Lecture 8 As I've Said There Were Three to Four Major Waves of Filipino Immigration Depending

Lecture 8
As I've said there were three to four major waves of Filipino immigration depending on which scholar you consult. beginning with the immigrants who came at the turn of this century. Actually, there were Filipinos in the United States as early as 1565 who jumped ship from the "Manila Galleons' between China and Mexico. there are accounts from galleon logs of Filipinos jumping ship as soon as they saw California and Mexico. In 1595, the galleon of San Augustine wrecked off the coast of Marin, and Filipinos were in this area. The painstaking research by Marina Espina, a librarian form the University of New Orleans, gathered from old documents, historic landmarks and oral interviews reveal that Filipinos were the earliest Asians to come to the United States during the Galleon trade from 1565-1815. These Manila men were forced to work on the Spanish ships as woodcutters, shipbuilders, crewmen and munitions workers and jumped ship because of the brutal treatment from their Spanish masters and escaped into the nearby marshes and bayous of Louisiana where they build villages with houses on stilts and developed fishing enterprises like shrimp drying. Some also settled in the New World in Mexico near Acapulco where they intermarried with then native population By 1763, there were Filipino communities in the Louisiana bayous. Filipinos in Louisiana founded the historic sites like St. Malo near New Orleans, ManilaVillage on a fifty acre marshland in the Mississippi Delta by the Gulf of Mexico. St Malo was the oldest Filipino settlement comprised of about 100 Filipino men. Women were not allowed to St. Malo on the grounds that they would cause trouble for the men. Most of the men engaged in fishing and their social life was marked by gambling and cockfighting. Manila village was the largest of these settlements and had about 300-400 residents and where families were allowed to reside.Sun drying of shrimp was the primary economy of the village.
The second period of immigrants were the Pensionadzos(1903-1910) and farm laborers(1906-1935) often called the Manongs which in Ilocano means older brother These two groups comprised the more than 125,000 Filipinos that came to the United States and Hawaii. The pensionados were a very small group around 100-300 who were hand picked by the US government to study at US Universities(UC Berkeley) to head the civilian government back home with American values and a very pro-American outlook. They were to study to reflect American political and economic interests and were from Philippine elite. These students that attended the East CoastUniversity provided the Americans the image of the well mannered, well groomed very cosmopolitan and very western and knowledgeable of American culture. There were also "schoolboys" or the "fountain pen boys" who came to work to support their education in the US in an attempt that their education will also land them a good job in the colonial government back home. There were about two thousand students enrolled in colleges and universities in the US but their numbers declined during the Depression to less than one thousand. The third group were the laborers/ sakadas or "three year contract workers" were the laborers who came to Hawaii and the West Coast, mostly young men between 16-30, to work. Of these 125,000 plus migrants, 109,513 were men, about 9,398 women and 7,006 children entered.. Very few women came with only a few thousand making the journey since it was not considered appropriate for women to go alone and leave home as well as since most laborers were just coming as sojourners, there was no need to start a family. Hence the gender ratio was 20 to 1 males to from the twenties to the thirties. Due to the lack of women, wife stealing became a problem. They called it "cowboy" The sakadas worked on the plantations and were the first to suffer economic oppression, poverty, labor exploitation, political disenfranchisement and social rejection among Filipinos in the US. The sakadas were treated as the "jackasses and country jacks" and were stereotyped as oversexed and hot-tempered.(Cordova,P.30)
LABOR:
Besides the plantation laborers, Filipinos also became part of the migrant labor in California like the Chinese and Japanese before them. Some Filipinos came directly to the mainland while the others after their contract was over on the plantations headed to California.. By 1930, there were over 45,0000 Filipinos on the mainland, with over 34,000 living in Californiawhile 3500 in Washington. while the rest all over the US. With all their expectations of El Dorado Street, all they could find was farm work in California by the fact that they were brown and foreign. Unlike the plantations where the communities were sedentary, farm labor was migratory, transient, always on the move following crops and seasons. Filipinos provided most of the stoop labor in agriculture where your back is bent all day, 10 hours a day, at least 26 days a month, working with pesticides, no toilets or clean water, living in bunkhouses, tent, shacks, boxcars, sometimes where the animals slept. Another level of exploitation in farm labor was the labor contracting system in which labor contractors negotiated with landowners and crew bosses since sometimes the contractors would keep some to the money but the contractors were able to bargain on behalf of the Filipinos since they could enter as a collective unit rather than individually being hired.
