Filipino American Faith in Action

Immigration, Religion, and Civic Engagement

Joaquin Jay Gonzalez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814732977
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Filipinos are now the second largest Asian American immigrant group in the United States, with a population larger than Japanese Americans and Korean Americans combined. Surprisingly, there is little published on Filipino Americans and their religion, or the ways in which their religious traditions may influence the broader culture in which they are becoming established.

Filipino American Faith in Action draws on interviews, survey data, and participant observation to shed light on this large immigrant community. It explores Filipino American religious institutions as essential locations for empowerment and civic engagement, illuminating how Filipino spiritual experiences can offer a lens for viewing this migrant community’s social, political, economic, and cultural integration into American life. Gonzalez examines Filipino American church involvement and religious practices in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Phillipines, showing how Filipino Americans maintain community and ethnic and religious networks, contra assimilation theory, and how they go about sharing their traditions with the larger society.

1
Introduction: Calling in San Francisco

One Sunday more than a century ago, an elegantly dressed Peter Burnett and his wife, Harriet, walked two blocks from their home to the Sunday school where their daughter taught. As they crossed the street, a young gentleman respectfully tipped his black top hat as he recognized Burnett, who was the first governor of California. The Bible study groups at the Sunday school were organized by members of the University Mount Presbyterian Church, who came from the wealthy families of European descent living in nearby Portola Valley. In attendance were affluent first- and second-generation Italian migrants as well as a few French and German families. Some had moved to San Francisco from South and North Carolina but still considered themselves citizens of the Old World—Sicilian and Maltese, for example. These families established homes and businesses around San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley. As their numbers grew, and undeterred by the battering of the great 1906 earthquake, they built Saint James Presbyterian Church on Leland Street. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the pull of suburbia and the influx of African, Latino, and Asian imigrants changed the demographic makeup of the busy neighborhood. For various reasons, newcomers to the area were not drawn to Saint James. Attrition took its toll on the once-vibrant church membership, and by the 1980s, Saint James faced closure by the presbytery. By 1990, however, instead of closing its doors, historic Saint James Presbyterian Church was opening them wider to receive an eager group of Protestants from across the Pacific. Unlike the church’s founding members, these new parishioners liked to hear the word of God in a mix of the Philippine dialect Tagalog and English (or Taglish). Many originated from Cavite Province, but in all, the membership represented numerous regions throughout the Philippines. As part of a rehabilitation plan established with the Presbytery, the new Filipino membership recruited the Reverend Jerry Resus, who was then pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Pasig, Metro Manila. Together with a few remaining descendants of the founders of the church, they formed a new multiracial congregation that remains active today.

Currently, the San Francisco Bay Area is home to many thousands of Filipino migrants. Filipino Americans have become the second-largest Asian American population–numbering more than Japanese Americans and Korean Americans combined. Not surprisingly, many existing religious sites have become their spiritual homes. Like the Filipino Presbyterians at Saint James, Filipino migrant Witnesses, Methodists, Baptists, Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) members, Aglipayans, Episcopalians, Mormons, Adventists, and others are also repopulating many of San Francisco’s other declining churches.

From these new spiritual homes, Filipino migrants have built “bonds” and “bridges” with religious, civic, governmental, business, and social institutions within their new San Francisco communities. They have done so by means of (1) transnational influence, (2) adaptive spirit, and (3) intergenerational cohesion.

By showing how Filipino migrant faithful Filipinize elements of the cultural, political, and economic arenas within the San Francisco Bay Area cities and towns in which they have settled, this book will tell a new kind of migration saga—one that is enriched with descriptions of transnational, adaptive, and intergenerational kasamahan (bonding Filipinization) and bayanihan (bridging Filipinization).¹ I will discuss these terms in greater detail later in this chapter.

