The creatures go about their crossings and connections unnoticed at the airport, checking for departure gates, buying overpriced fast food, and whiling away time at the duty-free. “Uuwi ka ba?” (Are you headed home?) the Filipina sales worker at Detroit Duty-Free asks me during one of my layovers on the way to Manila. Having caught my eye, she nods in recognition. She refers to a “home,” the Philippines, a colony of Spain and then of the United States before it was granted independence in 1946, a place neither of us inhabits. The sales worker’s query has been asked more widely across the planet since the 1970s, when the Philippines began exporting professional and service labor as part of a domestic political safety valve and later as its comparative advantage in the global marketplace. (2)
Leeroy New, Aliens Grocery, from Aliens of Manila series, 2014–present; © Leeroy New
The woman never actually referred to home as such. In Tagalog or Filipino, “uwi” refers not to home (tahanan) or house (bahay/balay) but rather to the direction toward home: homeward. “Ka” refers to me, the addressee, and “ba” is the interrogative. The repetition of the first syllable in “uuwi” denotes eventuality, and the root, “uwi,” is not so much an endpoint but a direction we both understand is toward home. Thus, the word connotes not necessarily a physical topos or telos, but a shared orientation, an embodied anticipatory movement in time, space, and imagination. In the context of migration and histories of colonization, to go homeward for many Filipinos is perhaps not an act of return, but is about anticipation, communality, and the fact that we together are here and no longer there. With the friendly query, the saleswoman marked not only our shared displacement from Philippine soil but also our alien origins. After all, she sees her fellow creatures daily passing through her workplace, a way station for transients. These aliens hide in plain sight, holding blue and other passports like appendages at these border crossings, more aliens of Manila and other points in the archipelago.
Aliens of Manila (2014–present) is a photography series by Philippine-based queer artist Leeroy New that features the mundane lives of Filipinos. The photographs document aliens as both migrants and otherworldly creatures, organic-inorganic humanoids, partaking in workaday activities like shopping, commuting, even passing through airports. Inspired by the Humans of New York series (2010) but departing from the inspiration that sought to humanize and tell stories of millions of urban dwellers,[3] Aliens of Manila centers the nonhuman elements of urban dwellers and their global migration.
The author thanks Lucy San Pablo Burns, Ethel Brooks, Martin Manalansan, Donette Francis, and Mark Berkowitz for providing insights and clarifying ideas toward this direction home.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Allan Punzalan Isaac, Aliens at Balete Bulate Bituka (Banyan Worm Viscera) under the Bentway Expressway, Toronto, 2023; Photo by Allan Punzalan Isaac
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Allan Punzalan Isaac