Part four of a four-part series. Read parts one, two and three.
When he was young, Julio Peralta learned how to fish. He would walk to the river to look for tilapia, snakehead and sparkling gourami — a quick way to put food on the table.
Peralta grew up during the 1950s in Mapandan, a small town in the Philippines. His parents planted rice and peanuts, crops their lives depended on. At one point, they grew sugar cane too, but Peralta remembers his parents abandoning it because the stalks took an entire year to grow.
“In the barrio, you are either a farmer or a farmer,” Peralta said. “No choice.”
Yearning to be more financially independent, Peralta moved to the U.S. and enlisted in the Navy. He served for over two decades and traveled the world. In the 1980s, he and his family settled in San Diego.
Peralta was following a route familiar to many Filipino families.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, generations of Navy sailors and their families have moved to San Diego from the Philippines seeking work and stability. In many ways, scholars said, those families built the foundations of the Filipino community in San Diego, one of the largest in the U.S. today.
The path was rarely an easy one for many families, who endured discrimination while stationed overseas and long stretches of separation at home. That legacy of service has left some with a complicated relationship to the military — and many others with an enduring sense of identity and pride.
“We owe a lot to the military,” said Felix Tuyay, a professor emeritus at Southwestern College. “Stability, opportunity … that’s basically the legacy of the Navy here in San Diego.”
Decades of U.S. colonial rule
The history of Filipino servicemembers dates back to decades of U.S. colonial rule.
The U.S. took control of the Philippines as a territory in 1898. It was part of a peace treaty with Spain, which had previously colonized the island nation for hundreds of years.
The takeover sparked a brutal war for independence between Filipino revolutionaries and U.S. military forces. Brown University American Studies professor Rick Baldoz said U.S. forces killed as many as 400,000 Filipino people between 1899 and 1902, by some estimates.
“The estimates of the number of Filipino deaths are quite disturbing,” Baldoz said. “I've heard estimates even higher. It's hard to know because they weren't really keeping records of mass atrocities.”
The U.S. government started establishing a civil government and building military bases in the Philippines, said Tuyay. They also started recruiting small numbers of Filipino servicemembers, including Tuyay’s father, who enlisted in the Navy in 1928.
“They set up infrastructure in the cities, the military bases,” Tuyay said. “That's where my dad was able to join the Navy in the Philippines.”
Serving in the Navy, in particular, offered a way for many Filipino people to travel the world and earn a living. But Navy leaders segregated sailors of color, confining most Filipino sailors to basic tasks like working in galleys and mess halls. For decades, the number of Filipino servicemembers in the U.S. military remained low.
Then came World War II, when Japanese forces invaded the Philippines. Over 250,000 Filipino soldiers signed up to fight under the U.S. flag to liberate the country.
Julian Martinez Flor had left the Navy in 1937 after serving for two decades, but was called back into service in his home region of Bicol in the Philippines. According to his son Salvador Flor, Julian rescued two American pilots and was held prisoner by Japanese soldiers before escaping.
“He got a proclamation from President Harry Truman on White House letterhead,” said Salvador Flor, a Filipino American community advocate. “He really was a bona fide hero.”
Others faced torture and war crimes at the hands of Japanese forces. In Bataan, Japanese soldiers forced over 60,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war to march dozens of miles through the heat and humidity, beating and beheading those who couldn’t keep up.
Jimiliz Valiente-Neighbors, a sociology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, interviewed several veterans who survived the walk — now known as the Bataan Death March. She said they endured by keeping together with fellow soldiers from the U.S.
“What I heard is that they would try to stay alive by walking alongside each other, almost leaning on each other,” she said. “That helped them feel part of the American story.”
Betrayed by U.S. leaders
In exchange for their wartime service, Congress promised Filipino veterans benefits and a streamlined pathway to U.S. citizenship.
That pledge was especially meaningful because, just a decade earlier, U.S. lawmakers had passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act — a racist response to fears about the number of Filipino people moving to the U.S. The law laid out a 10-year path to granting the Philippines independence from U.S. rule. It also severely restricted the number of Filipino people who could enter the country.
But after World War II, U.S. officials betrayed their promise.
One place that happened was inside the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to ICE, Baldoz said. Immigration officials there raised anti-immigrant fears about the large numbers of Filipino people who could become citizens.
“Privately, they expressed a lot of concern about the kind of number of Filipinos who might potentially — they would use the term 'flood' into the U.S. — as a result of these generous policies,” Baldoz said.
Quietly, the INS withdrew its naturalization officers assigned to the Philippines, Baldoz said. That left hundreds of thousands of Filipino servicemembers with nowhere to apply for citizenship.
In 1946, U.S. leaders officially granted the Philippines independence with the signing of the Treaty of Manila. That same year, Congress officially revoked its promise of citizenship through a series of laws called the Rescission Acts of 1946.
Each servicemember experienced that betrayal in their own way, Valiente-Neighbors said. She didn’t find out that her grandfather served under the U.S. flag until she visited his tombstone and saw the name of his military unit.