A New Migration Story

I tell this story about the civic engagement of Filipino migrants through religion from my perspective as a scholar, church member, activist, and migrant. Growing up in the Philippines, I was very familiar with the central role of the church in practically all aspects of life. But I never dreamed that as a parishioner of historic Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, the civic spirit of the church’s Irish Catholic founders (who concurrently served in San Francisco’s city hall) would one day descend upon me and awaken my own civic sensibilities—this time for my new homeland.²

Let us think back to September 11, 2001. On that day, terrorists pierced America’s financial and military arteries, prompting a wave of fear that stimulated anti-immigrant sentiment. Soon thereafter, Congress hurriedly passed the Patriot Act in an effort to protect the United States against further attacks, but at the expense of certain civil liberties. The San Francisco immigrant community acted swiftly to voice its concerns. Encouraged by Saint Patrick’s highly energetic Filipino pastor, Monsignor Fred Bitanga, the Filipino American community became the first ethnic group to take a collective stand on this and other political issues that emerged after the tragedy. After all, Saint Patrick’s had to live up to its role as a voice for social justice, as well as a spiritual fount. As the so-called Vatican of all Filipino American Catholic churches, with Monsignor Bitanga as the figurative “pope,” Saint Patrick’s sees political activism as part of its responsibility to its congregation. One by one, Filipino American, Latino American, Chinese American, Indian American, Native American, Arab American, and African American religious and community leaders, young and old, joined the vigil. They called and prayed for the maintenance of peace, for a stop to violence against Arab and Muslim Americans, and for the United States to take a step back and examine its foreign policies as a possible motivation for the terrorist attacks. Several speakers proposed that America’s hegemonic role in the global economy was a motivating force for would-be terrorists. At the end of the gathering, more than 200 voices joined together in singing John Lennon’s peace anthem “Imagine.” The church was filled with emotion.

As if timed by fate, my cell phone buzzed while I was saying goodbye to the ever-smiling monsignor. The call was from San Francisco’s city hall. Mayor Willie Brown’s appointment secretary was asking if I would be willing to serve on the Immigrant Rights Commission of the City and County of San Francisco. There was no time to think or to pray for guidance about this important request. I looked at the fearless leader of my church. He winked his blessing, and I nodded my head in thanks. So like Governor Burnett of Saint James Presbyterian Church, I, Commissioner Gonzalez of Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, led a life of religious worship and civil service. While performing my volunteer city hall duties, I found other community-focused Filipino migrants like me who belonged to other local churches: the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in the Excelsior District, Saint Francis and Grace United Methodist Church in the Sunset neighborhood, the Salvation Army Chapel on Broad Street, the Sixth Church of Christ the Scientist in ritzy Pacific Heights, the San Francisco Tabernacle Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the Mission District, and the Geneva United Methodist Church on Geneva Street. Like me, some attended services at more than one church and had multiple volunteer and civic duties. The focus of their work included local and “Filipino issues,” such as the rights of Filipino veterans of World War II and employees at San Francisco International Airport, but also national concerns, such as immigration and health care reform. As my list of churches grew, so did my collection of business cards from fellow Filipino migrant faithful who served both God and their new country. Some of them had even run for public office. Others were simply political activists and advocates. I became more intrigued not with the churches’ varying spiritual dogma but with the ways in which Filipinos utilize religious places as new migrants and new Americans, and the influence they are having—as mediated through these places—on the historical, cultural, and political aspects of their San Francisco Bay Area communities. Given the strong ties that many Filipino migrants maintain to their home country, I also became curious about the continuing impact that Filipino migrants in the United States have on their families and hometowns in the Philippines.

From the day of that prayer vigil onward, I began to view the Filipino spiritual experience in San Francisco as a useful lens through which to consider the social, political, and cultural integration of migrants from the Philippines into San Francisco society. Doing so renders visible the crucial but often unseen influence of Filipino migrants on their new homeland. Given the deep-seated and omnipresent religious traditions of Filipinos, I believe that the best places to observe the unique interplay of their integration and influences are the San Francisco church spaces that Filipino migrants have come to occupy. More than simply attending churches in the Bay Area, Filipino migrant groups have actually saved several religious spaces—ranging from modest storefronts to grand architectural edifices—from closure, or else taken them over from earlier migrant Catholic and Evangelical congregations, including German Lutherans, Italian Catholics, Irish Protestants, and many others.

Consequently, this book exposes an important facet of Filipino migration history to the United States. In the chapters that follow, I will discuss the migration of Filipinos to the San Francisco Bay Area in a new way, that is, through several local church sites.

