We Were Here, Too: The Filipino American Story America Forgot-From My FB Page
When America talks about its history of race, immigration and discrimination, certain stories understandably dominate the conversation. We talk about slavery and Jim Crow. We talk about the treatment of Native Americans. We talk about Mexican laborers and immigration. Those histories deserve to be told, studied and remembered.
But somewhere along the way, the Asian American experience and particularly the Filipino American experience became remarkably easy to overlook.
And I think it’s time more people knew our story.
Filipinos didn’t suddenly arrive in America sometime after World War II. Our documented presence on what is now the continental United States goes back more than four centuries.
On October 18, 1587, Filipino sailors identified in Spanish records as “Luzon Indios” came ashore near what is now Morro Bay, California, aboard the Nuestra Señora de Buena Esperanza. That was 33 years before the Mayflower reached Plymouth. It is generally recognized as the first documented landing of Filipinos and among the earliest documented Asian presences in what became the continental United States.
Then there were the Manilamen of Louisiana.
You’ve probably heard the claim that Filipinos established Saint Malo, Louisiana, in 1763, making it the first permanent Asian settlement in what became the United States. There’s good reason that date appears everywhere, but because I want this history told accurately, there’s an important qualification: historians agree that Filipino sailors established an extraordinarily early community in the Louisiana bayous, but the exact 1763 founding date is disputed because contemporary documentation is thin. Saint Malo is nevertheless historically recognized as an early permanent Filipino settlement, and nineteenth-century accounts document Filipino fishermen living there. These men built communities in the marshes, worked the fisheries and helped develop Louisiana’s shrimping industry. Even this chapter of American history remains virtually unknown to most Americans.
Then America came to the Philippines.
After the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. The Philippines became an American colonial possession, creating one of the strangest racial and legal relationships in American history. Filipinos were eventually considered U.S. nationals, but generally not U.S. citizens.
Think about the contradiction contained in that sentence.
America controlled their homeland. America recruited their labor. America recruited Filipinos into its military. But America did not necessarily grant them the full rights of Americans.
In 1901, President William McKinley authorized the U.S. Navy to enlist hundreds of Filipinos. Filipino students known as pensionados came to American colleges. Thousands more were recruited into Hawaii’s sugar plantations, California’s agricultural fields and Alaska’s canneries. Because the Philippines was under American sovereignty, Filipinos initially occupied a different immigration status from other Asian peoples who were being targeted by exclusion laws. (Naval History and Heritage Command)
America wanted Filipino labor. Acceptance of Filipino people was another matter entirely.
The generation of Filipino men who came to the American West during the early twentieth century became known affectionately as the Manongs, an Ilocano term conveying respect for an older brother or elder.
Many worked brutally difficult agricultural jobs for low wages. They followed harvests from field to field and lived in labor camps, hotels and segregated neighborhoods. They picked asparagus, lettuce, grapes and other crops that helped build California’s enormous agricultural economy.
Stockton, California, became one of the great centers of Filipino America.
South of Stockton’s Main Street grew Little Manila, filled with Filipino restaurants, hotels, barber shops, grocery stores, pool halls, churches, labor organizations and social clubs. At its height, Stockton was home to one of the largest Filipino populations outside the Philippines. It was a community created partly because Filipinos were excluded from so much of the white city around them.
And this is where the story becomes both fascinating and ugly.
The Manongs may have spent their days performing backbreaking labor in California’s fields, but when Saturday night arrived, many of these men knew how to dress.
They wore sharp suits. Beautiful shoes. Hats. Carefully pressed shirts. They loved music and dancing. Photographs from the era show these young Filipino men looking absolutely immaculate.
Historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon documented how farmworkers could spend the day cutting asparagus and then transform themselves at night to go into Stockton’s clubs and taxi dance halls. Smithsonian collections today preserve some of the stylish clothing Filipino men wore to church, dinners and those dance halls. (Smithsonian Institution)
And yes, that caused trouble.
America had produced an overwhelmingly male Filipino immigrant population while immigration restrictions and economics kept the number of Filipina women comparatively small. Filipino men consequently socialized and sometimes formed relationships with women from other racial groups. Taxi dance halls were among the few places where Filipino men could openly dance with women, many of whom were white.
White resentment became vicious.
Filipino men were portrayed as sexually threatening, accused of stealing white women and treated as competitors by white men. Their dancing, clothing, confidence and relationships became wrapped into a racist stereotype of Filipino men as dangerous sexual outsiders.
That resentment wasn’t merely somebody getting angry because a Filipino guy looked better in a suit. It became violence.
In January 1930, mobs numbering in the hundreds attacked Filipino farmworkers in and around Watsonville, California. The violence followed growing agitation over Filipino labor and Filipino men socializing with white women at dance halls. Filipinos were beaten, hunted and terrorized. A 22-year-old Filipino worker named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed when attackers fired into a bunkhouse.
Anti-Filipino violence spread elsewhere in California.
This is why we need some precision when talking about Jim Crow.
Jim Crow itself was primarily the legal racial caste system created to subordinate Black Americans, particularly in the South. I don’t want to appropriate someone else’s history by pretending the Filipino experience was identical. It wasn’t.
