Growing Up Brown
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Growing Up Brown

Memoirs of a Filipino American

Peter M. Jamero

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eBook - ePub

Growing Up Brown

Memoirs of a Filipino American

Peter M. Jamero

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"I may have been like other boys, but there was a major difference -- my family included 80 to 100 single young men residing in a Filipino farm-labor camp. It was as a 'campo' boy that I first learned of my ancestral roots and the sometimes tortuous path that Filipinos took in sailing halfway around the world to the promise that was America. It was as a campo boy that I first learned the values of family, community, hard work, and education. As a campo boy, I also began to see the two faces of America, a place where Filipinos were at once welcomed and excluded, were considered equal and were discriminated against. It was a place where the values of fairness and freedom often fell short when Filipinos put them to the test.""-- Peter Jamero Peter Jamero's story of hardship and success illuminates the experience of what he calls the "bridge generation" -- the American-born children of the Filipinos recruited as farm workers in the 1920s and 30s. Their experiences span the gap between these early immigrants and those Filipinos who owe their U.S. residency to the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. His book is a sequel of sorts to Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, with themes of heartbreaking struggle against racism and poverty and eventual triumph. Jamero describes his early life in a farm-labor camp in Livingston, California, and the path that took him, through naval service and graduate school, far beyond Livingston. A longtime community activist and civic leader, Jamero describes decades of toil and progress before the Filipino community entered the sociopolitical mainstream. He shares a wealth of anecdotes and reflections from his career as an executive of health and human service programs in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Francisco.

