Immigration, Family & the Philippines

The first few lectures that Professor Vo presented were about Manifest Destiny of the Philippines and their situations of labor and immigration between them and the United States. Learning about these events were particularly intriguing to me because first, I am half Filipino and second, I have never really learned the history of my people. So learning about the Filipino-American experience somewhat impacted the way I look at my Filipino side of the family, especially my mom and my Lolo (grandpa in Tagalog).

Although the history between America and the Philippines was not taught to me much in school, I knew a good amount about the Spanish influence on Filipino people. I knew many of the words in Tagalog and Spanish are the same and so are many of the dishes. My mom also told me that my Lola (grandma in Tagalog) spoke fluent Spanish. Other than knowing that, I was not aware of the struggles that Filipinos had to endure trying to enter to United States.

The Labor and Immigration Act of 1965 was an act that “abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immigration policy based on reuniting immigrant families and attracting skilled labor to the United States,” (history.com). Recently, I found out that when my mom’s family wanted to migrate to the U.S., my lolo migrated first because he was an engineer that could easily get a job. Later on, the rest of the family migrated over to reunite with my grandpa, thanks to the Labor and Immigration act of 1965. Now after almost 30 years, many of my family members from the Philippines live here. We do an annual family reunion and over 200 of us normally attend (my grandpa is the youngest out of 9).

Hearing about how Americans viewed my culture and my people back then honestly bothered me. Even today some people have no changed their views on Filipino people. I saw a video on Twitter where a woman was screaming extremely racist comments to a Filipino man by his home (I will leave the link below). But knowing now how Filipinos have contributed to American society and that that we are a strong, smart united people, it makes me extremely proud to be Filipina.

Works Cited:

History.com Staff, "U.S. Immigration Since 1965", 2010, http://www.history.com/topics/us-immigration-since-1965

Video: https://youtu.be/zFKLH4K9aTo