Little Manila is in the Heart - Comprehensive Notes

Remembering Little Manila

• The author was born and raised in Stockton, California, as the daughter and granddaughter of Filipino immigrants.
• In 1977, she was five years old and remembers her father, Ernesto Mabalon, taking her to Little Manila.
• Her father greeted elderly Filipinos, who gave her dollar bills and quarters.
• Her grandfather, Pablo “Ambo” Mabalon, owned the Lafayette Lunch Counter, where she ate her favorite hotcakes.
• The elders would tell stories and laugh.
• Years later, as a student at UCLA, she read Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and asked her father about him.
• Bulosan used the Lafayette Lunch Counter as his permanent address in Stockton from the 1930s to the early 1950s.
• He received his mail there and often ate for free because the author’s grandfather couldn’t bear to see Filipinos starve.
• In return, Bulosan gave the grandfather a signed copy of his book.
• The author corroborated her father’s stories with Bulosan’s papers at the University of Washington.
• The family rarely spoke about the history of their community, which was a silence the author wanted to understand.
• The restaurant was sold in the early 1980s.
• In 1997, the author visited the shuttered restaurant, longing to understand the community that had formed there.
• Two years later, the restaurant was demolished for an urban redevelopment project.
• The destruction inspired her to explore the community’s history for her dissertation at Stanford.
• Her elders rarely spoke about Little Manila or the racism they had survived.
• Bulosan was often regarded as an alcoholic Communist who never worked in the fields.
• The author aims to understand the silences, recover memories, and tell the stories of Stockton’s community members.
• She hopes these stories will inspire community members to challenge capitalism’s attempts to destroy what is left of the historic community.

Little Manila's Identity

• The book is about how Filipinos created a distinctive community and identity in Stockton.
• She argues that the ethnic community in Little Manila and its institutions offered sites for the construction of a unique Filipino American ethnic identity and culture.
• This identity was shaped by racialization as brown “others” and collective experiences in the fields and streets.
• Her family’s history is linked with the history of Little Manila and Filipinos in Stockton.
• Her mother, Christine Bohulano, arrived in the U.S. in 1952, and her father met her mother during World War II.
• Her grandfather brought his family to the San Joaquin Delta in 1952 and worked as a labor contractor.
• They spent weekends in Little Manila.
• The Veterans Administration loan program allowed them to purchase a home in South Stockton in 1955.
• Her mother was among the first Filipinos in Stockton to leave the fields and become a schoolteacher.
• Her grandfather, Pablo Mabalon, emigrated to Stockton in 1929 and sent for his son in 1963.
• Her father had a medical degree but became a labor contractor due to discriminatory laws.
• He was active in the Filipino Community of Stockton and the Legionarios del Trabajo.
• Her grandfathers hailed from Numancia, Aklan, and her parents met at the Mabalon family restaurant, which was a gathering place for Filipino immigrants.

Stockton's Filipino Community

• Her grandparents and parents came to Stockton as part of a massive wave of Filipinos that began in 1898.
• The first Filipino immigrant to Stockton was Villareal, who arrived in 1898 and encouraged others to come.
• Vicente Roldan recalled that early immigrants talked about Stockton as a “valley of opportunity.”
• Pensionados also worked in the fields around Stockton as early as 1914.
• By the late 1920s, several hundred Aklanons and thousands of Filipinos had settled in Stockton.
• Stockton became known as "Little Manila" by World War II.
• It was considered the hometown of the entire Filipino American community.
• By World War II, it was home to the largest Filipino community outside of the Philippines, a distinction it held until the 1960s.
• Frank Perez called her Lolo Ambo “Mr. Little Manila.”
• Her grandfather left for the U.S. because he couldn’t earn enough money in the Philippines due to the death of his father in the 1902 cholera epidemic.

