From "Little Brown Brother" to "Forgotten Asian American": Racial Politics in Filipino Los Angeles

My paper studies the urbanization and social experiences of Filipino Americans in Southern California from the 1930s to the 1970s.  It examines this history under the backdrop of Los Angeles’s development as a “multicultural global city” through the city’s promotion of ethnic enclaves beginning in the 1930s and the shifting social and political formations of Filipino Americans in reaction to this emergence.  Once ghettoized in a “Little Manila” enclave in downtown Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s, Filipino Americans have since been geographically dispersed throughout Southern California’s vast landscape with few distinct neighborhoods that can be deemed as prototypical called ethnic enclaves.

Filipinos, historically one of the largest Asian American ethnic groups in Southern California, have lacked a visible ethnic enclave since World War II.  This has prompted many city officials and other political leaders in Los Angeles to largely ignore Filipino Americans due to their perceived urban “invisibility.”  While many scholars have devised multiple explications as to why Filipino Americans have historically lacked a Filipino enclave since the 1950s and, as a result, lagged behind other communities in terms of political and social visibility, many have inadvertently placed the blame on Filipinos themselves, rendering them as “inadequate” to participate in the American political process.  My research seeks to interrogate such public policies that aim to reinforce the politics of multicultural recognition.  Changes in urban planning, consumer culture, labor practices, and immigration legislation, all rooted in American foreign policy, I suggest, rendered Filipino Americans socially and politically “invisible.” It is this invisibility of Filipino Americans that I further argue contributed to the United States’ disavowal and amnesia of its colonial and neo-colonial domination of the Philippines.