This seventeenth day of Filipino American History Month brings information on contemporary Filipino America.

Filipino Americans have made significant contributions to America’s social (Pedro Flores), economical (Diosdado Banatao, Cecilia Pagkalinawan), political (Dolores Sibonga, Velma Veloria, Ben Cayetano), and educational (Dan Begonia, Dan Gonzales, Dawn Mabalon, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales) communities. They have made contributions in the progression of science (Mariano Yogore), technology (Julian Banzon, Josefino Comiso, Eduardo San Juan) and medicine (Fe del Mundo) in America. They also reside among notable literary writers (Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn) in America. Filipinos Americans have also become more visible in the arts (Art Silva) and have gained representation when it comes to beauty (Angela Perez Baraquio). A growing list of Filipino Americans can be found in the entertainment field (Richard Quitevis, Sam Milby, Allan Pineda Lindo) and in the sports arena (Victoria Manalo Draves, Bobby Balcena, David Batista, Cheryl Burke).

Filipino Americans have proved to be effective union labor leaders (Pablo Manlapit, Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong) and activists (Al Robles, Bill Sorro). They have proudly served the U.S. Military at all levels (Antonio Taguba).

This sixteenth day of Filipino American History Month brings information on the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which relaxed immigration quotas and allowed family reunification and large numbers of Filipino professionals to migrate to the United States of America.

The passage of the 1965 immigration act by the U.S. Congress triggered the “third wave” of immigration, which brought the largest number of Filipino immigrants to the United States of America. The act abolished the discriminatory national origins quota system that had unfairly restricted the entrance of non-Western European immigrants to the U.S. since 1924.

The Philippines thus experienced a “brain drain” phenomenon with the migration of highly skilled physicians, teachers, seamen, mechanics, engineers, and others from the country. In the 1980s, the exodus of those in the medical profession continued although mid-level professionals like nurses, medical technicians as well as paramedics increasingly dominated the flows. In the 1990s, advances in information technology triggered new waves of skilled labor migration consisting of engineers, computer programmers, designers, and allied skills workers. The primary reason Filipino workers leave their country is that the Philippines is not able to absorb their skills into their own local economy.

In U.S. hospitals today, nursing is no longer exclusively practiced by white and black women in white uniforms. Between 1965 and 1988, more than seventy thousand foreign nurses entered the United States, the majority coming from Asia….Philippines is by far the leading supplier of nurses to the United States [at least 25,000 Filipino nurses migrated to the U.S. between 1966 and 1985]…. Filipino nurses provide a critical source of labor for large metropolitan and public hospitals primarily in the states of New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts. In New York City, Filipinos comprise 18 percent of RN (registered nurse) staff in the city’s hospitals. Filipino nurses are also geographically clustered in Mid-western urban areas, in particular Chicago.

The most significant features of the 1965 act was the establishment of a preference system designed to facilitate the reunification of immigrant families and the admission of workers with skills needed in the United States.

This fifteenth day of Filipino American History Month brings information on Filipinas and Filipina Americans.

Filipino women have been migrating to Hawaii and the United States of America as war brides, students, and laborers as early as the Spanish-American War. One of the defining moments of this history occurs in the years immediately after World War II, when hundreds of Filipino American U.S. soldiers married Filipinas and returned with them to the U.S. to raise families. Filipino women have been key in developing long family lines in Louisiana, where Filipinos are well into their 8th and 9th generations. 

In cities like Honolulu, San Francisco, and Stockton throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Filipino women developed and sustained large community-based organizations through women’s auxiliaries of fraternal organizations and lodges where they administered budgets, programmed events, and sold U.S. war bonds during World War II.

It is important to recognize the importance of women in the Filipino family as well, a remnant of a maternalistic Philippine society. When Corazon Aquino was elected President of the Philippines in 1986, she was not only the first woman president, but the first woman head of state and elected president in Asia.

One does not need to look very far to identify one of the many notable Filipinas and Filipina Americans that have contributed to the United States of America and the world.