But Filipinos encountered their own network of racial segregation, discriminatory laws, exclusion from businesses and housing, employment discrimination, police harassment, anti-Asian immigration policy, prohibitions against interracial marriage and outright racial violence.
California’s anti-miscegenation history is particularly revealing. In the 1933 case Roldan v. Los Angeles County, a California court concluded that existing law banning whites from marrying “Negroes,” “mulattoes” and “Mongolians” didn’t technically include Filipinos because Filipinos were then racially classified as “Malay.”
So Filipino men could marry white women, right?
California lawmakers moved almost immediately to close the loophole. The legislature amended the law to specifically include members of the “Malay race,” making Filipino-white marriages illegal.
Let that sink in.
The government saw a Filipino man successfully challenge a racist marriage restriction and essentially responded, Fine. We’ll rewrite the law so it includes you too.
Then came another cruel contradiction.
In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act began the process toward Philippine independence. But it also changed Filipinos’ immigration status. Filipino arrivals were reclassified from U.S. nationals to aliens, and immigration from the Philippines to the mainland United States was restricted to an annual quota of just 50 people. FIFTY.
America had colonized the Philippines, recruited Filipino workers and benefited from their labor and then essentially closed the door behind them. (National Archives)
And yet Filipinos continued fighting for America.
During World War II, more than a quarter-million Filipinos served with U.S. forces and recognized guerrilla units fighting the Japanese occupation. They endured Bataan, imprisonment, starvation, torture and death under the American flag.
Then, after the war, Congress passed the Rescission Acts of 1946, denying many Filipino veterans the full veterans’ benefits they had been led to expect.
Imagine fighting for a country that colonized yours, surviving one of the most brutal theaters of World War II, and then being told afterward that your service didn’t count the same way.
Decades passed before many received meaningful recognition. Filipino World War II veterans were finally awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2017. (VA News)
Our history is also intertwined with another American movement whose Filipino roots are too often forgotten. Most Americans know Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Far fewer know Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz and the Filipino farmworkers who helped ignite the movement.
In September 1965, Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led by organizers including Larry Itliong, walked out of the grape fields around Delano, California. More than a thousand Filipino workers joined the strike. Mexican farmworkers organized with Chavez and Huerta subsequently joined them, creating the multiracial labor coalition that transformed American agricultural labor.
The famous Delano grape strike did not begin with Filipinos joining someone else’s movement. Filipino workers helped start it. (Smithsonian Folklife)
And then came another generation.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the old national-origin quota system and opened new pathways for skilled immigration from Asia. Filipino nurses began arriving in enormous numbers, continuing a nursing system whose American connections had actually begun during the colonial period.
That legacy is still visible everywhere in American healthcare.
In 2021, Filipinos accounted for approximately 27 percent of all foreign-born registered nurses in the United States. Filipino immigrants are also disproportionately represented in professional fields including healthcare, management, business, science and the arts. Today Filipino Americans serve this country as nurses, physicians, therapists, medical technicians, engineers, IT professionals, educators, military personnel, public servants, entrepreneurs, caregivers, artists and countless other professions. (Migration Policy Institute)
We have become so associated with nursing that people sometimes joke about it.
I look at it differently. Generation after generation of Filipino families sent children into professions where they could build stable lives, take care of their families and serve other people. There is tremendous dignity in that history.
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And that brings this history home for me. I’m half Filipino.
I was born at Clark Air Base in Pampanga, Philippines, itself a place deeply connected to the complicated history between America and the Philippines. My mother was Filipina. My father was an American serviceman. I spent my earliest years in the Philippines before coming to the United States as a child.
So when I read this history, I’m not reading about some distant group of immigrants.
I’m reading about my people. I’m reading about men who crossed oceans before the United States even existed. I’m reading about laborers who harvested America’s food while being told they weren’t good enough to marry America’s daughters. I’m reading about young Filipino men who could work in the dirt all day and still put on a beautiful suit that evening, walk into a dance hall with their heads held high and refuse to let somebody else’s racism define their worth.
I’m reading about soldiers who fought beneath the American flag and then had to fight America again for recognition.
I’m reading about labor organizers whose names should be spoken alongside Chavez and Huerta.
I’m reading about nurses who have held the hands of millions of American patients, immigrants who became doctors and engineers and teachers, military families who served generation after generation, and parents who worked themselves exhausted so their children could have opportunities they never had.
And I’m also reminded of something else. Filipinos have often been extraordinarily quiet about our accomplishments and our struggles. We tend to assimilate, work, build families, laugh, cook enough food for approximately 37 people when six are coming over, send somebody home with leftovers, and get on with life.
There is something beautiful about that humility. But humility should never become historical invisibility.
Recognizing Filipino suffering doesn’t diminish what Black Americans endured under slavery and Jim Crow, what Native peoples endured through dispossession, or what Mexican and other Latino communities endured through exploitation, segregation and deportation.
American history isn’t a competition over who suffered the most.
It’s a demand that everybody who helped build this country gets written into the story.
Filipinos were here. We worked here. We organized here. We fought here.
We bled here. We fell in love here, even when governments tried to make that illegal.
We helped feed America, defend America, heal America and build America.
And more than 400 years after those Filipino sailors stepped onto the California coast, we’re still here. For me, knowing that history doesn’t make me bitter.
It makes me incredibly proud to be Filipino.
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