Filipino American History and Imperialism

• Filipino American experiences in Stockton are part of a larger history of American imperialism.
• After the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Philippine-American War in 1899–1913, the Philippines became an American colony.
• Filipino students and workers streamed into the U.S. until the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 restricted immigration.
• By the end of World War II, more than 150,000 Filipinos lived in Hawai’i and on the U.S. mainland.
• By the 1920s, San Joaquin County growers depended on Filipino labor.
• Filipinos provided cheap labor for harvesting crops.
• Stockton was a center of a West Coast migratory labor circuit.
• Some Filipinos stayed in Stockton year-round due to available work.
• It became a destination because there were not enough jobs in other cities, and farmers needed cheap labor.
• Filipinos specialized in labor-intensive produce like asparagus.
• In the 1920s and 1930s, approximately 5000 to 6000 Filipinos lived in the Stockton area. During the asparagus season, the Filipino population would double.
• The pull to Stockton became so strong that some Filipino immigrants came to the city almost immediately after landing in San Francisco, Seattle, or Los Angeles.
• Taxi drivers exploited them by charging exorbitant fares.

Little Manila's Community and Themes of the Book

• From the 1920s until the 1970s, Filipino families, organizations, and businesses thrived in Little Manila.
• It was located near Chinatown and Japantown and was a working-class area with various establishments.
• By World War II, the number of Filipinos in Stockton had mushroomed to around 15,000.
• According to 2010 Census figures, Filipinos are the second-largest Asian American group nationwide, the third-largest minority group in California, and the largest Asian American group in San Joaquin County.
• Three themes are central to the book: the politics of historical memory, racialization and cultural transformations, and the demands of capitalism.
• The book explores how Filipinos remember their community, how immigrants became Filipino Americans, and how urban redevelopment destroyed much of the community.
• The destruction of Little Manila threatened to obliterate the collective memory of this important place.
• The relationship between Filipinos and their history in Stockton was fractured by the destruction of Little Manila, new immigration, and invisibility in media and government.
• The loss of Little Manila left a traumatic wound, and there are no monuments to Filipino American history in Stockton.
• Public schools do not teach about Filipino American culture or history.
• The book aims to recover memories of the past to reimagine a better future.

Racial Formation and Identity

• The arguments in the book rest on Omi and Winant’s theory of racial formation.
• Emigrants brought ideas about race, ethnicity, and culture shaped by their identities and racialization as colonial wards.
• They began calling themselves Filipinos due to American colonialism.
• The American colonial regime ushered in new racial formations, racializing the insurgent enemy as “goo-goos” and “niggers.”
• It constructed a new racial state that split the population into Christian and non-Christian peoples.
• When emigrants arrived in Stockton, identities were tied to class, region, province, and town.
• They saw themselves as Ilocanos, Visayans, or Tagalogs.
• Segregation in the labor market, antimiscegenation laws, and their status as “nationals” racialized them into despised brown others.
• Space and place shaped ethnic identities and Filipino American culture.
• The racialized space of Little Manila became a site for negotiating a local Filipino American identity.
• Immigrants turned to family networks and fellow immigrants to survive, constructing a social world and ethnic identity.
• Ethnicity emerged from daily experience in the United States.
• The book traces how historical events and lived realities created Filipino American racial and ethnic identity, culture, and community.
• It explores life and culture in the provinces of the Philippines during American colonial rule.
• Immigrants lacked a unifying language and preferred to associate with others from their hometown or region.
• Class differences also created divisions.

Challenges and Transformations in Stockton

• The 1920s and 1930s were crucial for forging Filipino American culture, identity, and community in Stockton.
• By the mid-1930s, Filipinos had been transformed by the brutality of industrialized agriculture, joblessness, violence, exclusion, and labor repression.
• After 1934, Filipinos were reclassified as aliens.
• The Filipino Repatriation Act of 1935 offered a one-way ticket back to the Philippines.
• Filipinos weathered these challenges, showing the strength of their community.
• Immigrants developed a new ethnic identity and accepted the possibility of a future in their new land.
• They responded to racialization in diverse ways, such as identifying as “brown” on official documents.
• A third theme is how capitalism destroyed Little Manila through urban redevelopment.
• The story demonstrates the impact of urban policies on poor neighborhoods of color.
• The community has attempted to challenge these policies.
• It builds on and challenges histories of Filipino Americans, rewriting the dominant narrative of Asian American history.
• It examines local communities, identities, and institutions built by early immigrants.
• It challenges historians to broaden ideas about the emergence of Asian ethnic communities.
• Some historians assert that Filipinos rarely settled in West Coast cities, but this book argues against that assessment.
• Stockton remained a mecca for Filipinos who traveled frequently.
• The book provides frameworks for understanding other Filipino communities on the West Coast.