ALASKAN CANNERIES
These Alaskan workers or "Alaskeros" came to work in the canneries doing mainly unskilled work done also by the Chinese and Japanese before them. Before WWII. over 10,,000 Filipinos were working in the canneries to do seasonal work during the spring and summer. The hooked the fish, sorted, butchered, clean, declaimed, beheaded, de-tailed, gutted, canned and cooked the fish.. Despite their dominance in labor, they were often exploited by the companies. Pilipino workers were under the control of the company, the labor contractor and the Pilipino foreman or crew boss. The contractors abused the workers by giving the workers less food, clothing, transportation, anything to minimize his expenses so that he can line his pockets after the job is done.
In Alaska, one worker complained" We’re supposed to ahve three meal s every day, But that , even when that is provided in the contract, we are served eggs and rice every morning, rice and boiled salmon at noon, rice and boiled or fried salmon at night. That was the menu throughout the whole season, (cordova, p65)
US NAVY,
Because of the US Navel Station at Sangley Piont in Cavite near Manila, my Filipinos joined the US Navy and were enlisted only as stewards as cooks, waiters, pantry man, dishwashers, valets, custodians, bed makers, despite their background in the Philippine military or other training. This was one way of leaving the Philippines and getting a US citizenship after completing three years of working in the navy.
The history of Filipinos serving as seamen has its roots in Western imperialism having first served as galleon crew shiplaps for the Spanish- Manila, Acapulco Galleon trade. During the early 1900, during the American period- Filipinos started joining in the US Navy and as merchant marines . In 1903, there fewer 9 Filipinos in the US Navy, by 1905, there were 178. Since WWI, Filipinos have been a constant feature of their personnel about 5% of the Navy, all Stewards,..
Most of those interviewed said that they join mainly to escape the poverty and not out of patriotism to the United States. As one interviewee confirmed:
"I joined the Navy on account of the social economic standing of retired ex-navy men from our town in Nabua. " .. there were several of them, you know. Nabua is , you know a navy town. It used to be a farming town but now its a famous for its retired sailors. A lot of young Nabuans look up a t the life of the retired sailors in our town because they lead a nice social and economic life. And the only people who could ever get out of Nabua were navy men and teachers.. So it made a trend fo r young boys who weren't going to go to college or who weren’t going to get anything from their parents.. so they try to join the navy because of the retired navy men and they say "I;ll be like them" So for that reason, a lot of young Nabuans went to Manila, went to Subic Bay, right after the Americans landed at Leyte Gulf and joined the Navy right away."
Despite the better life promised by joining the Navy, they complained about the discrimination. One complained
"I could never understand why I had to take orders from an officer's wife, even when she was the admiral's wife. She's still a civilian you know . There would be time when they would order you to move furniture around their houses but what could you do, say I refuse to take orders from you because you're a civilian. You just couldn’t' do that.
'Yeah they called you 'boy' That was a common expression with Americans. Some of us were adults and resented name calling and stuff like that but in the military you cannot object every time you hear the word or else the relation between you and your superior officer will start to become more delicate.
Some fought back in their own way.
"The officers, some of them from the South were really very nasty, they thought you were a man-servant through an act of Congress., that you were inducted to be their personal servant. Well, some of them learned the hard way. They didn't know what was going on in the kitchen. Yeah, that right, They didn’t know how their coffee was made-- with our sock that we had worn for a were. And that some their food had Filipino saliva in it. Sometime it took a wile until someone told them that the worst enemy you could have was your steward.
LABOR PROTEST
Because of all the labor exploitation and deplorable working conditions, Filipinos started to get organized and militant in demanding better wages and living conditions. Many of the complaints included a list of "no’s": No minimum wage, no uniform pay increases, no compensation, no insurance, no medical coverage, no pension plan, and to top it off, no collective bargaining.
In Hawaii, the legendary Pablo Manlapit founded the Filipino Federation of Labor, the first Filipino union to organize plantation workers. He also organized the Filipino Unemployed Association in 1913 and the Filipino Higher Wage Movement in 1920 and led the more than three thousand Filipino workers along with the Japanese in the Jan 19, 1920 in Oahu and later another big strike in April 1924 which involved 1600 Filipinos lasting eight months and culminating with a union confrontation with the police which left 16 Filipinos dead and Manlapit was arrested and later banished to the Mainland where he organized, came back to Hawaii, arrested again, and later deported to the Philippines.
On the Mainland. Luis Agudo organized the Filipino Labor Union to strike against the growers and shippers of lettuce in Salinas in 1934 in which the month strike only gained them a token five cent wage hike.
Larry Itliong later in 1965 coordinated successful grape strikes in Coachella Valley near Los Angeles and brought his Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to Delano for the famous September 8,1965 strike which was later supported by Chavez and his Mexican American National Farm Workers Association and then in 1967 the two merged to form the UFW of America, often associated with Mexicans and Chavistas.