As a result of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the military has played a large role in the lives of millions of Filipinos and Filipino Americans. People of Filipino descent served in all branches of the United States Armed Forces, as enlisted persons as well as officers.

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order that gave full veteran’s benefits to Filipinos if they enlisted in the United States Armed Forces.

Filipinos and Filipino Americans answered the U.S. call to war against Japan by volunteering to serve in large numbers during World War II (1939-1945). Many groups of men from different generations did not previously know each other – from Hawaii, the U.S. west coast, coming from the Philippines throughout the twentieth century, and so on. Even though they came from different places and generations, their experiences during their service allowed them to build a familial network many had not available to them before. Soldiers typically fight for one country, but when Filipinos in the United States answered the call during World War II, thousands specifically intended to join in order to liberate the Philippines as well as serve the U.S.

By 1942, the First and Second Filipino Infantry Regiments were established to fight in the Philippines. The Nationality Act Amendment gave Filipino non-citizens who joined the military U.S. citizenship. There were mass naturalization ceremonies where thousands of Filipinos became citizens. The segregated First Filipino Infantry Regiment was activated in California mid-1942 and the Second Filipino Infantry Regiment was formed later in the year. Prior to World War II, Filipinos had long served as stewards in the U.S. Navy, and they continued to do so in large numbers throughout the war. In 1944 about 1,000 Filipino Americans were selected for a secret mission, taken to the Philippines by submarines, and landed in various spots throughout the archipelago to contact anti-Japanese underground groups and to gather intelligence for General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia. The stories of the First and Second Filipino Infantry Regiments were memorialized in a documentary entitled, An Untold Triumph: The Story of the 1^st and 2^nd Filipino Infantry Regiments, U.S. Army.

In the Philippines, Filipinos joined the United States Armed Forces of the Far East (USAFFE) also being promised the same benefits as other U.S. veterans and U.S. citizenship. Their knowledge of the terrain and resilient fighting spirit served invaluable to the war effort and the eventual defeat of the Japanese forces. Some of their heroic story was captured in the books Ghost Soldiers: The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission, by Hampton Sides, The Great Raid on Cabanatuan, by Willam B. Breuer, and the movie The Great Raid, starring Philippine actor Cesar Montano.

Today, many of the soldiers that were part of the USAFFE and their allies continue to fight for the rights they were promised at the start of World War II. Slowly, legislation passed over the years has provided for the return of some of the unkept promises, but equity continues to evade them.

A common denominator for Filipino Americans during this time was the racist and unfair laws and policies against Filipino Americans. For example, the 1879 Naturalization Act originally excluded only Chinese from becoming citizens of the United States of America. In 1910, the United States Supreme Court widened the act to include other Asian immigrants, including Filipino Americans.

During the roaring twenties, the economy was prosperous. In 1924, the Immigration Act recognized colonized Filipinos as U.S. nationals. This meant that they were exempt from immigration quota limits, creating a situation where the Philippines was a seemingly unlimited source of labor to support the economy.

However, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, and there suddenly was no need for laborers, as more and more farmers escaped the Midwest to come to California. People started to blame immigrants for the economic woes of the country, a common practice during recessions and depressions.

The first race riot against Filipino Americans occurred in Exeter, CA in 1929. During the 1930s, riots also broke out in Watsonville, CA and Stockton, CA. Many people also blamed the social difficulties of the country as well. Filipinos or “Malays” were banned from marrying White women in many states through anti-miscegenation laws.

Throughout the period of Philippine colonization by the United States of America, Filipinos and Filipino Americans also were lobbying for the independence of the Philippines. Coupled with the difficult economy, Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1934, which declared the Philippines a commonwealth, guaranteed independence in ten years, made all Philippine-born Filipinos “aliens,” and restricted Filipino immigration to 50 a year. A year later, the Filipino Repatriation Act was signed, in an effort to send Filipinos to the Philippines without the chance to return.

