And so here we are in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month which began on September 15 and continues on through October 15. It’s a strange straddle over two months, but what do you expect from an imperial culture that went in and dominated lands and people? 

We’re not just talking about being born “Hispanic” in that positive, “let’s go out and have some flautas and margaritas” kind of way.

There’s that nagging negative side, too.

We all have some Hispanic heritage in California, whether we own it or not. The style, the language, the names of our cities and streets. All an homage to our link to Spain. 

But as an Asian American Filipino, born here in California, the link to Spain goes back more than 500 years when the Spanish conquered the Philippines. 

My Hispanic heritage?  As a colony of Spain, the Philippines got the full imperial treatment. My name? Spanish. My food? All sorts of Spanish influences. My beliefs? Spanish and Catholic to the core. 

The Spanish colonization gave way to the American colonization, which started after the Spanish American War ended and the Philippines was sold to the U.S. for $20 million. 

I like to say that’s slightly less than Draymond Green makes for the Warriors.

The colonization process continued as the U.S. taught English to the Philippines, and then brought Filipinos like my dad to California in the 1920s and 1930s to work the fields. 

Born under the American flag as a colonized Filipino, my dad was allowed to enter the U.S. as an “American national.” No papers necessary. But he wasn’t a citizen. Nor a slave. He was a colonized ward of the state. About 30,000 of them, mostly men, came to California to be a labor force, working the fields for ten cents an hour.  

They also found out just how unwelcome they were. They couldn’t vote, own land, and they couldn’t intermarry. There were anti-miscegenation laws that prevented the mixing of races. 

If a Filipino was caught with a white woman, he was shot, killed, and even lynched.

Filipinos? Like Blacks? Yep. 

My father chose to stay in the Bay Area to work in restaurants. He lived in the Fillmore.  Most of his Filipino townmates went to work migrant agricultural jobs up and down the Central Valley. That was their life for decades.

Grape Strike: The Filipino-Mexican Merger

In Delano, north of Fresno, Larry Itliong led the Filipino agricultural workers in a strike against the table grape growers on Sept. 7, 1965. They wanted $1.45 per hour.

But the Filipinos were mostly elderly in their 50s and 60s. They realized they needed to join in coalition with Cesar Chavez who ran a community organization for Mexicans at the time. Chavez wasn’t a unionist. He didn’t want to strike. 

Five years ago, on the 50^th anniversary of The Great Delano Grape Strike, I talked to Gil Padilla, a co-founder with Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association. He told me Chavez was persuaded by Itliong.

“He was the one who made the negotiations,” Chavez had said. “Larry was the one who made sure we became a family and we merged.”

The 1965 merger of the Filipinos and the Mexican workers in solidarity in the United Farm Worker strike against the grape growers also symbolized the merger of the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement. 

That’s what I think about when I think Hispanic Heritage Month, which overlapscFilipino History Month which starts on October 1. 

There’s some complicated history intertwined, both positive and negative, with a lot more diversity than you think. 

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. He vlogs at www.amok.com 

Facebook: emilguillermo.media ;  Twitter@emilamok

Christy Price

Posts by Christy Price