Between 1899-1900, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West hired eight Filipinos to join the Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Although the Filipino Rough Riders were largely forgotten to history, in their itinerant project Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David work with historic theaters in towns and cities where the Wild West show once traveled to install the performers’ names on vintage marquees. Inspired by the iconic 1900 Courier Lithographic Co. chromographic poster, I Am Coming, which features Cody’s portrait superimposed over stampeding bison, We Are Coming decenters the white, masculine subject encompassed in the singular “I” and asserts a collective “We” of immigrant communities whose group boundaries have yet to be fully constituted. We Are Coming reimagines the original poster design’s anticipatory logics and stages Filipino futures yet to come. While it announces a collective action in the present, We Are Coming also refers to past waves of migration and posits the possibility of future arrivals.

Using the theater marquee and its ever-changing unveiling of coming attractions as a point of reference, We Are Coming asks museum staff to participate in the ongoing rotation of Filipino Rough Rider names during the course of its exhibition.