Despite all of these unfair laws against Filipinos and Filipino Americans, they found ways to prosper. They organized, formed community organizations, and supported one another. They built coalitions with people of other ethnicities and similar circumstances. They found ways to overcome the roadblocks and barriers put in their way.

This twelfth day of Filipino American History Month brings information on a rich part of Filipino American history—agricultural workers.

In addition to Hawaii and Alaska, Filipino laborers were also recruited to work in the continental United States of America in the early 1900s. They had short term contracts. Their work was tough, requiring long hours and demanding physical activity. Fieldwork was back-breaking stoop labor, but they were tougher.

Life outside the fields was also difficult. Whether foreign- or native-born, Filipino Americans have been defined as non-white in the United States, defined as “other” than the majority in a way that is generally pejorative and frequently racist. The Filipino American confrontation with racism has a direct, painful, and constricting history: called ‘monkeys’ and ‘dogeaters,’ relegated to menial labor despite their qualifications, denied housing they could afford, refused professional credentials for which they qualified, forbidden to speak their language among themselves at work, and kept from enrolling in schools whose admissions requirements they met. These concepts are captured in Carlos Bulosan’s classic, America is in the Heart, where he wrote, “I came to know afterward that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California. I came to know that the public streets were not free to my people.”

Missing among these freedoms was the freedom to start traditional families. Agricultural life was near absent for women. Many worked as cooks on plantations. The sex ratio in 1930 had been 14.4. males to one female. Angeles Monrayo kept a diary of her life as a young girl growing up in a strike camp in Hawai’i and later moved to central California. Through her writing, we see how Filipino families moved about and were stitched together in labor camps and other settings. It has now been published as Tomorrow’s Memoirs: A Diary, 1924–1928, where on Monday, March 5, 1928, she wrote, “Ninang, Hon, and I were hired today…Ninang and I cut spinach, we cut off the roots…We are paid 20 cents a crate. Today I finish 10 crates only, so I made $2.00 exactly…I am glad that I am working by the hour and that I made $2.00 today.”

These low wages and unfair conditions moved workers to organize laborers. These labor leaders included Pablo Manlapit (1891-1969), Chris Mensalvas (1909-1978), Philip Vera Cruz (1910-1994), Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956), and Larry Itliong (1942-1976).

One the most famous of these is Philip V. Vera Cruz, who came to the United States in 1926. Like many young persons traveling from the Philippines, Vera Cruz, dreamt of receiving a good education in the USA and becoming a lawyer. Others hoped to study religion, history, and literature. While a few did, many others had to set aside their plans to find work. Vera Cruz’s first job was as a laborer in a Washington state box factory. He moved to Chicago and Cincinnati where he worked in restaurants. The draft and army brought him to California and its agricultural industry. In 1948, he was an organizer in a key strike by Filipino asparagus workers. He continued to organize farm workers and was instrumental in the start of the United Farm Workers, serving as the highest-ranking Filipino American officer from 1971 to 1977.

This eleventh day of Filipino American History Month brings another often uncelebrated part of Filipino American history—Alaskeros. Alaskeros are Filipino recruits to Alaska.

Filipino Alaskeros found work in salmon canneries, “kanarya,” in Alaska during the summer and worked along the west coast during other seasons. Alaska was a place to make “quick money,” never “easy money.” Cannery work lasted about two months and as many as 9,000 Filipino men worked at one time during peak salmon canning seasons. Many of them worked to support their families, as well as earn money to pay for higher education.

The salmon canneries, like the California grape growers, were resistant to making changes for their migrant workforce. Since its earliest days in the late 1800s, the salmon industry has depended on an abundant supply of cheap labor that could be deployed at a moment’s notice, or discharged if the salmon run was weak. The workers had to be willing to do grueling work under harsh conditions; they had to be dependable but expendable. Asian immigrants, a captive workforce with a tenuous status in America, were considered ideal and preferable to Native Alaskans, who could easily leave the canneries for home if conditions became intolerable.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 each essentially stopped immigration of Chinese and Japanese people to the United States of America. Filipinos from the Philippines became the largest available source of labor.

