Basically, a "showcase" was a party/event in which two or more DJ crews participated in. Sometimes, these events were set up as competitions, aka "battles." But in a sense, while all battles were showcases, almost all showcases were battles too, whether formally or informally. You don't put two or more crews together, at the same event, and not expect them to measure up against one another in terms of staging, mixing, music choice, etc. 

Multi-crew parties began to crop up as early as 1982, during the first wave of crew formations. While the scene was still young, the fact that most crews got started in high schools meant that they were always in each other's orbits. For example, one early sponsor of crew battles was the Octogon [sic] Club at S.F.'s Balboa High. Amongst their other events, they sponsored a 1984 battle between Daly City's Unique Musique and Unlimited Sounds. 

As the scene grew during the first half of the 1980s, other school and church groups caught the same idea and more and more 2-3 crew showcases began to emerge. However, in 1984, a new promoter, from outside the Filipino community, began to throw a series of parties that took the concept of the showcase to the proverbial next level: Imagine's Mark Bradford. 

The story of Bradford is complicated enough to warrant its own book. A San Francisco resident, he made his money from real estate and would throw big parties with little interest in recouping a profit. He was also white, gay, with an open interest in young Filipino men. As his Imagine parties grew in stature, he was able to leverage his power and money to shed favors of people/crews he liked and blacklist those he didn't. Opinions of Bradford run the gamut from those who saw him as an eccentric "friend to the scene" to those who felt he was a sexual predator, preying on underage boys. He was probably both but in any case, couldn't be here to explain himself or his actions: he was murdered in 1992. His case remains unsolved. 

Bradford's personal story aside, his Imagine parties became, indisputably, a major force in the scene. They began in 1984, with a three-way crew battle plus b-boy competition. By 1987, his "Don't Stop the Madness" party (aka Imagine 7), invited over 20 crews, hosting them in a massive warehouse at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. His parties were flashy and expensive; special guests would arrive in limos and the venues were often far fancier than any school gym or social hall. Simply appearing on an Imagine flier was treated as a mark of success, let alone winning an Imagine battle; it raised crew profiles and helped increase their gig potential.

Imagine wasn't the only game into town either. Arleen Alviar was a protege of Bradford but from across the Bay, as part of the Union City/Hayward scene. Her AA Productions parties started in 1985 and if Imagine was anchored in S.F./Daly City, then AA Productions was the East/South Bay equivalent. Later, there were John Francisco's Expressions parties, which helped fill in the vacuum left once Imagine began to fade out in the city. 

What the showcase parties did was bring youth from all those various neighborhoods into shared venues, creating opportunities for interaction and social bonding that may not have occurred otherwise. This is one of the powers of musical events, especially DJ events. Whether in the UK's Northern Soul scene or Jamaica's soundclash tradition or the proto-hip-hop park jams of the South Bronx, DJ parties have the ability to pull many fans from across many points. And in traveling, in making what one could call a "pilgrimage" to those destination parties, those fans begin to develop a sense of collective identity with one another.  

Part of what made the Filipino American mobile crew scene, Filipino, was that it was made up of hundreds, if not thousands of Filipino youth. That's an obvious observation. And as discussed in Part 2, part of why the scene became so massive within the Filipino community is that because family and community networks helped new crews succeed. But there's another side to the equation to. 

At a certain point, part of how you defined yourself as Filipino was participation in the scene. In other words, people were already ethnically Pinoy and Pinay but if identity is an act of expression, then for this generation of Filipino youth, one major method of expression was participating in the mobile scene. It's how people "became Filipino," how you built a shared bond with other people in that community.

For a generation of Filipino American youth in the Bay Area, the mobile scene was a powerful way in which they built these bonds, shared these identities. But even as popular as the mobile scene was, it couldn't withstand any number of incoming forces that began to chip away and its primacy. That's the story of the next page.