October is Filipino Heritage Month - Who are the Filipino Americans?

October is Filipino Heritage Month - Who are the Filipino Americans?

Filipino Americans are immigrants to the United States from one of the 7,107 islands and islets that form the archipelago of the Philippines, and their U.S.-born descendants. In the United States, Filipinos are categorized as Asian Americans. This official category is used to refer to people who can trace their ancestry to the peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian sub-continent. However, Filipinos are unique within the Asian groups given the strong Spanish influence in their culture in addition to Chinese and Malaysian influences.

 The Philippine Islands were under Spanish colonial rule from 1565 through 1898. In 1564 Miguel López de Legazpi, acting on behalf of King Philip II of Spain, set off on an expedition to colonize and Christianize the archipelago. He landed in Cebu in 1565, and during the next seven years transformed the Philippines into a Spanish colony and the only Christian nation in Asia. About one hundred years before the arrival of the Spaniards, the religious traditions of Filipinos had been strongly influenced by Muhammadans, also known as Moors or Moros. In fact, even after the Spaniards' arrival, conversion to Christianity was not uniform; the Moors in the southern Philippines successfully resisted Spanish influence for three centuries.


American Control of the Philippines

The Philippines and the United Stated have had a long-lasting, intertwined political history. At the close of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States paid Spain $20 million at the close of the Treaty of Paris, wherein Spain relinquished claims on the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Initially, U.S. military forces controlled only Manila and surrounding geographic areas. Early in 1899, the Philippine-American War began as the United States tried to gain greater control of the archipelago, whose inhabitants had already fought for and declared a Philippine Republic headed by Emilio Aguinaldo. The war ended in 1902. President Theodore Roosevelt's peace proclamation applied to all except the "country inhabited by the Moro tribes," located in the southern lands of the archipelago. Some scholars contend that the Philippine-American War extended unofficially until 1912 or 1913. On 4 July 1946, the United States granted independence to the Philippines, marking the formation of the second Philippine Republic. However, Filipinos and Filipino Americans celebrate Independence Day on 12 June, the date when the Philippines declared independence from Spain in 1898.

There have been four identified waves of Filipino migration to the United States, each marked by a particular sociopolitical context that has shaped both Filipino and American history. The beginning of the first wave was in 1763, although Filipino migration to the United States has been documented as early as 1587, when so-called Luzon Indians landed in Morro Bay, California. The Indians were crewmembers of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza. These early travels by the Luzon are not surprising given that their lands were among the first colonized by Spaniards in the 1560s.

Filipino Migration

In the first wave of Filipino migration, Filipino seamen (Manilamen) in Acapulco crossed the Gulf of Mexico to Barataria Bay in Louisiana in 1763. They established a series of Philippine-style fishing villages and pioneered the dried shrimp industry in America. In 1781, Antonio Miranda Rodríguez, a Filipino, and his eleven-year-old daughter were sent by the Spanish government from Mexico to settle the Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula, later known as the city of Los Angeles. The second wave of migration to America occurred between 1906 and 1935, after the United States had gained control of the islands. It brought students, scholars (pensianados), and workers. More than 125,000 Filipinos migrated to Hawaii to work on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. The Filipino presence in Hawaii continues to be significant. In 1994, Ben Cayetano, Hawaii's fifth governor and the first of Filipino heritage, took office; he was reelected in 1998. Some Filipinos in the second wave of immigration went to labor in the farms of California and canneries of Alaska. This led to the prominent participation of Filipinos in the United Farm Workers, most famous for its 1965 Delano, California, grape strike.

The third and fourth waves of migration follow each other very closely. The third wave began with the end of World War II (1939–1945) and lasted through 1965. These immigrants traveled to the United States mostly to join the U.S. Navy as noncitizens. The fourth wave of migration came with the passage in 1965 of the Immigration and Nationality Act that removed the 1924 national origins quota system. This wave of migration has been characterized as the "brain drain" wave because of the high numbers of Filipino professionals moving to the United States.

Filipinos As a Component of the U.S. Population

Filipino Americans make up 2.4 million of the 11.9 million Asian Americans in the United States. They are the second largest Asian subgroup in America, closely trailing the 2.7 million Chinese Americans in the country. Filipinos provided the largest number of immigrants from any Asian group between 1981 and 1998, bringing over 927,000 new immigrants to the United States during this seventeen-year span. The majority of these immigrants settled in California (47 percent of all immigrants from the Philippines settled there in 1998). In 1999, of the 1.5 million foreign born Filipinos living in the United States, over 61 percent were naturalized citizens. Although the information is scant, available vital and health statistics for Filipino Americans compare favorably to those for other ethnic minorities in America. In 1998, 6.2 percent of births to Filipinas were to teen mothers, 19.7 percent were to unwed mothers (a far second place among Asian Americans to Hawaii's 51.1 percent), 84.2 percent of Filipino American mothers began prenatal care in the first trimester, and 8.2 percent of their children were born in the low birth weight category. These numbers are not surprising, given that the Philippine nation of over 74 million people has similarly low rates of children born to teen mothers (3.9 percent) and born at low birth weight (9 percent) along with high rates of immunization, with anywhere between 71 percent and 91 percent of children immunized for various illnesses. Filipino Americans have higher than national average rates of participation in the workforce, high school graduation, and college graduation. Even though Filipino Americans have over twice the national proportion of three or more household members participating in the workforce, their per capita income is slightly below the national average, although they have below national average poverty rates. Filipino Americans are most notably visible in Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Nevada.

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Bibliography

Bautista, Veltisezar. The Filipino Americans (1763–Present): Their History, Culture, and Traditions. 2d ed. Naperville, Ill.: Book-haus, 2002.

Scharlin, Craig, and Lila V. Villanueva. Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farm Workers Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. "The Asian Population: 2000." Available from http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-16.pdf