Tagalog Story

[Rosita Westhouse]

Thecities of her childhood are the settings in her debut collection of short stories, In The Country. The nine stories feature very different characters, in and outside of the Philippines, who are grappling with some form of exile or emigration.

When people are sort of thrown together in a place that's strange or foreign to them, Filipinos who maybe would not have socialized with each other back in Manila spend all their free time socializing with each other and kind of lean on each other and feel a responsibility to each other.

I think the second person is just polarizing for understandable reasons. People don't like being told that they are someone they're not, or that they're doing something that they definitely aren't. It can come across in ... almost an aggressive way.

And I sort of decided that I was OK, in this particular story, with aggressively insisting that the person reading identify with [the main character], whose real-life counterpart might not have time to read a literary short story collection.

Some manongs sent their pay back to the Philippines, and others tried to save up enough to return home to marry or retire, or to attend college in the U.S. Few ever realized these dreams. Fred was one of the few who was able to find a female companion. Because she was a white woman, they kept their relationship hidden from the public for years to avoid legal persecution or, worse, violent retribution.

With the onset of the Great Depression, Filipinos and other immigrants were convenient scapegoats for the troublesome economic times and subject to racist attacks. In 1930, a mob in Watsonville, California, dragged dozens of Filipino men from their homes and beat them. One was shot and killed. Deaths also resulted from the bombings of Filipino labor camps, often with the complicity of local law enforcement. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organizing efforts among farm workers were often met with violence, persecution and imprisonment, with agribusiness interests abetted by local, state and national policies all but ensuring the mostly immigrant workforce effectively remained second-class citizens.

Despite the charged racial and economic environment, the manongs never abandoned their dreams for a better life and dignity in America. Throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s they organized successful strikes and work stoppages, formed unions and began winning significant improvements to wages and work conditions. By the 1960s, with the prominence of the Civil Rights movement and a spirit of social change in the air, these workers consolidated under the leadership of manongs Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong and others as the mostly Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC).

In September 8, 1965, the AWOC decided to strike against Delano grape growers, demanding pay equal to the federal minimum wage. It was a bold move. Few strikes of this scale had been attempted, and growers had refined their own strategies for combating such efforts. They included fear tactics, hiring thugs to break up union activities and keeping the workforce effectively divided by pitting workers of different races against each other.

This set the stage for the last major wave of immigrant farm labor from Asia: Filipinos. Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory, Filipinos were exempt from immigration restrictions, and in the 1920s and 30s over 100,000 men would come to the U.S. seeking employment and economic opportunities.

With changes in immigration policy and the availability of new economic opportunities, the participation of Filipino Americans in farm labor declined rapidly. By the 1980s and 90s only a handful of manongs, now in retirement, survived. Today, a few remaining monuments help keep their story alive for future generations.

In 2013, the National Park Service identified two sites in Delano, California, for potential inclusion in the National Park System for their relevance to the Filipino farmworker story. They include The 40 Acres, former headquarters of the UFW and the site of Agbayani Village, built by volunteers in 1974 to house aging Filipino farmworkers. The second facility, Filipino Community Hall, was the site of critical meetings and organizing efforts leading up to and after the start of the 1965 Delano grape strike.

Some may call it luck, but Arnel was well-prepared for this opportunity. His mother, a tailor who passed away when he was 13, began grooming him via in-home performances at age five. Born into poverty, he was competing in local singing competitions by age seven. He went pro at 15, initially showcasing his vocal range in malls and later throughout the Philippines and other parts of Asia. His story was also punctuated by spells of hunger and homelessness.

This exhibition is presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, California Humanities, UCSC The Humanities Institute, UCSC Arts Research Institute, UCSC Arts Division, UCSC Office of Research, UCSC Division of Social Sciences, UCSC Center for Labor and Community, Monterey Peninsula Foundation, UCSC Committee on Research, Society of Hellman Fellows, and Rebecca Hernandez of the Rise Together Fund at Community Foundation Santa Cruz County. The exhibition is made possible with the generous contributions of Cristana DeGuzman, Greg Reyes, and George Ow, Jr.

Help fuel a strong and resilient MAH by becoming a MAH Member or making a donation. Your contribution directly supports the future of the museum and connecting our community through art, history, and culture.

Several of the most prominent thinkers in Filipino American history will present their insights and findings on the role of archives, the work of preserving memories, and the histories of Filipinos in the United States.

Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley will run through August 4 at the MAH. Four years in the making, this long-awaited exhibition tells the story of Filipino migration and labor in Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley of Central California from the 1930s to the present.

The exhibition is the result of a prestigious $75,000 Public Humanities Projects: Exhibitions Planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH). Housed in The Humanities Institute at UCSC, WIITH is a community-driven public history initiative dedicated to preserving and uplifting the stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley.

POSITIVELY FILIPINO is the premier digital native magazine celebrating the story of Filipinos in the diaspora. POSITIVELY FILIPINO online magazine chronicles the experiences of the global Filipino in all its complexity, covering the arts, culture, politics, media, sports, economics, history and social justice. Based in San Francisco, California, POSITIVELY FILIPINO magazine is your window on the Filipino diaspora.

POSITIVELY FILIPINO is the premier digital native magazine celebrating the story of the global Filipino. The POSITIVELY FILIPINO online magazine chronicles the experiences of the global Filipino in all its complexity, providing analysis and discussion about the arts, culture, politics, media, sports, economics, history and social justice.

As one of the few American freelancers in the Philippines, I thought it was my duty to get down there and work. I got myself onto a C-130 military cargo plane and flew from Manila to Zamboanga, crowded into the hull with 150 soldiers leaning on their rifles. When we landed, I hitched a ride in the back of a rumbling military jeep and was dropped off at the hotel where some local journalists were waiting in the lobby.

Three weeks after that, Typhoon Haiyan hit the country. It was the largest hurricane ever to make landfall, killing at least 6,300 people and leaving millions homeless. As the typhoon was barreling towards the Philippines, it was already global news. The eye of the storm did not pass over Manila, which meant I had electricity and terrible (but functional) cell service. I monitored news on local radio, filed multiple spots and did interviews with American outlets.

Aurora Almendral is a Philippine-born freelance writer based in New York City. As a Fulbright Scholar to Morocco and Spain, she researched and filmed a documentary on entrepreneurship and illegal immigration in Madrid. She previously worked as a research assistant at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and has written for Filipinas Magazine and New America Media.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic shut the exhibit down early. The Tobera Project planned to take the exhibit to a more public venue once the stay-at-home restrictions were lifted, and when Plank learned about it, she offered to create a more expanded exhibit at the Museum of Art & History.

The exhibit also features a timeline covering the history of Filipino Americans in the United States, particularly the Pajaro Valley. Following the Philippine Revolution and Spanish-American War of 1898, America acquired the Philippines from Spain, and the U.S. government recruited Filipino workers for cheap labor in the then-territory of Hawaii as well as mainland Western states like Washington, Oregon and California.

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