It was the Fourth of July, and crowds had filled the streets of Manila. Planes thundered overhead. Soldiers marched through the Philippines’ capital city, carrying the United States’ flag.
The year was 1946. For half a century, the U.S. had colonized the Philippines. Now, it was granting the island nation independence. In a speech cracking with emotion, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur called it the fulfillment of a decades-long promise.
“America never wavered in that purpose,” MacArthur said. “America today redeems this pledge.”
That moment was far more complicated than MacArthur made it sound. The treaty was the endpoint of a 10-year independence plan that specifically excluded Filipino immigrants from the U.S. Today, it is barely remembered, with many celebrating a different anniversary entirely.
Yet, the decades that led up to that moment, and the ones that followed, would reshape the world — and San Diego County.
Eighty years later, San Diego is home to one of the largest Filipino communities in the nation. The journeys of those families have left a mark across the county, from San Ysidro to Chula Vista, Paradise Hills to National City, Mira Mesa and Rancho Penasquitos.
“It really feels like you can see the movement happening when you trace each decade,” said Josen Diaz, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. “People literally coming to the shores and then ending up making the city their own.”
Two countries tied together
The U.S. took control of the Philippines on the cusp of the 20th century.
The Philippines had been a Spanish colony for hundreds of years. But in 1898, as part of a peace treaty with the U.S., Spanish leaders transferred authority over the country. They struck that agreement even though Filipino leaders had declared independence, sparking a brutal war for independence between Filipino revolutionaries and U.S. military forces.
Some Americans were openly afraid that annexing the Philippines would make all of its residents U.S. citizens.
Rick Baldoz, a professor of American Studies at Brown University, said that was partly because many white Americans saw Filipino people as racially inferior. U.S. news reports from the time depicted them as “uncivilized savages,” he said.
Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court denied citizenship to Filipino residents, creating a new classification called “U.S. national.” Federal courts also banned Filipino immigrants from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens based on their race.
“They owed allegiance to the U.S., but they were not U.S. citizens,” Baldoz said.
In the 1920s and 1930s, young Filipino men began immigrating to the U.S. as laborers.
They were able to travel to the U.S. freely because of their status as U.S. nationals. But they were barred from voting in the U.S. and faced racial segregation in where they could live and work.
The earliest generations were attracted to San Diego because of opportunities to work on farms and in canneries. They began to build communities in places like the South Bay and downtown neighborhoods.
Independence fueled by exclusion
It wasn’t long before Filipinos experienced the rising tide of anti-Asian racism throughout the U.S. during that time.
It was the era of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. Amid an economic downturn and consolidation of wealth by powerful railroad companies, Congress had passed multiple laws aimed at banning Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the country.
Filipino immigrants defied those racial conventions of the time. According to Baldoz, many young men would spend time at taxi dance halls, nightclubs that allowed mixed-race dancing. They would also flout laws against interracial marriage, driving to Mexico or Canada to get married.
Their defiance incensed white nationalist leaders, Baldoz said, who organized campaigns of vigilante violence against Filipino communities across the West Coast. They began lobbying Congress to look for ways to ban Filipino immigrants from the U.S. too.
Those anti-immigrant, or “nativist” activists soon began to focus on a new goal: Philippine independence.
“As long as the Philippines was a colony of the U.S., Filipinos would have the right to immigrate here,” Baldoz said. “So nativists end up switching gears and deciding to focus their efforts on securing Philippine independence as really the only way to achieve their goal.”
In 1934, Congress bowed to the pressure. They passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which laid out a decade-long pathway to independence. It also immediately put severe restrictions on Filipino movement to the U.S.
Baldoz points out that the decision wasn’t only a victory for anti-immigrant activists. Filipino nationalists had long pushed for independence, and the law also had some backing from the Midwest farming industry.
But he argues that the specifics of the law show that the nativists had won out.
“Independence in 10 years … exclusion immediately,” Baldoz said. “So that’s interesting.”
A plan upended by war
World War II upended that exclusion plan as the Philippines swiftly became a major front in the Pacific theater.
On the same day as it attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese government launched a bloody occupation of the island nation. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino people signed up to fight under the U.S. flag to liberate the country. In exchange for their service, Congress promised them a streamlined path to U.S. citizenship.
