Filipino Americans

FILIPINO AMERICANS. Before Spain ceded her Southeast Asian colony to the United States in December 1898, the revolutionary government headed by Emilio Aguinaldo sent Felipe Agoncillo, a nationalist intellectual, to the United States to rally progressive forces to support the Filipino national liberation struggle. Unless one considers Agoncillo the pioneer, the first radical Filipinos in US territory were the pre-union militants in the sugar plantations of Hawai`i. One of them was Pedro Calosa, who in the early 1920s helped his brother organize Beginning of Progress, an association that planned a general strike of workers. After a prison term, he was deported back to the Philippines in 1927, where he led the 1931 anti-imperialist and antifeudal peasant insurrection in Tayug, Pangasinan.

Recruited mainly by the Hawai`ian Sugar Planters Association, the early Filipinos were sojourners with peasant or proletarian roots. Their main leader was Pablo Manlapit, who spearheaded the organization of the Filipino Federation of Labor in 1911 and the Filipino Unemployed Association in 1913. In 1919, members of these groups formed a Higher Wages Association to demand better pay and working conditions, including eight weeks of paid maternity leave for women. On 19 January 1920, 2,600 Filipinos struck ahead of their Japanese counterparts; they were later joined by Spaniards and Puerto Ricans, totaling 8,000. To counter charges of anti-Americanism, three thousand Japanese and Filipino strikers marched in Honolulu carrying American flags, pictures of Lincoln, and signs such as “We Are Not Reds, God Forbid, but Are Brown Workers Who Produce White Sugar” and “We Want to Live like Americans.”

With the decrease of Japanese labor in Hawai`i and California, the Filipinos became the chief Asian group that engaged in labor agitation. When Manlapit was arrested in September 1924, Filipinos staged actions in Hanapepe plantation, Kauai, where police shot and killed sixteen, wounding many others. Manlapit was tried, convicted, and later freed in 1927 on condition that he never return to Hawai`i. In 1932 he returned to Hawai`i from California and revived the Filipino Federation of Labor with the help of Manuel Fagel and Epifanio Taok. Manlapit was subsequently arrested and deported to the Philippines. With the help of two organizers from the American Communist Party, Fagel mounted the last “ethnic” strike at Puunene in 1937. He was beaten up by police despite protests by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). (Prior to the CIO, only the Industrial Workers of the World had pledged solidarity with Filipinos.)

The Japanese American activist Karl Yoneda named Danny Roxas as one of the eight Communist Party members who, in 1930, tried to organize 10,000 Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino fieldworkers in the Imperial Valley of California. All the leaders were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned under the Criminal Syndicalism Law.

In 1933, 4,000 Filipino lettuce pickers in Salinas and Stockton, California, formed the Filipino Labor Union (FLU) when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused their plea for help. In 1934 the Filipinos merged with the Vegetable Packers Association and struck in Monterey County; later, the association rejected the FLU when it was branded a Communist front group by farm owners. Severe repression—from arrests to the burning of workers’ camps—forced the Filipinos to end their strike.

