Filipinos arrived in the Washington, D.C., area shortly after 1900 upon the annexation of the Philippines to the United States. These new settlers included students, soldiers, seamen, and laborers. Within four decades, they became permanent residents, military servicemen, government workers, and community leaders. Although numerous Filipinos now live in the area, little is known about the founders of the Filipino communities. Images of America: Filipinos in Washington, D.C. captures an ethnic history and documents historical events and political transitions that occurred here.
Since the 19th century, Filipinos have immigrated to the Puget Sound region, which contains a deep inland sea once surrounded by forests and waters teeming with salmon. Seattle was the closest mainland American port to the Far East. In 1909, the "Igorotte Village" was the most popular venue at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and the first Filipina war bride arrived. Filipinos laid telephone and telegraph cables from Seattle to Alaska; were seamen, U.S. Navy recruits, students, and cannery workers; and worked in lumber mills, restaurants, or as houseboys. With one Filipina woman to 30 men, most early Filipino families in the Puget Sound were interracial. After World War II , communities grew with the arrival of new war brides, military families, immigrants, and exchange students and workers. Second-generation Pinoys and Pinays began their families. With the 1965 revision of U.S. immigration laws, the Filipino population in Puget Sound cities, towns, and farm areas grew rapidly and changed dramatically--as did all of Puget Sound.
Tucked among the great pioneer destinations on the Oregon Trail is the fertile agricultural area of the Willamette Valley. Today the valley forms the cultural and political heart of Oregon and is home to three-quarters of the state's population. The beginning of the 20th century saw the entrance of Filipinos into the valley, arriving from vegetable farms in California and Washington, fish canneries in Alaska, and from the pineapple and sugar plantations in Hawaii. At the same time, the U.S. territorial government in the Philippines started sponsoring Filipino students, beginning in 1903, to study in the United States. Oregon's two biggest centers of education, today's University of Oregon in Eugene and Oregon State University in Corvallis, became home to Filipinos from the emerging independent Philippine nation. They were mostly male, the children of wealthy Filipinos who had connections. Most of them returned to the Philippines upon graduation; some stayed and created a new life in America.
In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. Self-consciously adopting the essay form as a method with which to disrupt epic conceptions of Filipino history, Rafael treats in a condensed and concise manner clusters of historical detail and reflections that do not easily fit into a larger whole. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is thus a view of nationalism as an unstable production, as Rafael reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines. With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity. This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.
"I may have been like other boys, but there was a major difference -- my family included 80 to 100 single young men residing in a Filipino farm-labor camp. It was as a ‘campo’ boy that I first learned of my ancestral roots and the sometimes tortuous path that Filipinos took in sailing halfway around the world to the promise that was America. It was as a campo boy that I first learned the values of family, community, hard work, and education. As a campo boy, I also began to see the two faces of America, a place where Filipinos were at once welcomed and excluded, were considered equal and were discriminated against. It was a place where the values of fairness and freedom often fell short when Filipinos put them to the test.”"-- Peter Jamero Peter Jamero’s story of hardship and success illuminates the experience of what he calls the “bridge generation” -- the American-born children of the Filipinos recruited as farm workers in the 1920s and 30s. Their experiences span the gap between these early immigrants and those Filipinos who owe their U.S. residency to the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. His book is a sequel of sorts to Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, with themes of heartbreaking struggle against racism and poverty and eventual triumph. Jamero describes his early life in a farm-labor camp in Livingston, California, and the path that took him, through naval service and graduate school, far beyond Livingston. A longtime community activist and civic leader, Jamero describes decades of toil and progress before the Filipino community entered the sociopolitical mainstream. He shares a wealth of anecdotes and reflections from his career as an executive of health and human service programs in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco.
First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well-known Filipino poet describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
A Time to Rise is an intimate look into the workings of the KDP, the only revolutionary organization that emerged in the Filipino American community during the politically turbulent 1970s and ’80s. Overcoming cultural and class differences, members of the KDP banded together in a single national organization to mobilize their community into civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States and in the fight for democracy and national liberation in the Philippines and elsewhere. These personal accounts document recruitment, organizing, and training in the KDP. More than two-thirds of the stories are by women, reflecting the powerful role they played in the organization and its leadership. Also included are chapters on the struggle for justice for murdered KDP and union leaders Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes. These memoirs offer political insights and inspiring examples of personal courage that will resonate today. A Time to Rise was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.
"Maria P. P. Root′s new edited volume on Filipino American makes an outstanding contribution in terms of exploring the socio-economic integration and the transformation of ethnic identities among one of the largest, fastest growing, but least studied Asian American groups in the United States - Filipinos. . . . One unique area covered by this book is its thoughtful reflection on the impacts of colonization on Filipino literature and the articulation of Filipino identities . . . . The book provides an unusual breadth of information on Filipino lives in the U.S.A. . . . I found this book very valuable as an introductory text in an undergraduate curriculum on Asian American studies, and in racial and ethnic studies. The power of the book lies in its ability to render problematic the stereotypes of Asian Americans, and to question the preconceived categories of race, culture, and ethnicity. The book′s discussion and reflection on identities is provocative and accessible to students." --Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies "Maria P. P. Root succeeds where many ethnic-specific anthologies fail: focusing on the issue of a people′s identity while avoiding boxing them in. . . . What is refreshing about this volume is not only the variety of perspectives, but the different styles. . . . Root and the contributors succeed in living up to the hope stated in the book′s introduction, ′′that these pages will offer challenging questions, some refreshing analysis, and new paradigms for interpreting the Filipino American experience.′′ --Pacific Reader Typically, when Asian Americans are discussed in the media, the reference is to people of Chinese or Japanese descent. However, the largest Asian American ethnic group is Filipino-a group about which little is known or written, even though Filipinos have a long-standing history with the United States through colonization that effects how this group is viewed and views themselves. Aimed at rectifying this information dearth, this volume presents the first interdisciplinary analysis of who Filipinos are and what it means to be a Filipino American. With contributions from historians, social workers, community leaders, ethnic studies scholars, sociologists, educators, health care workers, political scientists, and psychologists, this book addresses such issues as ethnic identity, the impact of different colonizations on ethnic identity, personal and family relationships, mental health, race, and racism. In addition, the sociopolitical context is examined in each social-issues chapter to make the volume more useful as a foundational tool for hypothesis generation, empirical research, policy analysis and planning, and literature review. This book offers readers a rich and varied portrait of our largest Asian American ethnic group.
