a digital found poetry project by Vitoria S. Perez, 2026
I WORK IN NEW YORK is a digital found poetry project that transforms the bureaucratic fingerprints of my great-grandfather, Cresencio, an Ilonggo seaman and U.S. colonial national of the Manong generation, whose life moved through multiple Filipino geographies of labor in the United States.
The poetry and visual materials presented here are drawn almost exclusively from Cresencio’s Immigration and Naturalization Service A-file and other primary source documents. These records: letters, forms, memoranda, photographs, stamps, and closures of naturalization petition cases, constitute the raw textual material of the project.
I WORK IN NEW YORK examines how U.S. imperial bureaucracies produce and maintain systems of labor mobility while actively obstructing sociopolitical incorporation into the larger empire.
In the source documents, permanent residence appears as neither right or achievement as decades of American propaganda would suggest, but as a forever-deferred administrative condition to be tracked, surveilled, reopened, suspended, and closed again. Citizenship is shown to be not an attainable status through any sort of diligence or compliance, but as a disciplinary mechanism that folds Commonwealth subjects into the American imperial economy while withholding the protections and stability associated with membership.
Cresencio’s A-file documents the narrow labor corridors through which Filipino men were permitted entry into the United States in the mid-twentieth century, and how those conditions and clauses shifted (and continue to shift) under the feet of migrants on already stolen land: maritime labor contracts, agricultural work, and an unrelenting demand for documentation that never resolves into security.
This project is also personal and familial. In 1948, a month before my grandmother was born, Cresencio was served a letter from Immigration and Naturalization Services that granted him 30 conditional days, with a slip at the bottom to be signed by any competent official aboard the ship upon which he would see himself out.
My grandmother never knew her father. In his absence, family narratives, speculation, and accusation filled the spaces where knowledge could not.
What we do know is that Cresencio survived the sinking of the Doña Aurora on Christmas Day, 1942 and survived a 30-day float through the ocean, and was required to keep sailing.
He meticulously petitioned the state to remain in the United States, fighting off endless extensions and insisting upon himself as a seaman. And before one of his shipping contracts dragged him back into contracted motion, he left behind a photograph and an address for his daughter.
I WORK IN NEW YORK records the permanence of provisionality imposed by an imperial state that extracts labor from migrant bodies while refusing them the right to stay. Told through poetry, fiction, family interviews, journal fragments, and primary immigration and labor documents, the project takes its title from one of the only moments in Cresencio’s file where he speaks in the first person – not in the blank line of an inspection form, but on an otherwise empty sheet of paper.
He writes two sentences:
On one page, “I want to be an American citizen.”
On another, “I work in New York.”
I Work in New York 