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IV

THE ACTIVIST
EXECUTIVE
1970–1995

12 Region X

WE ROUTINELY TOOK ROAD TRIPS WHEN WE LIVED in California. Drives of two hours to visit relatives and even four to six hours for vacations to Disneyland and San Diego were commonplace for our family. However, we had never experienced anything like the trip we took in July 1970, when we drove from Menlo Park to our new home in Bellevue, Washington. The nine-hundred-mile trip in our 1962 Chevrolet station wagon took fifteen hours of straight driving, with time out only to eat, refuel, and take potty breaks. It was the first of many trips we would make between California and Seattle in the next twenty years. Thank goodness the kids were good travelers. The transition to Bellevue went so well that we still had time to take a mini-vacation. We went to Vancouver, British Columbia, a three-hour drive on Interstate 5. Only a few short weeks before, we had crossed the southern terminus of I-5 into Tijuana, Mexico. Now, here we were, crossing the northern terminus of the interstate into Canada.
After a year in academia, I was eager to get to work on my new job. I had yet to meet anyone from the new Seattle regional office and was understandably curious about my coworkers. The pre-employment process, conducted entirely with personnel staff in Washington, D.C., consisted of performing a cursory review of my central office performance and obtaining favorable references from my superiors. I thought it unusual, but also flattering, that my new employers did not even think it necessary to interview me before approving my transfer request. My job description stated that I was to serve as the primary federal representative in the region for welfare, medical assistance, and social service programs authorized by the Social Security Act. I had become knowledgeable and proficient in these programs while working in the Washington, D.C., headquarters and should be able to transfer this knowledge and proficiency to the regional level. Moreover, my former job as bureau chief of Field Operations required regular contact with regional offices in Dallas and San Francisco, which meant I already had a working knowledge of regional operations.
The job description also stated that I would be assigned to one of two state teams in the region. My state team was composed of other program specialists from the programs of aging, vocational rehabilitation, juvenile justice, and mental health plus specialists in personnel, systems, and planning. As a regional assistance payments specialist, I was the only program person, and the only member of an ethnic minority, with headquarters experience in Washington, D.C. Only two other people on the team had federal service experience. The rest came from state or local government or the private sector. I was not exactly sure what working with a state team entailed. However, given my program experience in regional offices, I felt I should be able to make the adjustment.
Of the sixteen staff members on the two state teams, four were ethnic minorities: two blacks, a Japanese American, and me. Top-level leadership at the Social and Rehabilitation Service was all white. No other DHEW region in the country operated under the state team structure. In this experimental approach, team members were responsible for all programs, not just their own primary programs. Experienced team members had the additional responsibility of preparing staff who were new to federal service. Since I was one of only three team members with federal experience, I was expected to train other staff in their programs as well as in my program. Moreover, I was to train the new assistance payments specialist on the other state team. When I pointed out that these additional responsibilities would likely affect my ability to perform my primary duties, I was told that I had to learn to be “a good team member.” Despite this unusual interpretation of my responsibilities, I was not seriously concerned—at least, not initially. I came away from my first day on the job feeling that I must have misunderstood what I had heard from my new employers. Their interpretation of the state team approach seemed far removed from generally accepted management practices.
Other aspects of the transition to the Pacific Northwest went much more smoothly. We celebrated my fortieth birthday soon after our arrival. Many people regard forty as the beginning of old age, but I felt good about turning forty. I still felt young. I was in good health, and so was my family. I had matured as a husband and a father. My career had greatly exceeded my expectations, and my ability to support my family had improved considerably. I remembered how depressed I had been when I turned thirty. Ten years later, I was pleased about the turnaround in my self-assessment. I felt truly blessed.
One of the first things we did after our move was to call our old friend Fred Cordova, who invited the family for a get-acquainted visit. I knew Fred from our basketball tournament days, when he played for the Stockton Padres. The team name was most appropriate for Fred, who spent a year at seminary. We had all thought he surely was going to become a Catholic priest.
Fred and Dorothy lived in a large home in an established Seattle neighborhood adjacent to the beautiful Arboretum. We immediately felt comfortable in their presence. They were warm and outgoing, and their mannerisms reminded us of our Filipino American friends in California. Their experiences and attitudes were similar to ours. Their eight children were roughly the same ages as our kids, and the two sets of children hit it off right away. Fred and Dorothy seemed equally comfortable with us. They asked Terri and me to come to a meeting at their home to discuss plans to support a Filipino candidate for political office. They also alerted us to an invitation our kids would soon be receiving to join Filipino Youth Activities (FYA) of Seattle, an award-winning drill team. These two invitations marked the beginning of my twenty-year involvement with mainstream politics, the Filipino community, FYA, and the Young Turks, the group of Filipino Americans who became our closest friends in Seattle.
