Victoria Manalo Draves Park Plaque To Be Unveiled Saturday

Victoria Manalo Draves Park Plaque To Be Unveiled SaturdayPhoto: National Federation of Filipino American Associations/Facebook
Brittany Hopkins
Published on October 09, 2015

At 10am tomorrow, the National Federation of Filipino American Associations & Philippine Consul General are gathering city officials, Filipino residents and community leaders at the Folsom Street entrance of Victoria Manalo Draves Park to celebrate the installation of a permanent plaque, dedicated to the park's namesake.

Born to a Filipino father and English mother, Draves (who died in 2010) grew up in SoMa and was the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She took home gold medals in springboard and platform diving in the 1948 London Olympics—an era when interracial marriage wasn't yet legal, ethnic segregation was common practice and sexism was the norm.

'A Really Good Role Model'

"She's a really good role model for the Filipino kids who go there, and for everybody," said Rudy Ascercion, chair of the NaFFAA and former executive director of the West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center in SoMa.

"When [Draves] started her diving lessons, she was discriminated against," he continued. "She'd go to the swimming pool at the Fairmont, and all the white kids in the pool would get out of the pool. She would be the only one swimming in the pool while she was there. In spite of all those challenges, all the discrimination that she faced, she still triumphed."


Ascercion met Draves in 2005, when she served as the grand marshal at the annual Pistahan Festival and he was the hermano mayor (honorary chair).  

"I didn't know who she was, and I totally ignored her. We were having lunch, and I didn't even speak to her," he admits.

He didn't learn just who he had snubbed until a year later, when he served on the committee tasked with naming the new park at Seventh and Folsom streets. But even after the park was dedicated in her honor, he regularly noticed that Filipino children and their families had no idea who she was.

Creating the Plaque

By 2012, he decided on a solution: installing a commemorative plaque in the park, to ensure her story would always be visible for visiting youth and families to read. However, as soon as he raised enough money to purchase a long-lasting bronze plaque, the city pulled funding for the West Bay's youth summer program. To keep it running, Ascercion had to re-route most of the funds, so he settled on a temporary aluminum plaque for the park gates, he said.

Ascercion renewed the fundraising effort this year, and with support from the local development firm Realtext Group and approval from Rec and Parks, he was finally able to purchase and install the permanent plaque that's being unveiled tomorrow.

To help mark the occasion, he's invited Supervisor Jane Kim, the general manager of Rec and Parks, and a host of sponsors, Filipino community leaders and celebrities to the dedication ceremony. Open to the public, it will feature authentic cuisine from SoMa's new Filipino restaurant, Pampalasa, as well as ethnic performers, Ascercion said.


Victoria Manalo Draves — The Film

One of the celebrities leading tomorrow's celebration is Georgina Tolentino, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who's producing and starring in a biopic about the the Olympian’s career and private life.

Unlike Ascercion, Tolentino never met Draves. But after Draves passed away in 2010, she was inspired just the same.

“Someone actually came up to me in Los Angeles and said, ‘Oh, have you read about this woman, she actually kind of looks like you,’” Tolentino recalls. As a San Francisco native of Filipino and Portuguese decent, she was surprised she had never heard of the Olympian.

Draves and Tolentino side-by-side. (Image: Georgina Tolentino)

At the time, Tolentino was working at a film company and pursuing an acting career, and felt limited by the roles available to her as an Asian women, she said. But as she read Draves’ obituary and learned of the adversity she overcame to take home gold medals, she finally saw an empowering character worth exploring.

Since then, she's been assembling a team of producers and private investors; training in gymnastics, diving and ballet for 15-20 hours a week; and working with Draves’ close friends to create a story-driven film that honors her legacy while speaking to universal struggles with racism and sexism today. 

Tolentino, preparing to play Draves on film. (Photo: Quoc Ngo)

“It’s very personal for me,” Tolentino said. “To hear this story, it’s so moving. But it’s also about an Olympian. And it’s through sports that you kind of see someone for their work, and you see how ridiculous those prejudices are.”

Tolentino and her team expect the film to be distributed with a high profile distributor in 2017, she said.

“It’s a really rich story, and it’s unfortunate that people don’t know it. But they will.”

More Than A Monument 

While raising Draves' profile in SoMa is a major goal of this event, it's not his only reason for hosting it, Ascercion said. Following the celebration, he plans to convene a meeting with Filipino community leaders from across the city to discuss the community's long struggle with the city to secure a Filipino Heritage District South of Market.

"There has to be an anchor if they're going to be successful in getting a Filipino Heritage District," Ascercion said. He believes that if the community works with the city to turn Victoria Manalo Draves Park into a space featuring more Filipino themes, it could become that anchor.

"And even if we don't get a Filipino Heritage District, we'll still have a heritage something, because the park would be a Filipino-themed park," he said.

Ascercion has invited Southern Captain Jerome DeFilippo, to address mounting safety concerns impacting Draves Park, which is one of the neighborhood's few green spaces.

Photo: Brittany Hopkins/Hoodline

Since the police department moved its headquarters to China Basin this spring, security in the park has been neglected, he said. Over the past few weeks, he's seen people doing drugs in the open, drinking, having sex in the bathroom and engaging in other activities that make the space uncomfortable for neighborhood youth.

"We need to figure out the best way to make it a family-oriented park that everybody can enjoy," Ascercio said. "And that's basically the objective of this whole exercise. The bronze plaque itself is the beginning of everything we're going to try to do."