In the late 1930s, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrant and Asian American cannery workers attempted to develop a unit front, but the union broke down with changes in the salmon industry and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. In its place, ethnic-specific unions competed. Because Filipinos were the main source of the cannery labor pool, their labor organizations, run by Filipino officers, emerged as the most powerful.

Two Filipino American labor leaders were Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, who took a stand against corruption within their own union. This infuriated the Filipino gangsters who ran the gambling rings in the Alaskan cannery towns–which depended on getting their gang members sent to Alaska. Viernes and Domingo had also introduced a resolution at the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) convention to oppose the martial law restrictions against workers and labor unions in the Philippines–a resolution that Marcos supporters called communist. The union leaders became subjects of death threats and surveillance. On the evening of June 1, 1981, two Filipino men with long police rap sheets entered the Local 37 ILWU office and opened fire on their targets, Silme Domingo, twenty-eight years old, and Gene Viernes, twenty-seven. The sacrifices of the Filipino American cannery workers galvanized Asian Americans. They offered another Asian American contribution to civil rights and American democracy. Asian Americans found betrayal, but also discovered a new level of political involvement.

This tenth day of Filipino American History Month brings a new and often uncelebrated part of Filipino American history—Sakadas. Sakadas are Filipino recruits to Hawaii.

Besides the many “moral” reasons that the United States of America (USA) wanted to have the Philippines as its colony, there were also economic reasons.

Around 1900, The Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) needed people for manual labor. They turned to the Philippines, where there was a large rural population. They recruited from two regions, the Visayas and Ilocos, looking for “unskilled laborers” to do ten hours of manual work a day on the plantation. In December of 1906, fifteen Filipino men arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii on the Doric. Eleven of them were single and four were married, all leaving behind their wives. The oldest was 56, and the youngest was 14. Five belonged to one family, headed by their father, Simplicio Gironella, and his four sons. The “First Fifteen” were sent to the Big Island of Hawaii, to Olaa Plantation, south of Hilo, and were assigned to live in the Japanese camp.

A total of 126,147 Filipinos came to Hawaii through the HSPA during four time periods between 1906 to 1946. The first period, 1906 to 1919, a total of 29,800 arrived, including 3,056 women and 2,338 children. From 1920 to 1929, the second wave of arrivals brought in 73,996, with 5,286 women and 3,091 children among them. The next groups came in 1930 to 1934, bringing in 14,760 – 610 women and 662 children. Finally, the last wave came after World War II in 1946, which drew in 7,361 Filipinos – 6,000 of which were men. The 1946 Sakadas amounted to the last major recruitment to Hawaii. These were more educated Filipinos and professionals, who brought their wives and children., mostly Ilocanos and Visayans-all indentured to a three-year contract. Within a span of 37 years, these Sakadas are known to have planted the “roots” of the Filipino experience in Hawaii.,

Sakadas were the first among Filipinos, outside of the Philippines, to experience economic oppression, superimposed poverty, overt racial bigotry, labor exploitation, social rejection, educational neglect, political disenfranchisement, societal denials, civil wrongs, and empty promises. Although they came as American nationals, they did not have full rights like American citizens.

In Hawaii, the first-generation Filipino men, women, and children were treated as the lowliest of the unskilled labor. Some Sakadas were beaten with sticks by “lunas,” or plantation work supervisors for not responding to their satisfaction. They were stereotyped as being oversexed, hot-blooded, and quick tempered. HSPA policies also discouraged bringing the wives and children of the men because they believed families on plantation wages would be costly. Moreover, higher education was not encouraged for plantation children.

Sakadas lived a life of segregation at work and on the plantations. They got the lowest jobs, and were held down as unskilled laborers for most of their lives in Hawaii. Maintaining a normal life was difficult with their wives and children back in the Philippines. Their main goal was to work hard, save money, and return home quickly to their families. The uneven men to women ratio created many social problems, including wife stealing and fighting over women. Gambling was also an issue with Filipinos, as they had hopes to “win big.”

