Who doesn’t have a kababayan in the States?  Or a neighbor or an old friend who’s turned Fil-Am?  The Manila dailies are rife with headlines on Fil-Am heroes, heroines, anti-heroes and victims.  Fil-Am fall in senseless violence in the U.S., or become a source of shame.  Veterans are still embroiled in an epic struggle for justice in Mainland U.S.A., while conversely; medical missions organized by Fil-Ams have become a welcome program in Philippine communities, whether these are born of conscience or cognition of the long-lamented deficiency of leadership in the motherland.

      For most Filipinos, the Fil-Am is the sports icon who has suddenly surfaced by doing us proud in an arena far away, or the athlete or entertainer who has come home to roost.

      Many more Filipino Americans are doing us proud.  All the positive developments concerning the ongoing Fil-Am experience should be brought to the attention of the wide, disparate community, as well as all the relations, friends and countrymen back home – or back where it all started.  At best, this experience of enrichment abroad can be a source of national renewal, an awakening, even. 

    There should be no forgetting.  It would be a great pity if we were to suffer from a kind of Fil-Amnesia.  All the exploits, hardship and successes inherent in defining an uncommon identity, as well a common, collective strength, cannot be allowed to lapse in the generational turnover of remembrance.  What make us essentially Filipino, Filipino American, Filipino Canadian, or whatever else, certainly enhances our eventual sense of distinction and unity as a wonderful, adventurous and determined people.

     It's not surprising that Filipinos would find their way early to America.  After all, close to a third of the United States used to be part of New Spain, later known as Mexico.  But it would be years later before official records of Filipino immigration would begin.  This was shortly after the Philippine-American War, when the United States began allowing waves of Filipinos to enter its shores.  First came the pensionados, government scholars who were trained to impart their newly acquired knowledge to their countrymen.  Then came the migrant workers, farmhands mostly from Ilocos who filled the gap in Hawaiian and Californian labor when the United States imposed restrictions on Chinese and Japanese workers.

     Waves on non-whites alarmed the United States (which itself was still dealing with its own African American issues).  There government eventually passed a series of exclusion acts especially targeting Asians and Hispanics.  Filipinos were in a curious category, because they were nationals of the country but not citizens.  In order to limit the arrival of Filipinos, special laws had be enacted and the status of the archipelago periodically reviewed.  Reducing it to the status of a "possession" officially closed the borders.

     But now and then the borders would open to  received, however grudgingly, medical professionals, and later a trickle of families, navy wives, bi-racial children, veterans, and envitably, illegal aliens.

     Today there are officially two millions Filipinos and Filipino Americans in the United States.  They are considered the fastest growing Asian minority in the country, and they can be found in almost  any field, from government positions to medicine to the arts and even to domestic service.

     For close to a hundred years, theirs has been a history of invisibility.  But now the presence of Filipino Americans in the United States is beginning to be felt.

     Time have changed for the young Fil-Am in search of his roots.  Just years ago, there was virtually nothing for a Filipino American to read about his own culture.  There was no one to turn to.  Some of them went home to the Philippines, hoping to find answers to their impossible hometowns, in new friends, in the shock of the familiar.  And some went back to the States as baffled as ever, feeling neither at home in America nor in the Philippines.

     Motives of immigrations change through generations, but it is safe to say that most first-generation immigrants still come to the U.S. for economic reasons.  Like most ethnic families, they level behind the memory of home and forge a new life in the State, becoming completely absorbed in the struggle for survival and prosperity.  The onus of memory rests on their children and grandchildren, who, under favorable conditions, would have acquired the luxury of reminiscence, nostalgia, analysis, and soul-searching.

     Hopefully, this website could help the youth of our Fil-Am Luisianians look back and see for themselves the great heritage of their parents.