So why is a Filipina writing about Soul Food?

Traveled across the country to attend the 50th Anniversary March on Washington last Saturday. Met some nice people and connected with old friends. Went to visit someone in Maryland and stopped at a popular soul food restaurant that had been started by a Black family and then sold to the Korean family that now runs it. did a lot of thinking, lot of talking. decided to write about some of my reasons for writing this blog.

let me start by saying that Black folks and Filipinos have an association that goes back a long, long, long time.

First off, the original inhabitants of the Philippines were Black people, and they may have arrived as many as 90,000 years ago. Historically, they were collectively referred to as Negritos, because of their small stature. Genetically, they are related to the aborigines of places like Australia, New Guinea and Micronesia. They suffered terrible discrimination from the successive waves of non-Black immigrants and there are maybe 30,000 today, living mostly in isolated villages. With the compulsive adoration of light skin in the Philippines (no surprise after hundreds of years of Spanish and American occupation), the main reason that the indigenous  societies have survived more or less intact is the reluctance of the non-Black Filipinos to intermarry with them.

Black and Filipino in what is now the United States also goes back a lot farther than you might think. The first Filipino settlement in North America started in the 18th Century. From 1565 to 1815, Spain ran the “Galleon Trade” between its colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. In 1763, a group of Filipino sailors jumped ship in the Americas and made their way to Louisiana. Along with groups of escaped African slaves, the Manila Men (as they came to be called) settled in the bayous, where they could hide from the Spanish. In 1784 a group of enslaved Africans escaped into the marshes. Their leader, Jean Saint Malo, was eventually captured and hanged. The principal settlement of Manila Men, St. Malo, was named for the leader of the rebellion. The Filipino settlers made a living fishing and shrimping and intermarried with local women. Because of the harsh living conditions in their bayou settlements, the families of the Manila Men generally lived in town, and there are records of their children being enrolled in schools in New Orleans.

For my family, Black and Filipino starts the day my dad stepped off the boat in Portland, Oregon in 1926. The United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898, making the Philippines a U.S. colony. And one of the principal resources that the U.S. wanted to exploit was the potential pool of cheap labor. But rather than using violence to bring the Filipinos here, the Americans resorted to trickery. One of the first actions of the U.S. government was to send a ship full of teachers to the islands. They set up schools and created a curriculum (all in English), and taught young Filipinos that America was land of opportunity. All they needed was to get here, and then they would be able to go to college, get their degrees in medicine or law, and then return to their homeland as successful professionals.

My dad and thousands of other young Filipinos believed the lies of their teachers. Their families saved up the price for the ticket and shipped them to America. My father left behind his mother, father, siblings, and a young wife and infant son.

I will always remember his story about arriving in Portland. Along with his shipmates, he was dressed in his Sunday best and full of dreams. But they were met at the boat by a labor contractor. The men were packed into the backs of open trucks and told they were going to go and eat. When they arrived at a small café, they went inside and my father said that when he looked around, all he saw were Black and brown faces. It was at that moment that he knew the future that was in store for him – he got a job in a sawmill and then went on to become a migrant worker and eventually, with other Filipino pioneers, he organized the farmworkers union and then became the business agent for the Alaska cannery workers and a member of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

Black and Filipino really started involving me, personally, in the ninth grade. I transferred to a mostly-Black junior high school and joined the Black Student Union. Membership in the BSU was open to any Black student at the school and, as a brown person, pretty much everyone accepted me into the group. My friends may correct me, but I’m fairly sure I was the only non-Black member. By contrast, the established Filipino community organizations were closed to me, in part because my father’s militant unionism had frightened away many in the community, and partly because I was personally not acceptable, being only “half” Filipino.

I grew up in a very segregated city at a time when Black activists, like the Black Panther Party, were challenging racism and calling for Black Power and Black Pride. Because of my mother’s race and my light complexion, I had the opportunity shared by many mixed people – would I continue to seek acceptance by the white world in which my mother had raised me, or would I finally accept that I was a woman of color? It took me a while (some years in fact) to realize where I really belonged, but, in the end, I made what I believe was the only reasonable choice. I think i finally realized that my friends didn’t HAVE a choice. So I gave up any claim to white privilege, and threw in my lot with the one community that had always welcomed me.