After the war, the first cracks in the U.S.’s racial immigration restrictions began to emerge.
In 1946, the same year that Congress granted Philippine independence, it also passed a series of laws that challenged racial immigration restrictions. The War Brides Act allowed women who had married U.S. service members overseas to immigrate. The Luce-Celler Act repealed bans on Filipino and Indian immigrants becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.
Despite those changes, movement from the Philippines to the U.S. was still heavily controlled. That’s partly because the U.S. didn’t keep its promise of citizenship.
After the war, federal immigration officials raised the same anti-immigrant fears that U.S. lawmakers had decades earlier: That thousands of Filipino immigrants who had fought for the U.S. would suddenly become citizens.
Baldoz said the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to ICE, withdrew their naturalization officers assigned to the Philippines. That left hundreds of thousands of Filipino service members with nowhere to apply for the status they were promised.
“The U.S. had deliberately made it essentially impossible to apply,” Baldoz said.
Soon, Congress officially revoked that citizenship promise with the Rescission Act of 1946, sparking a long-running civil rights battle for Filipino veterans that continues today.
Generations of change
Despite those ongoing limits on immigration, San Diego was one of the few Filipino communities in the U.S. that continued to grow, largely due to the expanding military presence in the region.
San Diego’s community was able to grow, Baldoz said, largely because it was a major Navy port. In the Navy, Filipino sailors traveled all over the world and had more opportunities to apply for naturalization than soldiers in the Philippines.
“It’s a really unique case in San Diego,” he said. “They sort of occupied a really kind of narrow space of Filipino American life.”
More families started moving into places like National City, San Ysidro and the Paradise Hills neighborhood of San Diego — a hub for Navy families.
"Those that were here then brought wives back and started families," said Judy Patacsil, a professor of Filipino Studies at San Diego Miramar College. "And that's when the community I believe actually started to grow."
Filipino leaders started landmark community organizations, including the Filipino American Veterans Association and the Filipino American Women’s Club.
In the following decades, the U.S. government made sweeping changes that opened doors for many more immigrants from the Philippines.
In 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, ending strict racial limits on immigration from Asian countries. Lawmakers approved measures aimed at reuniting families and incentivizing specialist workers to immigrate.
In the Philippines, the authoritarian government of Ferdinand Marcos also launched an effort to encourage workers to move abroad and send money home, a national strategy to grow the young nation’s economy.
“Many Filipino Americans start sponsoring their family members back home to immigrate to the U.S. to escape some of the political turmoil in the Philippines, as well as economic dysfunction,” said Baldoz.
Across the country, Filipino communities saw new generations of immigrants. Families in San Diego began to move outward, forming community hubs in Chula Vista and northern San Diego neighborhoods like Mira Mesa and Rancho Penasquitos.
Filipino Americans are now the largest Asian American community in San Diego, and the second-largest in California.
‘Echoes from the past’
Today though, few remember the fact that the Fourth of July marks the signing of the Treaty of Manila and a turning point in U.S. and Philippine history.
Instead, many celebrate a different day: June 12, the day that Filipino revolutionaries declared independence for themselves against Spain, making a first decisive move toward national sovereignty.
To Baldoz, that’s in part because many people still see the Philippines as very connected to — and, in some ways, dependent upon — the U.S. They might argue that not much changed because of the treaty, he said.
“For most Filipinos, it's in the rearview mirror,” he said. “It just doesn't sort of register as that important of a thing to kind of take note of now.”
But Baldoz sees strong parallels between the way U.S. leaders described Filipino immigrants at the time of the treaty and the language of the Trump administration today.
“‘They're prone to crime, they are disease carriers, they won't assimilate,’” Baldoz added. “Lots of echoes from the past.”
Last December, White House adviser Stephen Miller took aim at the Hart-Celler Act. In an interview on Fox News, Miller said the U.S. was better off with the racial immigration restrictions of the 1920s.
Diaz, the UC Santa Cruz professor, sees the same thing as Baldoz.
This year, they are teaching a course on authoritarianism and fascism. Diaz said it feels like those types of leaders are on the rise again in different places — in the Philippines, in Korea and here in the U.S.
“They're asking us to contend with our own sort of history lessons,” Diaz said. “And whether we have forgotten it — or what the danger is in forgetting.”
