UC Davis

The history of Filipina immigrants and Filipina American women prior to World War II has received less attention compared to their male counterparts, the Manong Generation. The gender imbalance of Filipinas to Filipinos in America (1: 20) during the early twentieth century makes it difficult, but not impossible, to locate Filipina American history in the archives. Primary sources like Filipino American and local Euro-American newspapers from the Depression Era such as The Philippines Mail and the San Luis Obispo Tribune describe Filipinas who lived and worked in rural farm towns like Salinas and Santa Maria as largely supportive maternal figures dedicated to their community’s social prosperity. Because of their status as a minority within a minority, and their absence in the archives, my research seeks to 1) uncover narratives of Filipina Americans that have not yet been adequately highlighted in the scholarship, and 2) delve deeper into the agency of pioneer immigrant Filipinas on California’s Central Coast during the first half of the twentieth century.

Utilizing the western education offered to them both in the Philippines and abroad while traversing America's empire as colonial subjects and pensionados (students under American jurisdiction), Filipinas of the Progressive Era formulated their own modern woman, the "New Filipina'' and produced literature and labor that reflected a transpacific p/feminism; one that advocated for community survival as part of the larger movement for independence. Filipina p/feminist politicking would influence and affect the ways that the next generation of Filipina immigrants (1920s-1930s) in California practiced community organizing in their ethnic hubs which would later become known as Little Manilas. My paper describes how Filipinas navigated around patriarchal barriers found in both their Filipino immigrant communities and the surrounding segregated white American landscape in order to secure the survival of their families and cultural heritage. Such methods of community organizing and labor that immigrant Filipinas relied on, I argue, are a continuation of the Filipina politicking of the New Filipina who emerged out of a Transpacific and Transnational Progressive Era.

To do this research, I use a woman of color, transnational, p/feminist critique to create a history of the Filipina pioneer generation (the Manang Generation). My methods are interdisciplinary in practice and draw from Critical Filipinx Studies, the historical method, Critical Asian American Studies, and most importantly, the p/feminist method of Filipina/o/x talk story known as kwentuhans to speak with surviving Fil-Am community members whose families were part of the Manang/Manong Generation. Together these methods will enable my intervention into traditional labor, Asian American, and transnational women’s histories, and also contribute new insights into contemporary work in those fields.