In Alaska, Virgilio Duyungan organized the Alaskeros and testified at eh 1934 National Recovery Act hearings in SF on the abuses of Alaskan canneries. He and many testified of sexual exploitation by the canneries of bringing white homosexual boys 14-15 years old and other older white transvestites to service the workers. Foremen also ran the gambling, liquor and drug rackets while companies made workers buy clothes and other necessities from selected stores to keep the boys in debt. Chartered by the AFL, The Filipino dominated Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers union, Local chapter 18527 was organized in 1933. on Dec, 1 1936,. labor contractors contracted out the killing of the President who was gunned down alsond tithe the Union secretary, Aurelio Simon, while inside a Japanese restaurant In 1937, the chapter renounced the AFL since the AFL was not supportive of the aggressive Filipinos so they went under the United Cannery, agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers, ofAmerica under CIO(Congress of Industrial Organizations) Local 7. Later in 1949, under the red Scare, five of the Local 7 were arrested for "communist" activities and subject to deportation but were released in 1954 on the grounds that they were innocent and were US nationals since they came before 1934 hence could not be deported.
ANTI-FILIPINO Sentiments and Activities
SOCIAL/SEXUAL THREAT
Anti-Filipino Riots. by Emory Bogardus and Howard Dewitt.
Bogardus examines the different factors which contributed to the anti-Filipino riots.
The riots which started in 1928 in Washington, and continued in October 1929 in Exeter Ca, and finally in Watsonville, CA on Jan. 1930. Using accounts of different parties to the Watsonville riot he attempted to put a comprehensive account of the causes using the accounts of " Unskilled wage earners hwo view the Filipinos as labor competition2) business people who Filipinos patronize 3) businesses who have no contact with Filipinos 4) ranchers who employ Filipinos 5) idealistic citizens like pastors and civic leaders 6) Filipino stoop labor 7) Filipino labor contractors8 ) Filipino leaders
The Watsonville Riot on January 30, 1930 was preceded by the county's previous negative contacts with Filipinos. Prior to the riot, there have been several cases of Filipinos prosecuted for "wreck less driving" . But the first signs of anti-Filipino sentiment happened during New Year's eve in the Chinese section of Stockton. There was a poolroom fight between the an Anglo and a Filipino. However, the local Stockton paper, the Record reported it as a race war. The media sensationalized these sort of events which only heightened anti-Filipino sentiment. The Sacramento Bee, publisher, VS McClatchy, even as early as 1921 used his paper along with the Native Sons of the Golden West and California Joint Immigration committee to rally against Filipinos. This sentiment contained a social-sexual component in that whites tried to prevent Filipinos from socializing with white women. In August 1926, whites harassed Filipino youths for attending a local Dinuba dance. The local paper, the Sentine. heralded" Filipino Boy Crisis almost stops Dinuba Street Dance." This City inSan JoaquinValley believed it was unhealthy for white and Filipinos. So strong was this sentiment that the local American Legion formed a vigilante brigade to patrol the area to make sure there was no social intercourse between Filipinos and whites.
Congressmen Richard Welch and Senator Hiram Johnson also joined to support Filipino exclusion. This was hardly surprising since most California politicians were reselected by adopting a anti-Oriental platform. The anti- Filipino activity increased that by 1929 the Californian Commonwealth Club, along with the CaliforniaState Federation of Labor and the California Joint Immigration Committee joined forces to rally to restrict Filipino labor.
Another major incident preceded the Watsonville Riot: The Exeter Riot(in San Jouaquin Valley). Filipinos in the area have been brought it to harvest Kadota figs and grapes. On October 24, 1929, at a local carnival in Exeter, white youths started shooting rubber bands at local Filipino youths who were walking with white girls. After a few days of being harassed, one of the Filipino youths stabbed a white youth. This led to the formation of a mob of 300 who marched to eh EJ. Firebaugh ranch and burned his barn to avenge the young boys' death. The mob went to the Filipino labor camp and ran out the Filipinos. Even more surprising was that the vigilante group was led by the chief of Police C.E. Joyner. The local paper, the Sun reported that Filipinos proclivity towards violence was the cause of the riot. The Stockton Record reported that it was a "race riot" the Filipinos insistence to be treated as equals as white girls that caused the riot. And the Watsonville Pajoronian reported the incident as a "Race Riot'
One of the most vocal opponents of Filipinos in Watsonville was the Township Judge , DW Rohrback made some inflammatory remarks against Filipinos. On October 30, 1929, the local paper read" THE FILIPINO IS THE STATE'S NEXT PROBLEM. Filipino reaction was mixed, The LA based Filipino weekly(Ang Bantay) informed its readers in editorials that they had the same rights as Americans and complained of unfair practices in housing, labor and law. However, the other LA papers, The Little Manila Times. the Philippine Herald Tribune, and the Philippine Star Press encouraged Filipinos to cooperate with authorities and accept second class status while in America. this lack of political unity and voice paralyzed Filipinos; response to white agitation.