Terri and I joined the group that met at the Cordovas’ to consider supporting first-time candidate Tony Baruso, who was running for state representative. (Baruso later became infamous for his conviction and subsequent imprisonment for the 1982 murders of anti-Marcos activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes.) A native of the Philippines, Baruso was well known in Filipino community circles but had virtually no name recognition in the district he aspired to represent. He also had little in the way of people or financial resources. Winning the election was a long shot, but the small group that met that evening decided to mount a belated campaign on behalf of the Filipino political unknown.
I was impressed with the caliber of the group’s members. Fred, the eloquent information officer at Seattle University, had written several articles on Filipinos that had been featured in Seattle’s two daily newspapers. Dorothy, the eldest daughter of the Laigo family, with close kinship ties to the Filipino community, was the highly intelligent and assertive board president of FYA. Bob Santos, the gregarious executive director of an agency that provided tutoring services to inner-city youth, was the most visible member of the group because of his highly publicized arrests in civil rights demonstrations. Andres “Sonny” Tangalin, an intense educator originally from Chicago, had worked closely with anti-discrimination organizations. Roy Flores was the analytic director of the Ethnic Cultural Center at the University of Washington. His street-smart brother Larry, a recent graduate of the university, had strong ties with student activists and neighborhood youth. Tony Ogilvie, the group’s young, bright, energetic idea man, was assistant director of minority affairs at Seattle University. Dale Tiffany, a soft-spoken Flathead Indian who was married to Dorothy’s sister Jeannette, brought organizational skills honed during his years in a variety of business settings. Jeannette Castilliano Tiffany was key to the group’s multimedia communications.
After learning of my experience as a federal official and my knowledge of various funding streams, the group asked me to join in its activist effort. Politics had long stirred my competitive juices. Besides, politics was another way of leveling the playing field. I did not hesitate to accept the invitation. As impressive as the group may have been, however, it was totally inexperienced in political campaigning. No one had ever participated in a campaign. This was clearly a grassroots effort, a maiden voyage in the rough seas of local politics. Despite our best efforts, Baruso lost the election.
An election may have been lost in 1970, but a core group of politically active Filipino Americans came together for the first time. The group represented a variety of strengths and access to resources. The Baruso campaign was the first sociopolitical activity in which the group focused its collective knowledge, professional skills, and community networks on a Filipino American issue. The seeds of the group’s activism actually were sown much earlier, during the civil rights decade of the 1960s. Individual members of the group marched and demonstrated in support of causes that at the time concerned other ethnic groups. Their participation gave them valuable lessons in tactics and strategies for dealing with mainstream America. More important, Filipino American participation in the civil rights movement provided the community with early visibility and lasting credibility in working with Seattle’s major ethnic minorities—black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. Now, group members wanted to move Filipino community concerns onto center stage in Seattle. The next twelve years would see them play a major role in bringing the Filipino community into Seattle’s sociopolitical mainstream.
As impressed as I was with these activists, I was almost as impressed with Seattle’s Filipino community. Unlike communities I had known in California, Seattle’s Filipino community appeared to be more united, without a history of regional and petty jealousies. I do not know if this was due to its geographical isolation, in the northwestern corner of America, or to the predominance of one Filipino group in the community. (Seattle had a preponderance of Ilocano-speaking Filipinos rather than a multiplicity of regional groups, as was true in other West Coast communities.) Whatever the reason for the phenomenon, Seattle’s Filipino community appeared to be unusually united. My new activist friends, aware of past squabbles, were surprised to hear my assessment. I explained that while there may have been squabbles, these did not appear to result in chronic divisions within the Seattle Filipino community as they often did in California.
The relative cohesiveness of the Seattle Filipino community was surprising, considering that its patterns of settlement and growth were not significantly different from those of other West Coast Filipino communities. The 1901 U.S. Census reported only 17 Filipinos in the entire state of Washington. Beginning in 1906, the Philippine government sent a small number of pensionados to the University of Washington to study, and a few elected to remain in Seattle. Shortly after the meeting at the Cordovas’, I was introduced to Dr. Trinidad Rojo, one of the original pensionados. Dr. Rojo confirmed that the Filipino population, like other Filipino communities on the West Coast, had remained flat for the next few decades. During the 1920–30s, however, the importation of cheap labor, predominantly men, to work in agriculture and the Alaskan canneries, contributed to an unparalleled growth in the number of Filipinos in Seattle. According to the 1930 census, there were 1,653 Filipinos in Seattle, up from the minuscule number reported in earlier censuses. After the end of World War II, brides of Filipino soldiers serving in the U.S. Army began arriving along with descendants of white and black soldiers of the Spanish-American War accompanied by their mixed-race families. This postwar immigration was the first time that a significant number of women arrived in Seattle. War bride families became a notable segment of the Filipino community. Liberalized immigration laws of 1965 continued to facilitate a rapidly growing number of new immigrants to Seattle. By the time of my 1970 arrival, the Filipino population had grown to 5,823, and second-generation Filipinos, such as my new activist friends, were beginning to assert themselves within the community.