Why Is the Filipino Migrant Religious Experience Important to America?

The Filipino migrants’ sociocultural integration experience, as it occurs through their churches, challenges and builds on two of the most prominent paradigms of American social history: assimilation theory and multicultural theory. Assimilation theory assumes that to do well in American society, migrants have to fully assimilate into the dominant population or blend in with the predominantly European American majority. Multi-cultural theory, however, points out that while this “melting pot model” may be relevant to the assimilation experience of early European immigrants to the United States, it might not adequately represent the experiences of newcomers in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, and particularly minority populations, like African American, Asian American, and Latino American migrants. The Filipino migrants’ integration experience builds on the notion that a melting pot dilutes the cultural particularities that new Americans bring to a diverse, multi-cultural society. Instead, multiculturalism allows the unique qualities of its component communities to emerge, ultimately improving the larger society.

My observations of Filipino migrant faithful from San Francisco align with those of multiculturalist scholars Min Zhou and Carl Bankston. In Growing Up American (1998), they highlight the excellent educational performance of Vietnamese migrant youth in Louisiana, which they attribute to the strong kinship support structure and network provided by Vietnamese American neighborhood-based organizations. Zhou and Bankston argue that the nonassimilation of Vietnamese led to their societal mobility and success. According to their findings, the indigenous social capital created within the Vietnamese community is what enables mobility for those who do not assimilate. Interestingly, the local church had been the central avenue for the creation of social capital in the community studied by Zhou and Bankston. However, they did not examine closely the site’s spritual dynamics, but instead only addressed certain social outreach activities, such as helping with homework. Similarly, the multiculturalist writings of Asian American scholars like Yen Le Espiritu (2003) in Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures and Rick Bonus (2000) in Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space, among others, illuminate how churches have been used as sites to meet and recruit key informants and interviewees from the Filipino migrant communities in order to expose interactions among themselves and others, in community centers and cultural events as well as at their homes and family gatherings. They were not focused on the significance of the church itself.

In their pioneering works that question the assumptions of assimilation theory, Zhou, Bankston, Espiritu, Bonus, and others analyze the inwardly focused ethnic bonds that Asian American migrants have developed through the community centers, hometown associations, Internet Web pages, ethnic enclaves, and colorful festivals that they have established in the United States. But because these scholars were not focused on examining deeply the connections between church and civic engagement, their writings do not tell the story of the many outwardly focused, action-oriented, civic “bridges,” and the ways in which these connections have allowed migrants to span two homelands, blend American and Asian cultures, and form alliances between young and old. This omission in the foundational writings on Filipino migration provides an opportunity to examine the church sociologically, especially the ways in which it facilitates the integration of migrants into the United States and enables them to influence their new American homeland. This analysis reconciles some of the diverging assumptions between the assimilationist and multiculturalist paradigms by showing how new Filipino migrants have managed to align with the rest of American society without having to disengage themselves from either their Filipino cultural practices or their families and communities in the Philippines. These two competing views are the real philosophical underpinnings of the immigration debate in the United States. Understanding their divergence and then recasting U.S. immigration policy to reflect this conciliatory “Filipino American way,” spurred by Filipino American churches, provides a possible way of working out this long-standing U.S. sociopolitical concern.

