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(This new column is déjà vu for Greg Macabenta. His first byline
in a national publication was in The Manila Times almost half a
century ago. He was barely 16 and a journalism freshman in UST’s
Philets. His professor in News Writing, Joe Bautista, then editor in
chief of The Manila Times, assigned him to cover the visit to the
university of the historian Arnold Toynbee. Macabenta got a
byline and the fabulous sum of ten pesos for his effort.
Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area,
Macabenta owns and manages an ethnic advertising agency, publishes
and edits a Filipino newspaper, and is national vice-chair of the
National Federation of Filipino American Associations, the principal
advocate of Filipino interests in the US. Before moving to America,
he was president and CEO of Advertising & Marketing Associates,
a leading Makati ad agency.)
Some things you’ll never read about in the
history books:
• Natives of Las Islas Filipinas were
crossing the Pacific Ocean to the New World over half a century
before the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic. They were crewmen in the
Spanish galleons that sailed from Manila to Acapulco in the course
of the Galleon Trade, from 1565 to 1815.
• Antonio Miranda Rodriguez, an
Indio-Chino (which was how natives of Las Islas Filipinas were
called), was a Poblador, a member of the expedition that was
dispatched from Mexico to found El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la
Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula—now better known as the seat
of Hollywood and the home of the LA Lakers.
But the marker at Olvera Park, where the names
of the founders of LA are listed, does not include Rodriguez. He
wasn’t present on foundation day because he had to remain in
Loreto, in Baja, California, to take care of his dying daughter.
Two years later, he became the armorer of the
Presidio of Santa Barbara, where he died of an illness. There is a
marker in his honor in the Presidio chapel.
• But for the vagaries of fate and
history, President George W. Bush would not have been a Texan but a
Filipino. You see, the Lone Star State was originally named Nueva
Filipinas by its Spanish colonizers.
Now, Alamo na.
• There is reason to believe that
Filipinos helped Andrew Jackson’s forces fight the British in the
Battle of New Orleans. According to research done by the historian
Carlos Quirino, the Pinoys were crewmen of Jean Baptiste Lafitte,
the pirate who helped Jackson win that pivotal skirmish.
• At any rate, Filipino sailors had a
settlement in the marshes of Louisiana, near New Orleans in the late
1700s. The American journalist and world traveler, Lafcadio Hearn,
came upon the remains of the settlement in 1883 and wrote about it
in the magazine, Harper’s Weekly. He opined that the settlement
had been in existence 50 years earlier.
However, Marina Espina, a librarian at the
University of New Orleans, found evidence that the settlement had
been founded much, much earlier—at about the time of the Louisiana
purchase.
I came upon these and many other interesting
facts, conjectures and, quite possibly, tall tales when my family
and I decided to move to America back in 1986. I wanted to have some
kind of anchor for our existence in that big land. Not being sure
what that anchor would be, I took a chance on doing research in the
library at the US Embassy in Manila.
What I found were articles written by Carlos
Quirino for the Graphic back in the 1930s. Among them was a piece
about the “Manila Men of St. Malo.” These were the small,
brown-skinned sailors from Las Islas Filipinas that Lafcadio Hearn
had written about. They had reportedly been conscripted for the
Galleon Trade, had decided to jump ship upon arriving in Mexico, and
had made their way to the marshes of Louisiana, via the Gulf of
Mexico, to establish the settlement that Hearn had come upon.
Aha! So Filipinos had been in the New World and
in what would become the United States of America much earlier than
the American colonization of the Philippines at the turn of the
century.
You can’t imagine the kind of high that this
gave me. And whenever I told fellow Pinoys about it, a glow of pride
invariably lighted up their faces.
As soon as I had a chance, I went to the Library
of Congress in Washington, D.C., and secured a copy of the original
Hearn article. When I learned about Marina Espina and her research,
I flew to New Orleans to interview her. She also introduced me to
the Burtanog family, whose presence in America went back eight
generations.
The eldest of the clan was Lilian Martinez
Burtanog, past 80 and, according to her, four generations removed
from the first member of her family to go to America, a sailor from
Cebu named Felipe Madrigal.
What struck me was that Lilian’s two children,
being fifth generation and never having seen “the islands,”
meaning the Philippines, declared that they were “Filipinos,”
when I asked them how they identified themselves.
“I’m the only Filipino in the New Orleans
police force,” said one of them.
I couldn’t help telling them about many
FOP’s (fresh off the plane) from Manila who no longer wanted to be
associated with the land of their birth.
At any rate, my fascination with Filipino roots
in America and the dispersal of our people across the seas had
firmly taken hold. I resolved to dig some more and to follow
whatever leads came my way.
These are the things I will write about in this
corner.
From the hazardous journey of sailors on board
the galleons, braving the Pacific Ocean, to the even more dangerous
trek of OFWs across the highways of Iraq and other Middle Eastern
destinations; from the hospitals and clinics all over America and
England, where Filipino nurses are the linchpin of the health-care
system, to the homes of wealthy Europeans and Asians, where the term
“domestic” has come to mean “Filipina”; and from the crowded
one-room apartments in California where aging Filipino World War II
veterans wait vainly for “justice and equity,” to the
schoolrooms in Texas and other states where Filipino teachers are
doing a Thomasites-in-reverse, the saga of the Global Pinoy reads
like an epic soap opera, replete with cliff hangers and comedy
relief.
Abangan ang susunod na kabanata . . .
(Send comments to opinion@manilatimes.net)
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