Recollections and Research Methods

• In the mid-1990s, the author interviewed her father’s friend, Claro Candelario, who was a character in America Is in the Heart.
• A relative had thrown away his letters, newspapers, and photographs, but his daughter saved a few items.
• Old-timers rarely spoke openly of their experiences, and when they did, it often fell on deaf ears.
• The author regrets not engaging in enough conversations with her elders.
• Colonial mentality and the internalization of hatred of Filipinos in Stockton contributed to this.
• Much of the community’s history has been lost because it was not seen as historically important.
• Research involved trying to save materials from being thrown away.
• The lack of materials in local archives compounds this problem.
• No local organizations donated their papers to a local library.
• The search for information about Larry Itliong is an example of the challenges faced by Filipino American historians.
• There has been progress, with the Filipino American National Historical Society and the National Pinoy Archives preserving materials.
• In 2005, Antonio Somera discovered a trove of historical items in the basement of the Daguhoy Lodge.
• Oral histories provided the richest source of information, with community members sharing their memories and documents.
• The author drew on oral histories conducted by scholars in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Filipino American newspapers, government records, and Census information helped reconstruct the Little Manila neighborhood.
• Archival records of the City of Stockton provided information on the area.
• Some families saved diaries, photograph albums, and letters.
• Manuscript collections and ethnic newspaper archives at various universities yielded important historical material.
• New technologies made passenger ship lists, naturalization records, Census data, and military records accessible.
• The author used creative ways to uncover the history of the community, such as examining physical sites and buildings.
• Community celebrations and gatherings were sites of memory.

Travel to the Philippines and Book Structure

• The author traveled to the Philippines for archival research and visited rural provinces.
• She visited churches, historic sites, cemeteries, and town plazas.
• She gained a better understanding of how colonialism, poverty, and dreams pushed emigrants to the U.S.
• Seeing the provinces taught her about the homesickness felt by the first generations of Filipinos in the U.S.
• The book describes how Filipino American ethnic identities and the Filipino American community were constructed and changed over time in Stockton’s Little Manila.
• Part I presents stories of Little Manila from the provinces to the initial settlement in downtown Stockton in the 1910s.
• Chapter 1 examines life in the Philippines on the eve of emigration, arguing that Filipinos came to the U.S. due to American colonialism and economic changes.
• Chapter 2 examines the development of industrialized agriculture in the San Joaquin Delta and Valley, and how Filipinos became the solution to labor shortages.
• Part II explores how community members created their own world in Stockton, establishing institutions.
• Chapter 3 explores how Filipinos carved out a social world through community institutions and the development of Little Manila.
• Chapter 4 explores women’s lives in Little Manila from the 1920s to World War II, and the experiences of second-generation Filipino Americans.
• Chapter 5 examines the religious life of Filipino immigrants and the role of the church in the farm labor movement.
• Chapter 6 shows how World War II was a watershed moment for Filipinos in Stockton, and the expansion of Little Manila.
• Part III describes how much of Little Manila and Chinatown were destroyed by urban redevelopment.
• Chapter 7 describes the destruction of Little Manila due to urban renewal policies and freeway construction.
• Chapter 8 describes the struggle to create a Filipino Center as a solution to the displacement of Filipinos.
• The epilogue reflects on the legacies and burdens of Stockton’s Filipino American history, and the politics of history and memory.

Some Terms and Final Thoughts

• Several terms used: Filipina/o, manong/manang, old-timer/pioneer, Pinoy/Pinay.
• The book’s title, Little Manila Is in the Heart, was inspired by Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart.
• Bulosan yearned to be part of the America of his colonial education and dreams.
• Life in Stockton, before World War II, did not deter Filipinos from making their homes there.
• They cherished the hope that they would one day find a real home in their adopted country.
• They built a vibrant ethnic community and became Filipino Americans.
• The Little Manila community remains in the hearts of every Filipino who remembers its legacy.