The steady influx of Filipino Christian migrants over the past century into the San Francisco Bay Area has increased attendance at local Christian churches, many of which had been mostly or entirely abandoned by earlier Christian migrants. These American Christian churches and their congregations have helped Filipino migrants cultivate allegiances to their new homeland. But these churches are also learning that to many new Filipino members, being faithful to God in America and becoming an American Christian does not necessarily mean discarding either their Filipino ways of worshiping or their obligations to their Philippine homeland. Observing a mix of first- and second-generation Filipino American migrant faithful in San Francisco kiss and then wipe the foot of a Filipino saint in church prior to joining the civil rights marches on Market Street draped in a Philippine flag testifies to the fact that it is certainly possible for migrants to integrate into America while asserting their ethnicity, protesting human rights abuses in the Philippines in the name of the U.S. War on Terror, or exposing the environmental exploitation of U.S. corporations, since this is what American liberal democracy is all about. Having recognized the necessity and benefits of catering to this new migrant group, dominant institutional structures in California like government and corporations have developed services and products tailored to Filipino American taxpayers and consumers. Moreover, although some may participate in mainstream American organizations such as Lions Clubs, the Red Cross, United Way, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), a large majority of Filipino Americans, especially first-generation immigrants, tend to connect to American society primarily through their California-based Filipino hometown, religious, political, business, social, alumni, and professional veterans’ groups, as well as their Filipino consulates, casinos, groceries, bingo tournaments, restaurants, media, parades, rallies, fund-raisers, auctions, dances, beauty pageants, concerts, nightclubs, and fiestas. It is through these familiar institutions that Filipino migrants contribute to American society. To examine this phenomenon more intensely, I focus in this book on an institution that earlier studies have failed to recognize adequately—the church. San Francisco’s many spiritual sites treat their Filipino American worship communities as barangay residents. A barangay is a traditional Philippine village, barrio, district, or neighborhood. A barangay is composed of family clusters and is considered to be the smallest political unit in the Philippines. A group of barangays makes up a town, city, or municipality. Filipinos see their church as a key community gathering space in their new American barangay. Churches therefore become sites where the familiar social structure of the barangay can be practiced. Seen in this way, church spaces are the most obvious places in the San Francisco Bay Area to observe Filipino migrants cultivating their ethnicity while at the same time becoming American citizens, consumers, volunteers, taxpayers, and voters.

Broadly speaking, the influx of Filipinos is subtly Filipinizing segments of the larger American society. Filipinization refers to varying degrees of Filipino cultural, political, culinary, financial, or spiritual influence, support, ownership, or control. There are several notable examples of the Filipinization of American media and popular culture, both in the San Francisco Bay Area and nationally. The podcast section of the online San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) includes the popular “Pinoy Pod.” One can watch Filipino news, talk, and drama on KTSF 26 all over the San Francisco Bay Area. Meanwhile, televised twenty-four hours a day all over the United States and Canada is TFC (The Filipino Channel). In music, the Grammy Award–winning hip-hop group the Black Eyed Peas have included two Tagalog-language songs in their last two chart-topping albums, courtesy of Allan Pineda Lindo, a member of the group who is also Filipino. When disc jockeys throughout the San Francisco area play the Black Eyed Peas’ “Bebot” and “APL Song” on popular radio stations, they not only increase the circulation of Tagalog but also help to mainstream it in this American locale. Of course, it also helps that many San Francisco DJs are themselves Filipino. This demographic particularity of the San Francisco Bay Area prompted the Oakland Raiders football team to develop a Tagalog-language page on its Web site (www.raiders.com/Tagalog) for its thousands of Filipino American and Philippine-based fans. On national television contests, Filipino Americans called in en masse to help their kababayan (country-woman/countryman), singer Jasmine Trias, become a finalist in FOX’s highly rated American Idol and helped propel Filipina American dancer Cheryl Bautista-Burke into the winner’s circle twice in ABC’s hit show Dancing with the Stars. These singular examples from popular culture reflect the presence of a large and influential Filipino American population. English training in the Philippines has always enabled many Filipinos to enter the American workforce with relative ease. A recent trend has been for districts with teacher shortages to recruit teachers from the Philippines for their public schools. School systems in California, New York, Maryland, Florida, and Nevada are currently among those hosting migrant elementary, middle school, and high school teachers from the Philippines. Many other Filipino Americans have served and continue to serve the United States in the uniformed services—military, police, and fire. And, of course, one is hard-pressed to find a hospital in the United States without Filipino doctors or nurses.

The extensive presence and influence of Filipinos nationwide has prompted the development of specialized media. Philippine and Filipino American newspapers and magazines are now often found side by side with mainstream and ethnic media outlets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Honolulu, and New York. Inside these mass publications are gigantic Tagalog-language advertisements enticing Filipino consumers to switch to AT&T and send money back to the Philippines through Western Union. Given the pervasiveness of Filipinos in the United States, it is not surprising that Tagalog has become t...