Janice Lobo Sapigao

Like a solid to a shadow

Janice Sapigao, in this powerful and innovative debut, captures her mother's traumatic experience as an assembly line worker in Silicon Valley, as well as the larger social, economic, and environmental impacts of the high tech industry. The poems switch between English, Ilokano, and binary code, and between documentary, visual, ethnographic, and lyric modes. In our time of toxic exposure, labor exploitation, and gentrification, Sapigao shows us how poetry can be a site to protest injustice, affirm dignity, and maintain hope. [Craig Santos Perez]Note from the Author:This project complicates and juxtaposes the "clean" image of California's Silicon Valley. The northern part of Santa Clara County and east of the San Francisco Peninsula are often referred to as the Silicon Valley, home to many of the world's high technology companies. The boundaries of the Silicon Valley are not fixed; it is more a regional state of mind than a geographical location. As an ideal place of innovation and technological advancement, the Silicon Valley is not known for its exploitative nature of immigrant women workers who build it all - those like my mom.Through the use of binary code, my family's language, Ilokano; and personal observation, microchips for millions draws out the social layers of the microchip, which are central to the global economy. I color the moments and questions when a clear glitch in the collusion of personal, public, private and industrial matters presents itself. The industry in which she works allows her to create a livelihood that does not empower her or women like her to ask the questions that I raise in this text. This is for my mom.

Janice Lobo Sapigao

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