In his quasi-documentary ethnobiography America Is in the Heart (1946), Carlos Bulosan recounts the CIO-led activities of Filipinos during the Great Depression. Among the pioneer migrant compatriots of Bulosan was Chris Mensalvas, who was instrumental in forming the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America. Bulosan contributed to New Masses and edited a Left newspaper, The New Tide; and later, the yearbook of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) Local 37 in Seattle, Washington. Filipinos also figured prominently in the 1946 ILWU strike in Hawai`i.
In 1940, the AFL chartered the Federated Agricultural Laborers Association, an association of Filipino farm workers, after it led a series of strikes. In the Alaskan salmon-canning industry, Filipinos were active in 1933 and 1936. Ernie Mangaong was elected to head the Seattle-based Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union. In 1938 the union got rid of the corrupt system of labor contractors. In the 1960s, Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz, who headed the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, launched the historic 1965 grape pickers’ strike in Delano, California, that led to the founding of the United Farm Workers of America.
At the height of the McCarthy era, seven Filipino leftists with ILWU Local 7 (among them, veteran leaders Ernie Mangaong and Chris Mensalvas and Simeon Bagasol, an ILWU member in Hawai`i) faced deportation on charges of Communist Party membership. Only with the massive support of liberals and communities of people of color were their cases finally won in 1955.
Left militancy occurred in the ranks of the emergent intelligentsia as well. In the 1920s, Vicente Lava, a distinguished intellectual who later became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Philippines, studied at the University of California and Columbia University. Several Filipinos who later became Marxists inside or outside the Party also studied in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. James Allen, a Party activist, was sent to the Philippines by the Communist Party in 1936–1938 to render “fraternal assistance”; his memoir does not mention Filipino labor militancy, but he refers to two Filipino Communists whom he had known earlier: Pedro Penino, a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade, and Jorge Frianeza, who was killed as a combatant in the Communist-led Huk uprising of 1949–1954.
It was not until the late 1960s that a sizable segment of the Filipino intelligentsia became involved in various Left formations active in civil rights and anti–Vietnam War struggles. Several organizations protesting Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law regime (1972–1986) were formed, including the National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines (which became the Anti-Martial Law Coalition). From its lobbying activities and solidarity networks, the Union of Democratic Filipinos (Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Philipino; KDP) and an affiliate, the International Association of Filipino Patriots, were set up to rally support for the national democratic revolution in the Philippines. Left-wing Filipinos also participated in organizing a mainly American support group, the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP). Unlike the KDP, the FFP was able to engage in coalition work with a broad spectrum of the American Left: from the Communist Party to Maoist formations, Trotskyist groups, and social democrats. Owing to internal problems including debates between “Maoists” and “Soviet revisionists” as well as sectarian and dogmatist tendencies, the KDP disbanded in the late 1980s.
Contemporary Filipino radicals affiliated in the later decades of the twentieth century with groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, Democratic Socialists of America, Committees of Correspondence, Solidarity, and others. But they concerned themselves more with arousing support for the national-democratic struggle in the Philippines than in propagating Marxist or broadly socialist ideas among their fellow immigrants or expatriates in the United States. Socialist aspirations and diverse radical/popular democratic impulses remained dormant in the mass of the Filipino community.
With the passage of the Patriot Act (Public Law 107-56) in October 2001, and the listing of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as terrorist groups, Filipino progressives effectively went into isolation. The regimes succeeding the Marcos dictatorship continued the US-sponsored counterinsurgency schemes laid out during the Cold War and its sequel, the US global. war on Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere. Filipinos in the diaspora regrouped, where they could, under the affiliates of BAYAN Muna in the Philippines, together with local academics engaged in educational, lobbying and consciousness-raising activities.
Peace talks that began under President Fidel Ramos during the 1990s stalled until revived by President Rodrigo Duterte. Before President Donald J. Trump administration’s support for Duterte’s fascistic drug war, a brief revival of national-democratic mobilization led by BAYAN-USA occurred, Migrante (for Filipino workers abroad), Gabriela USA (a federation of women’s groups) and Malaya. The 2020 coronavirus pandemic worsened the plight of activists in the Philippines, with numerous extra-judicious murders of partisans of the National Democratic Front. Human rights violations and the impunity of military-police agencies expanded with deepening poverty and misery. The rise of COVID-19, described as “kungflu,” caused Filipinos to be mistaken for Chinese immigrants in the United States and brutally attacked. The pandemic also took a heavy toll on Filipina nurses and health care workers, adding to the depression and suicide rates of the younger generation who make up a large fraction of over twenty million Filipino workers abroad, out of the 105.7 million citizens of the Republic of the Philippines.
Demographically, the 3.4 million Filipinos constituted by 2020 the second largest Asian group in the United States, located mainly in Alaska, Arizona, and California. Despite relatively favorable incomes, discrimination remained common, also leading to numerous adjustment problems. The sources of their unique marginalized status as the most Americanized dependency prompted an ongoing struggle waged by the subaltern in the Asian-Pacific homeland as well as within the United States.

Allen, James. The Philippine Left on the Eve of World War II. Minneapolis: MEP Publications, 1993.

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.

Morelli, Paula, Alma Trinidad and Rihard Alboroto. “Asian Americans: Filipinos,” Encyclopedia of Social Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

San Juan, E., Jr. Filipinas Everywhere: Essays in Criticism and Cultural Studies from a Filipino Perspective. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2016.