Cultural enclaves are keeping Filipino American communities alive

Joselyn Geaga-Rosenthal, a longtime resident of Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown, used to worry that the district could disappear.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a Filipino ethnic enclave has done this: A Little Manila in Los Angeles that thrived in the 1920s and 1930s no longer exists today.

That concern was quelled when a 30-foot tall, 82-foot wide steel arch was built in the district to serve as a monument to the community and installed in 2022. But efforts to maintain the district must continue, Geaga-Rosenthal says.

“That lost Manila idea, it could be lost Historic Filipinotown if the population here doesn’t expand or strengthen the concept of this district,” she says. “Populations change. It's easy to take signs down, so that was my fear.”

Geaga-Rosenthal is a member of the steering committee for the HiFi Coalition, a group dedicated to strategizing the development of Historic Filipinotown. She and other community members and leaders describe ethnic enclaves like Historic Filipinotown as a key part of raising the community’s visibility, and strengthening and sustaining it. While Filipino Americans constitute the third largest Asian American subgroup in the United States, they have faced erasure in a way that other Asian American communities have not, says Kevin Nadal, president of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FAHNS). The reason for that lies in a unique migration story.

The effect of migration patterns on ethnic enclave sustainability

Most Filipinos who migrated to the United States in the early to mid 1900s were men who, after World War II, left the neighborhoods they formed when they had arrived. As a result, those neighborhoods didn’t last. When Filipinos first moved to New York in the 1920s, mostly as navy stewards, they lived near the Brooklyn Navy Yards, Nadal says. They eventually moved to other parts of the city, and the Filipino population in Brooklyn dwindled. He adds that Filipinos who immigrated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s moved to suburbs like Cerritos and Carson rather than Historic Filipinotown.

Nadal notes that Chinese immigrants who moved into Chinatowns were also mostly men and that similarly to Filipinos, they also migrated out to the suburbs. But new Chinese businesses remained in those districts and immigrants continued to settle in those areas.

“So just the patterns of migration may have affected whether these places sustained,” Nadal says.

In his 2014 dissertation, Joseph Bernardo, an adjunct professor at Loyola Marymount University and community historian, wrote that in the mid 1920s, Filipinos were recruited to work in various agricultural industries on the West Coast, including farms in California, orchards in the Pacific Northwest and salmon canneries in Alaska. Many migrated across cities and states for these types of jobs, and some of those places became Filipino districts, where workers lived and socialized. Residents in these districts had to contend with gentrification or redlining laws at the time that prevented them from owning property, which drove them out, Nadal says.

Combating gentrification with ethnic enclaves

Gentrification is an issue that SOMA Pilipinas, San Francisco’s Filipino cultural district, has seen drive down the Filipino population, says Desi Danganan, founder and executive director of Kultivate Labs, which was established in 2016 and focuses on economic development and arts in the district.

Danganan says the creation of the district is seen as a strategy to mitigate income inequality—a widespread problem in San Francisco—that’s tied to tech and redevelopment in the area. He says there was a gigantic drop in the Filipino population in the area starting in the 1990s, from 70 percent to less than 10 percent of the greater population.

Nadal notes that it’s not uncommon for there to be low Filipino populations in Filipino ethnic enclaves as they’ve been driven out for a number of reasons, including redevelopment and housing inequality. Despite low Filipino populations in Filipino ethnic enclaves, there are still a lot of Filipinos who live in those areas, Danganan says, and the Filipino community remains active in those places.

Danganan says that the vision is for SOMA Pilipinas to become San Francisco’s next Chinatown or Japantown. An article suggests that the district could help revive downtown San Francisco.

Danganan says Kultivate Labs is focused on creating a commercial corridor on Mission Street that is already home to anchor establishments, including the Bayanihan Community Center, pop-up Filipino American arts hub Balay Kreative, St. Patrick Church, Kapwa Gardens, and Filipino cultural center Sentro Filipino. A new Filipino-inspired sandwich shop opened up on Mission Street this year before finding a new home at a mall. 

Danganan says that while the district isn’t drawing international visitors to learn about Filipino culture at the moment, Filipinos in the San Francisco Bay Area are visiting to learn about themselves. “That’s a step in the right direction,” he says. “Then over the years, we'll become that Chinatown, Japantown, especially once we start filling out this commercial corridor.”

Filipino Americans are already seen

Further north, Seattle’s Filipino Town is located in the city’s Chinatown-International District.

Unlike Historic Filipinotown and SOMA Pilipinas, Seattle’s Filipino Town enclave hasn’t been officially designated as a district through legislation. But in 2017, the city of Seattle amended an existing resolution to mention “historic Filipino Town” as a neighborhood in the city’s Chinatown-International District.

Joël Tan, executive director of the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, says that while an official designation of a district is important, what’s more important is having more Filipino American families, businesses and cultural activities in the Chinatown-International District and across Seattle.

“It is about promoting and advancing the creative upswell. It's about ensuring that Filipino American culture and contributions are really ubiquitous—like they're more and more just showing up and normalizing rather than any big grand gestures of recognition,” he says. “We realize that that will happen more and more once there's more activity.”

The approach community leaders and organizers are taking in Filipino Town, Tan says, is forging a future carrying an assumption that the Filipino community is already seen and that its visibility is something to be celebrated, rather than fighting against erasure or for visibility.

One of those victories was an artist residency program with Filipino traditional tattoo artists. “We're just going to create more and more events and opportunities for people to feel that Filipino American joy and goodness in depth,” Tan says.

A hopeful future for Filipino cultural districts

Geaga-Rosenthal, the longtime resident of Historic Filipinotown, says one of her concerns about the future of the district is the displacement of longtime, low-income residents in the area.

“That's really one big challenge,” she says. “The whole city is involved in that, so it's not just this district that's addressing that dilemma.”

Another fear she has is that if monuments aren’t protected, the public won’t know about their importance, which could lead to vandalization and the use of the areas for other purposes like a skate ramp.

Still, she’s optimistic about what the future holds.

“It’s truly exciting to see the vision, and I think the collaborative spirit has come from that wellspring,” Geaga-Rosenthal says. “And the older generation is probably taking note that, ‘Oh, wow, these young people can get it together.’”