A Short History of How Filipinos Migrated to Los Angeles

Lorenzo Mutia shares the history of how Filipino families like his ended up in Los Angeles. Lorenzo is an educator, community organizer, and proudly reps the San Fernando Valley. I really appreciated his insights on how migration and displacement shapes a community.

Tiên Nguyễn: What is your favorite story to tell about Asian American history?

Lorenzo Mutia: I always like to tell people the history of Filipinos in Los Angeles. Filipinos are integral to the history of this city and where we settled in L.A. is very reflective of the things that we're experiencing as a community to this day.

Ah, interesting! And doesn’t L.A. have the largest population of Filipinos outside of the Philippines?

That’s right. Actually, both Los Angeles and Southern California as a whole, have the largest population of Filipinos outside the Philippines. 

Migration en masse first happened after the U.S. colonized the Philippines. So Filipinos had the chance to migrate initially with very little restrictions around the early 1900s. A lot of these folks are single men, bachelors. Some of them end up working low-wage jobs like in hotels closer to the city center and as farmer workers out in the outskirts of L.A. Some of them were even university students.

Then immigration quotas were established in the 30s and 40s. So the next wave of Filipinos came post-WWII. Some of them came as spouses of American G.I.s. Some of them served in the American military and were able to bring their families that way.

But it was really after 1965, with the Immigration Act of 1965, that immigration opened up as we then knew it, and established the family reunification model that came to define immigration to the United States for decades. That idea of chain migration comes into play. For example, your brother migrates, they bring their parents, the parents bring the rest of the kids, and so on and so forth. That's how my father migrated here. 

The thing with the Filipino community is that our history, and the Filipino story, you could argue, is defined by displacement. At least the postcolonial story. We were displaced from the Philippines because of the lack of economic opportunity and U.S. colonialism, so many of us ended up in places like L.A.

Then we try to re-establish ourselves. We were established first in what is now Little Tokyo, another refuge for displaced people. And then we were displaced by, you know, things like the construction of Los Angeles City Hall to the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, which used to have a thriving neighborhood, but a ramshackle one by that point, because the wealthier folks who had lived there before had moved away from that place.

By the time urban renewal in the 50s and 60s comes around, they do “urban renewal”—slum clearance, essentially—which displaces lots of working-class people from that area, including Filipinos.

And then they set up in what we now know as Historic Filipinotown, along Temple and Beverly streets outside of downtown L.A., and even then they could not catch a break. Some were further displaced by the construction of the 101 freeway.

My family ended up in the San Fernando Valley and our own little Filipino town of sorts in Panorama City. 

I really resonate with what you said about your history being defined by displacement. I feel that is a defining feature of the Asian American experience. Why do you love sharing this story of Filipino migration?

For me, personally, it's like trying to figure out, both literally and figuratively, what is my place in the world? That's why I took up Filipino migration as something I wanted to study and do research on during my masters in ethnic studies.

It informs the work I do as an organizer and how I want to contribute to the world. Even as a teacher, I teach in the neighborhood I grew up in, and we’re seeing migrant Filipino youth who are straight from the Philippines. I mean, some of them came in the last couple of months, you know, it's still ongoing. 

So I think it's me who's trying to grapple with that question, especially as a Filipino who grew up in the suburbs. You feel there's some level of alienation. You feel this sense of separation. The houses are kind of farther apart, you don't have this experience where you see people every day, when you're on the street walking from here and there. We're kind of living in our little bubbles.

Once you grow up and get out of that bubble, more questions, at least for me, popped up.

In one sense, we migrate for a better life, which is true. We frame it that way, you know, to give ourselves a sense of agency. And it's important to have that kind of method of coping. But I also think it’s true that we weren't able to stay where we were for a myriad of systemic reasons.

Thank you for sharing, Lorenzo! Could you leave us with any recommendations for an Asian American history book or film?

I’m looking at a book on my shelf called Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries by Yen Le Espiritu. It’s definitely a more scholarly work from the early 2000s. But it still has a lot of applicable things about how Filipino Americans have complex relationships with the Philippines despite being away from the land. The book explores what the implications of that are, and how U.S. neocolonialism affects us in the Philippines before we migrate. I also want to shout out Filipinos in the San Fernando Valley by Joseph Bernardo, a book that just came out that I’m in, as well as numerous Filipino migrant organizations! It shows how our Valley-based community developed over time from the early 1900s onward, with numerous pictures collected from public and personal archives.