“It wasn't talked about in our family at all,” she said.
Military families build a foundation
After the war, San Diego’s Filipino community began to grow quickly.
That’s largely because of the region’s ties to the Navy, Baldoz said. Despite challenges to pursuing citizenship and ongoing limits on immigration, Filipino sailors were able to move to San Diego in large numbers.
A key part of that was the arrival of many families, said Judy Patacsil, a Filipino Studies professor at San Diego Miramar College.
“Those that were here then brought wives back and started families,” Patacsil said. “And that's when the community, I believe, actually started to grow.”
Families like Patacsil’s and Tuyay’s moved to redlined neighborhoods in southeastern San Diego. They founded two community pillars: the Filipino American Veterans Association and the Filipino American Women’s Club.
The Veterans Association was headquartered in a building affectionately known as FAVA Hall. It was located on Market Street and became the venue for parties, competitions and regional club meetings.
Flor’s father, Julian, served as the association’s first vice president. A plaque on the wall inside the building still bears his name.
“I think everyone would say that FAVA Hall was where our community actually started,” said Flor.
The Women’s Club was founded in 1949, largely by the spouses of servicemembers. Elvira Magsarili, the group’s current president, said they worked to promote Filipino history and culture, holding dances and Thanksgiving dinners for recruits at the San Diego Naval Training Center.
The club was also there to support one another, Magsarili said. When she moved to San Diego in the 1970s, she said other women in the group knew the isolation that came with being married to a servicemember. Magsarili felt that they could speak freely about challenges and solutions.
“It was really important to be among Filipino friends because they understand you; they understand where you come from,” Magsarili said.
Patacsil said those organizations played a key role in carrying Filipino culture and traditions on to the next generation.
“Women are often the cultural carriers,” she said. “I think that that was in part significant to help the community grow.”
A fight for recognition
As the decades wore on and the Civil Rights Movement gained steam, Filipino servicemembers began to fight back against racial discrimination and lack of advancement.
Navy leaders were still segregating many Filipino sailors into steward roles. Magsarili’s husband Restituto was a trained electrical engineer, but she said his superiors forced him to make beds in the captain’s quarters when he first enlisted.
Rudolfo Recaido joined the Navy in 1967. He remembers other sailors criticizing his accent and treating him differently because of his skin color. He felt that he couldn’t push back or his superiors would bar him from promotions.
“Even now, prejudice never go away,” said Recaido, who now lives in El Cajon. “But you have to bear with it.”
It wasn’t until the 1970s that Navy leaders eliminated the steward class amid other civil rights reforms. At the same time, San Diego’s Filipino community was also beginning to grow beyond its military roots.
In 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, which ended strict racial limits on immigration from Asian countries, along with landmark civil rights laws like the Fair Housing Act. U.S. lawmakers also approved measures aimed at reuniting families and incentivizing workers with special skills — nurses, in particular — to immigrate.
"The community starts becoming much more diverse after 1965,” said Baldoz. “Lots of different kinds of people of different backgrounds.”
In the 1990s, Filipino World War II veterans launched a fight for recognition and the benefits that Congress had stripped away.
In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law a compromise of sorts that gave one-time payments to both citizen and noncitizen Filipino veterans. In 2015, lawmakers in D.C. awarded veterans the Congressional Gold Medal.
In San Diego, 10 surviving veterans received the medal, including Flor’s father.
Congress is still debating whether to restore benefits to Filipino veterans who served during World War II. Some veterans are also still fighting to repeal the Rescission Act of 1946, which revoked the promise of citizenship.
‘A Complicated Feeling’
To many, the legacy of the region’s Navy ties has left a lasting and nuanced impact.
Despite the trials they faced, many veterans like Recaido still feel a deep sense of identity in their military service.
“The Navy is the life of my children,” Recaido said recently. “Without the Navy, I am nothing.”
Others with family connections to the military feel more conflicted. Valiente-Neighbors, the Point Loma professor, can’t help but see the military’s connections to the U.S.’s exertion of imperial power around the world.
“I have a lot of friends in the military, so it's a very complicated feeling,” she said. “Thank you for being brave in doing something where it takes you away from your family — but then also there's that — we're part of that empire-building.”
Flor believes it’s had deeper impacts on the San Diego diaspora.
He thinks many families’ reliance on the Navy for work and stability meant they tended to bear injustices quietly rather than becoming politically active and fighting them in the open.
When Filipino farmworkers organized alongside Mexican American civil rights leaders in Delano in 1965, for example, Flor said he couldn’t identify with their struggle — because that wasn’t his experience.
“I think that mentality of trying to fit in has followed our community throughout generations,” he said. “Because it's easy to fit in as opposed to sticking out.”
Patacsil, however, points out that San Diego’s Filipino community does have its own history of organizing for political power. She believes more people are seeing a need again today.
“I think there's more of a sense of, not only do we deserve that respect — we contribute,” she said. “It's our time as well.”
