By David Courtland and Carlos Garcia
Filipino American History Month was recognized at the Oct. 7 Oxnard City Council meeting with a proclamation accepted by the Filipino American Council of Ventura County. There is a population of Filipinos of approximately 3.1 million in the USA, it is the second largest Asian-American population in the USA.
“We just want to say thank you, thank you for embracing this community and our culture,” said Grace Tuazon, the executive director of the FACVC, who accepted the proclamation after it was read aloud by Councilmember Michaela Perez.
“A little bit about the Filipino American Council,” Tuazon continued, “we are an umbrella organization for 12 Filipino American organizations, we have a lot of provincial groups and specialty groups.”
Tuazon also announced that The Filipino American Fiesta, a celebration of Filipino American history and culture, will be held on Sunday, Oct. 19 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Ventura County Museum, 100 E. Main St. in Ventura.
Filipino American History Month was first established in 1992 by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) and later officially recognized by the U.S. Congress in 2009.
It celebrates the first documented Filipino presence in the continental U.S. occurred when the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Esperanza landed in what is now Morro Bay, California on Oct. 18, 1587.
Following the Spanish-American War, the Philippines became a U.S. territory in 1898, granting Filipinos the legal status to travel to the U.S. and circumvent some immigration laws. This legal status was later taken from them by an act of Congress, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934.
Many Filipinos first went to Hawaii to work in sugar plantations, but later moved to California for better wages and job prospects. They arrived in large numbers in the 1920s and 1930s, with San Francisco as a common port of entry.
Thousands of young, single Filipino men—known as manongs—came to California’s Central Valley. Many were recruited from sugar plantations in Hawaii, where they had completed labor contracts.
The manongs worked in asparagus, lettuce, and other fields in areas like Stockton, Salinas, and the Imperial Valley, enduring low wages and harsh working conditions.
Anti-Filipino sentiment was common in California and Filipino Americans faced overt racial discrimination, including anti-miscegenation laws that prevented them from marrying white women.
This prejudice erupted into violence, such as the 1930 Watsonville riots, where mobs attacked Filipino farmworkers. California officially apologized for the riots in 2011.
Filipino farmworkers were pivotal in the farm labor movement. Labor leader Larry Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, made up primarily of Filipino Americans, initiated the historic Delano grape strike in 1965.
Their strike eventually merged with César Chávez’s United Farm Workers, leading to a historic victory for farmworkers.