long tine of nurses, was herself expected to into nursing.

It was Josue’s Aunt Dodo who first moved to Philadelphia as a foreign exchange visitor nurse in 1968, followed by her mom Frances in 1969 and dad Jack in 1970. The three all moved from Bacolod and Sagay cities in the Philippines.  

At that time, Filipino nurses came to the US through an Exchange Visitor Program that allowed them to temporarily study and work because of the growing demand of nurses in US hospitals. Most eventually gained permanent residency through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

The film is true to its message of representation and visibility as well as Asian hate in the light of the events surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic where Filipino nurses accounted to 30 per cent of the nurse deaths in the US considering they comprised only4 per cent of the nurse population.

When Covid hit in 2020, Josue said that narrative of the film shifted when the report from National Nurses United came out that  really tragically outlined how vulnerable our community was to the virus and had to integrate the history and data.

The integration of the Covid-19 impact on Filipino nurses into the film was for the better, as described by Josue after the collaboration with Arlene de la Pena and Joe Arciaga,  both nurses who became co-producers who earlier, wanted to embark on a documentary on nurse deaths.

Filipino-American comedian Jokoy has actively supported Nurse Unseen said that “a lot of people don’t understand it, but a lot of these people are in my family and they feel invisible, that they feel they are not even part of this country.”

“One thing that I have always said is expressing how there is no representation, it is when something like this  hits our voices out there, more representation is going to happen,” Jokoy added.

“Why do we have to die to be visible?” lamented writer-activist Ninotchka Rosca in the film as she reflected on the nurse deaths during the pandemic 

With the Covid-19 originating from Wuhan, China and the rhetoric spread by then President Donald Trump led to the rise of Asian hate and Josue said that by humanizing the Filipino experience, people can empathize and have compassion a little bit more and that might help combat some these ideas of intolerance, fear, anxiety of people who are different than yourself.

The story of Los Angeles-based Rosary Celaya Castro-Olega, the first Filipino nurse in the US who died of Covid-19, was featured in the film and it showed her as a hard worker well loved by her co-workers because of her cheerful and joyful attitude.

Olega died because of her exposure to the virus due to the lack of a proper protective equipment when she tended to patients. The lack of proper protective equipment was what nurse Allison Mayol and her companions at the Providence St. John’s Hospital have been demanding that hospital officials had them suspended.

“Maybe we can inspire people to understand and change things and want to fight for our nurses,” Josue said because the film showed how Filipino nurses not only  suffered exhaustion, fatigue and burn-out due to long hours  and a limited supply of personal protective equipment as hospitals were scrimping on them thus, exposing the Filipino nurses to the virus.

There were interviews where the mental health of the Filipino nurses had been impacted just to be on survival mode, having experienced so much Code Blues  and seen Covid death in the wards that some had suffered anxiety, depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

The film starts with a history lesson during the American colonial period when the US, through President William McKinley began its “benevolent assimilation” campaign, which among others, established schools of nursing in the Philippines to train Filipinos nurses with an Americanized  nursing curriculum.

Prof. Anthony Ocampo also said in the film that when the US became involved with World War II, their home base in the Pacic was the Philippines and you can just imagine soldiers getting injured, getting hurt, getting maimed being taken cared of by nurses in the Philippine

He added that the US was the most unwelcoming place in the 1920s-1960s, the whole country was essentially closed to immigration. The US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 altered the situation because of the need of skilled workers.

Dr. Catherine Ceniza-Choy said that with the new law US  hospitals and other health care institutions could recruit nurses to immigrate on a more permanent basis and there was an incredible increase in the migration of Filipino nurses after 1965.

“There was such a tremendous economic investment by Filipino families to send their daughter or son to nursing schools in the Philippines and one way of getting a return own that investment was to work abroad and earn foreign currency,” she narrated as the film panned the expanse of the sugarcane fields of Negros Occidental with a nursing student on a tricycle.

Every year 20,000 Filipinos graduate from nursing school and as of 2022, the Philippine has 95,000 registered nurses with more than half of them active in the nursing profession. It is also noteworthy that the country is the world’s largest exporter of nurses with one in 20 end up migrating to the US, Great Britain, the Middle East and other parts of the world.

The film also pointed out the labor export economy espoused by then dictator Ferdinand Marcos because the export of human labor brought benefits from from the billions of dollars in terms of remittances. 

Josue said that in making the film,  speaking closely and intimately with so many Filipino nurses of our generation, I now know what, I truly know first hand, how honorable nursing is, how integral and instrumental it is to the fabric of our country and its history and that makes me so proud.

She said that it is really inspiring, empowering and encouraging to bring home this film, which was unapologetically Asian or Asian American, let alone-Filipino with only Filipino voices centered.