Despite the hardships of the Sakadas, a tight community was formed among these Filipinos. Recreation such as music and basketball served as an outlet and bonding experience. Today, the Filipino American population is significant in number and many prominent individuals are of Filipino descent. It cannot be denied that Sakadas have contributed greatly to the Hawaiian economy and the unique history of life in Hawaii.

This ninth day of Filipino American History Month brings information about the infamous St. Louis World’s Fair (SLWF).

The SLWF was a 1,200 acre extravaganza with over 1,500 buildings, connected by 75 miles of roads and walkways. Over 60 countries and 43 states exhibited—among them the newly acquired colonies from the Spanish-American War.

Some of the displays were of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and included the native inhabitants like the Apache and the Igorot, both of which were dubbed as “primitive”. According to the Reverend Sequoyah Ade:

To further illustrate the indignities heaped upon the Philippine people following their eventual loss to the Americans, the United States made the Philippine campaign the centrepoint of the 1904 World’s Fair held that year in St. Louis, MI [sic]. In what was enthusiastically termed a “parade of evolutionary progress,” visitors could inspect the “primitives” that represented the counterbalance to “Civilisation” justifying Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Pygmies from New Guinea and Africa, who were later displayed in the Primate section of the Bronx Zoo, were paraded next to American Indians such as Apache warrior Geronimo, who sold his autograph. But the main draw was the Philippine exhibit complete with full size replicas of Indigenous living quarters erected to exhibit the inherent backwardness of the Philippine people. The purpose was to highlight both the “civilising” influence of American rule and the economic potential of the island chains’ natural resources on the heels of the Philippine-America War. It was, reportedly, the largest specific Aboriginal exhibit displayed in the exposition. As one pleased visitor commented, the human zoo exhibit displayed “the race narrative of odd peoples who mark time while the world advances, and of savages made, by American methods, into civilized workers.”

One of the exhibited Pygmies was Ota Benga, a Congolese man who was featured in a human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo alongside an orangutan in 1906.

Filipinos were exhibited as uncivilized to garner more support for the taking of the Philippines as a colony. Different groups of Filipinos were separated and put behind fences, each in their own diorama like environment. For added effect, certain paddocks of Filipinos were dressed in western uniforms while neighboring ones wore bahags and other indigenous clothing.

Filipinos and monkeys raced up trees, drawing conclusions that Filipinos were less evolved than their western counterparts and promoting the concepts of human evolution and scientific racism. Filipinos roasted different animals for food and savvy businessmen and marketers took advantage of the intrigue and popularized the “hot dog.”

After the fair was completed, many of the international exhibits were not returned to their country of origin, but were dispersed to museums in the USA. For example, the Philippine exhibits were acquired by the Museum of Natural History, at the University of Iowa.

This was a time before plans flew and electricity was new. Radio and television were not household fixtures. While this event is an appalling blemish on Filipino American history, it is part of the Philippine diaspora nonetheless.

This eighth day of Filipino American History Month brings information about Filipino American scholarship. As you know, the benevolent assimilation rhetoric was scattered throughout the policies related to the Philippines during the early twentieth century. In the Philippines, teachers came over from the United States of America and fanned out around all the islands. Filipinos were taught English, how to brush their teeth, and how to say their prayers. At the same time, many Filipinos came to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century to go to school as pensionados, government-sponsored student traveling from the Philippines to the United States.

Established in 1903, the pensionado program provided government scholarships to students supposedly chosen by merit from each Philippine province; in actuality, local prominence and connections played a major role in the selection process. In return for each year of education in the United States, pensionados were required to work for the government in the Philippines for the same length of time.

The pensionado project lasted officially from 1903 to 1910. More than 200 Filipino students, eight of whom were women, were sponsored by the American colonial government and studied in U.S. schools such as University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington, Cornell, Notre Dame, Purdue, Yale, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, George Washington, Iowa, Ohio State Michigan State, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others. Some attended technical and vocational schools, while a few first enrolled in high school.