Filipinos in Stockton


Book Description

The first Filipino settlers arrived in Stockton, California, around 1898, and through most of the 20th century, this city was home to the largest community of Filipinos outside the Philippines. Because countless Filipinos worked in, passed through, and settled here, it became the crossroads of Filipino America. Yet immigrants were greeted with signs that read "Positively No Filipinos Allowed" and were segregated to a four-block area centered on Lafayette and El Dorado Streets, which they called "Little Manila." In the 1970s, redevelopment and the Crosstown Freeway decimated the Little Manila neighborhood. Despite these barriers, Filipino Americans have created a vibrant ethnic community and a rich cultural legacy. Filipino immigrants and their descendants have shaped the history, culture, and economy of the San Joaquin Delta area.




Positively No Filipinos Allowed


Book Description

Essays challenging conventional narratives of Filipino American history and culture.




Filipinos in San Francisco


Book Description

Tens of thousands of Filipinos who have lived, worked, and raised families for over five generations in this unique city stake their rightful claim to more than a century of shared history in San Francisco. The photographs herein attest to the early arrivals, who came as merchant mariners, businesspeople, scholars, and musicians, as well as agricultural and domestic workers. But their story has often been ignored, told incompletely by others, and edited too selectively by many. The Filipino American experience both epitomizes and defies the traditional immigrant storyline, and these pictures honestly and respectfully document the fruits of their labors, the products of their perseverance, and, at times, their resistance to social exclusion and economic suppression.




Filipinos in Carson and the South Bay


Book Description

One of Carson's most distinct features is its diversity. The city is roughly one-quarter each Hispanic, African American, white, and Asian/ Pacific Islander. This last group's vast majority are Filipinos who settled as early as the 1920s as farmworkers, U.S. military recruits, entrepreneurs, medical professionals, and other laborers, filling the economic needs of the Los Angeles region. This vibrant community hosts fiestas like the Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture and has produced local community heroes, including "Uncle Roy" Morales and "Auntie Helen" Summers Brown. Filipino students of the 1970s organized to gain college admissions, establish ethnic studies, and foster civic leadership, while Filipino businesses have flourished in Carson, San Pedro, Wilmington, Long Beach, and the surrounding communities. Carson is recognized nationally as a Filipino American destination for families and businesses, very much connected to the island homeland.




The Latinos of Asia


Book Description

This “ groundbreaking book . . . is essential reading not only for the Filipino diaspora but for anyone who cares about the mysteries of racial identity” (Jose Antonio Vargas, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist). Is race only about the color of your skin? In The Latinos of Asia, Anthony Christian Ocampo shows that what “color” you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans, for example, helped establish the Asian American movement and are classified by the US Census as Asian. But the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines means that they share many cultural characteristics with Latinos, such as last names, religion, and language. Thus, Filipinos’ “color” —their sense of connection with other racial groups—changes depending on their social context. The Filipino story demonstrates how immigration is changing the way people negotiate race, particularly in cities like Los Angeles where Latinos and Asians now constitute a collective majority. Amplifying their voices, Ocampo illustrates how second-generation Filipino Americans’ racial identities change depending on the communities they grow up in, the schools they attend, and the people they befriend. Ultimately, The Latinos of Asia offers a window into both the racial consciousness of everyday people and the changing racial landscape of American society.




Filipinos in Hollywood


Book Description

The memoirs of Filipinos in Hollywood span more than 80 years, dating back to the early 1920s when the first wave of immigrants, who were mostly males, arrived and settled in Los Angeles. Despite the obstacles and hardships of discrimination, these early Filipino settlers had high hopes and dreams for the future. Many sought employment in Hollywood, only to be marginalized into service-related fields, becoming waiters, busboys, dishwashers, cooks, houseboys, janitors, and chauffeurs. They worked at popular restaurants, homes of the rich and famous, movie and television studios, clubs, and diners. For decades, Filipinos were the least recognized and least documented Asians in Hollywood. But many emerged from the shadows to become highly recognized talents, some occupying positions in the entertainment industry that makes Hollywood what it is today--the world's capital of entertainment and glamour.




Becoming Mexipino


Book Description

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy Guevarra traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast. Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups, regardless of their differences, were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own through family and kin networks, shared cultural practices, social organizations, and music and other forms of entertainment. They occupied the same living spaces, attended the same Catholic churches, and worked together creating labor cultures that reinforced their ties, often fostering marriages. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves. Their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined, revealing the ways in which Mexicans and Filipinos interacted over generations to produce this distinct and instructive multiethnic experience. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.




Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila


Book Description

In this new work, Linda España-Maram analyzes the politics of popular culture in the lives of Filipino laborers in Los Angeles's Little Manila, from the 1920s to the 1940s. The Filipinos' participation in leisure activities, including the thrills of Chinatown's gambling dens, boxing matches, and the sensual pleasures of dancing with white women in taxi dance halls sent legislators, reformers, and police forces scurrying to contain public displays of Filipino virility. But as España-Maram argues, Filipino workers, by flaunting "improper" behavior, established niches of autonomy where they could defy racist attitudes and shape an immigrant identity based on youth, ethnicity, and notions of heterosexual masculinity within the confines of a working class. España-Maram takes this history one step further by examining the relationships among Filipinos and other Angelenos of color, including the Chinese, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. Drawing on oral histories and previously untapped archival records, España-Maram provides an innovative and engaging perspective on Filipino immigrant experiences.




Legions of Boom


Book Description

Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases—or multi-crew performances—which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.




Life Experiences of a First-Generation Mestizo (Filipino – Caucasian) “American”


Book Description

In a time of nationwide riots and protest throughout America this is a timely work by the authors that gets down to the nitty gritty of discrimination in America as experienced by his father, his mother and himself. This author a Filipino-Caucasian mestizo tells you what discrimination is really like from a historical first-person experience as he has lived it every day and been exposed to it on the streets, in the schools and in bureaucracies of America. His no holds barred story, paints a clear picture of what discrimination really looks like, feels like and how it impacts one’s outlook on life and the “American Dream”. He tells how despite his father migrating thousands of miles to experience the American dream and his mother a white American desiring for him to live and self-actualize that American dream, he experiences being a white American trapped in a brown skin and who will never be accepted by Americans universally as a “real” American. The author offers his perspective on American biases and deceit, cleverly disguised under pretenses of justice, fairness, equal opportunity, and equality under God. He challenges the reader’s analytical objectivity and conscience to first self-assess the validity of his assertions and then walk through these pages of life experiences with him in his shoes for clarity of understanding and empathy as to the denial of this first generation mestizo’s quest to be a real American and live the American Dream. The author makes a valid case that since the anti-Filipino riots in Watsonville, California in 1919 and posting of signs in businesses reading “No Dogs or Filipinos Allowed”, the multi-cultural 2020 riots for equality and justice throughout the United States graphically show that the Heart of Americans has not changed much, if any - racism is still alive and well throughout.