Fresh from the excitement of the Baruso campaign, our small group of activists decided to run a slate for election to the Filipino Community Council, the governing body of the umbrella group Filipino Community of Seattle, Inc. (FCSI). There is an old saying among Filipinos, that if you put two Filipinos together, you create an organization. Seattle was no exception. Under FCSI, there were thirty-five organizations and clubs, organized largely according to regional origins in the Philippines. This number represents one organization for every 166 Filipinos—man, woman, and child—in Seattle. If we include non-FCSI organizations, the ratio becomes even greater. The FCSI had historically concerned itself with typical Filipino community activities, such as queen contests, and keeping current on events in the Philippines. Recently, however, it had begun to discuss social needs, especially concerns for the elderly. Our small group believed we had the expertise and an opportunity to make a difference. We also had built-in access to the FSCI through Fred and Dorothy Cordova. Because of their close kinship ties to many members of FSCI, they were credible and trusted. Fred and Dorothy’s kinship ties lobbied hard for our slate. We received enough votes for election to the Community Council.
We now had a larger arena in which to push our sociopolitical agenda. One of our first priorities was to establish the Filipino Economic Opportunity Board (FEOB), under the FCSI umbrella, as a strategy to obtain Community Block Grant funds from the City of Seattle. I was elected as FEOB board chair. We were joined in this effort by two more Bridge Generation Filipino Americans—Marty and Dolores Sibonga, publishers of a Filipino community newspaper. Within a year, FEOB received city funding to operate the Congregate Meal Program and the Filipino Elderly Program. These two successful funding efforts solidified our reputation within FCSI. After our success in obtaining funding for Filipino elderly, we were eager to make additional contributions to the community through FCSI. However, FCSI seemed to be satisfied with its new programs and was not interested in pursuing this type of activity. We decided to serve out our terms and then pursue our goals without FCSI.
The name “Young Turks” came from Silvestre Tangalan, FCSI president, who was impressed with the upstart group’s success in obtaining resources from the larger Seattle community. The name seemed to fit. Except for me, the group’s members were all in their thirties or late twenties. It also expressed the activist leanings of the group, whose members not only were progressive but had a record of civil disobedience. Their approach to community advocacy was far different from the conservative efforts of FCSI. For example, Larry Flores and Tony Ogilvie led a student sit-in at the University of Washington that resulted in the establishment of Asian American components within the Ethnic Studies and Equal Opportunity programs. Sonny Tangalin was a vocal member of anti-discrimination groups such as the Coalition Against Discrimination and the Asian Coalition for Equality. For the past few years, Fred and Dorothy Cordova, the inspirational leaders of the FYA Drill Team, had young drill team marchers carry incomplete American flags upside down, as symbols of protest, in parades throughout the Northwest. Bob Santos, executive director of CARITAS, a tutoring program for inner-city youth sponsored by the Catholic Church, was the most visible and insurgent member of the Young Turks. A veteran of civil rights demonstrations, Bob was blessed with a likable and irresistible personality, and his arrests received widespread media attention.
Bob and I hit it off from our first meeting at the Cordova home, when I suggested we “do lunch.” At first, he did not understand what the term meant, but he caught on quickly, perhaps because we found out we both liked our liquor, before and after meals. We became drinking buddies, hanging out at his favorite watering hole, the Gim Ling Restaurant in Chinatown. Sonny Tangalin, who was always ready to philosophize about any subject in his distinctive high-pitched voice, usually joined us. In a few years, Sonny would be vice principal at Franklin High School, while Cheryl, Peter, Julie, and Jackie were students there. Our Gim Ling sessions often included Catholic priest Harvey McIntyre, minus his collar and black shirt; he called this outfit his “shazam” uniform, referring to the comic-book character Captain Marvel. He and Bob were respected members of the Seattle Human Rights Commission. The lone Caucasian member of the Young Turks, Father Mac became a close friend of our family’s, and years later, he would officiate at several of our children’s weddings. Bob’s watering hole became a regular stop for me. But going to Gim Ling was not simply a social activity for us. It also provided a convenient venue where the Young Turks could strategize the next steps on their sociopolitical agenda.
Soon enough, the core group of Young Turks that met at the Cordovas’ was augmented by other like-minded Bridge Generation Filipino Americans. Bob Flor, a thoughtful doctoral candidate in education, provided valuable linkages to the Democratic Party. Our wives—Terri, Evelyn Tangalin, and Angie Flores—added a woman’s perspective to what often was a male-dominated agenda and could always be counted on to perform behind-the-scenes work. From time to time, other Seattle Filipino Americans offered their invaluable skills, talents, services, and access points. They included Mike Castilliano, assistant to the vice president for minority affairs at the University of Washington; Peter Bacho, who went on to a successful career as an author and university professor; Pio De Cano Jr., son of the legendary Seattle labor leader; Val Laigo, Seattle University professor; Frank Irigon, a University of Washington student whose forte was leading nonviolent demonstrations; and the aforementioned Dolores Sibonga, who went on to serve several terms on the Seattle City Council.
Before the year was over, the Young Turks spearheaded another successful funding effort, this time through the federal government. The Department of H...

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