August 19: Our Migration Journey to the USA 🇵🇭➡️🇺🇸
August 19: The Day We Left the Philippines
A nine-year-old boy, his Lola, and his sister walk across a Manila tarmac — toward Chicago, toward their parents, toward a new life. Fifty years later, the journey still shapes everything.
Every August 19, I go back to that tarmac.
I am nine years old. My Lola Rosita has our papers. My sister Joy is beside me, probably already calculating whether she would be carsick before we ever reached Chicago. And somewhere ahead of us is a Northwest Orient jet that is going to take us from Manila to Seoul, then Anchorage, then Illinois — to our parents, who had left a year earlier to set the table for the rest of us. I did not know, standing on that runway, that I was walking into the rest of my life.
The date was August 19, 1976. I was leaving my Marikina, my titas and titos on Carmine Street, my aunties and uncles in Malate Manila, the train rides to Bicol to visit Lolo Marciano's family in Ligao and Lola Rosita's family in Oas. I was leaving the country that made me Filipino. And I was also, finally, reuniting with my parents. At nine years old, that math was complicated.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled the quota system that had limited Filipino immigration to a trickle. By 1976 — the year this flight took off — Filipinos were one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States, settling in California, Hawaii, Illinois, and beyond. That tarmac in Manila was crowded with families like ours.
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Layunin — lah-YOO-nin
Purpose; goal; the reason you go. Every kababayan who has ever packed a balikbayan box, boarded a plane to a country they'd never seen, or held a child's hand on a tarmac — they all had a layunin. Ours was reunion. And a new beginning.
The Flight Itself
Northwest Orient Airlines was the carrier of choice for thousands of Filipino families in the 1970s. The airline had pioneered Pacific routes after World War II, and by 1976 it operated regular service from Manila — often through Seoul or Tokyo, then Anchorage, Alaska — into the continental United States. That Anchorage stopover was part of the great polar routing of the era, a logistical reality most passengers experienced as a long, cold, disorienting layover.
I remember the journey as an odyssey in the truest sense — not because it was dramatic, but because each stop felt like a different world. Manila to Seoul. Seoul to Anchorage. Anchorage to Chicago. The geography of that trip is still mapped somewhere in my body.
What made the flight possible to capture — literally — was Tito Sonny. Marciano Perseveranda Jr. worked for PAGASA, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, formerly the Philippine Weather Bureau. His position gave him access through and around the airport that ordinary civilians did not have. He was the one who walked out onto the tarmac and photographed the three of us — Lola Rosita, Joy, and me — mid-stride toward the plane. The handwriting on the back of that photo is Lolo Marciano's. He was sharp until the very end, though he was off by three days on the date. And yes — he unwittingly wrote down the birth date of my future wife.
What We Left Behind
Our house was at #9 Carmine, SSS Village, Marikina, Rizal. Lola Rosita, Lolo Marciano, and Tita Gigi were just down the street at #34 Carmine. Mom's side — the Reyes family — was in Malate, Manila, reachable by public transit, though the ride usually made Joy sick. School was Marist School. I had started playing chess at age five. I was already reading about Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio from the bookshelves of my titos and titas — not because school assigned it, but because it was there and I needed to know.
I left all of that on August 19, 1976. My parents — Ronald and Lualhati — had gone ahead to the U.S. a year earlier, on September 27, 1975, to secure the foundation before sending for us. That was a year of growing up I did not fully understand until I became a parent myself. They had left without their children so that the transition would be easier when Joy and I arrived. That sacrifice is not a small thing.
Chicago From Point Zero
My parents and Tito Narding (Leonardo Rivera Sr.) picked us up. Tito Narding was driving a Cutlass Supreme. We were brought to Warren Barr Tower, 856 W Nelson Street, in Lakeview — our home for the next three years. I loved Chicago from point zero.
The city made sense to me in a way I couldn't have articulated at nine. Chicago was a city of immigrants and ethnicities. Everyone acknowledged that they, or their ancestors, came from somewhere else. That normalized something I didn't yet have the language for: the feeling of being from two places at once. St. Sebastian Catholic School, International Day, the proximity to downtown, the winters I still miss — all of it became part of who I am.
Joy and I made a pledge when we arrived in America: we would never forget our Tagalog. Fifty years later, I am still holding that line — and building PinoyBuilt to help my own children hold it too.
We left Chicago on June 3, 1979, my dad driving us away in the same white Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. June 8, 1979: San Francisco. California, permanently. But the Chicago years are foundational. They are in the bones of everything I write about diaspora, identity, and belonging.
Why August 19 Still Matters
I am 59 years old now. My children — Veronica, JianCarlo, and Francesca — were born in the United States. They did not take the train from Marikina to Bicol. They did not feel that tarmac under their feet. They did not say goodbye to a country at nine years old. Much of what it means to be Filipino — the history, the language, the kapwa, the reasons we fight and the reasons we endure — they will only inherit if someone writes it down.
That is what PinoyBuilt is. And that is why August 19 gets its own article, every year.
To every kababayan who has a date like this — a departure date, an arrival date, a visa stamp, a tarmac memory — honor it. Write it down. Tell your children. The journey that brought us here is not just history. It is identity. It is layunin.
Sources & Further Reading
- History.com — U.S. Immigration Timeline
- USCIS — Philippine Immigration History
- Pew Research Center — The Rise of Asian Americans
- FANHS — Filipino American National Historical Society
- Family archive: Photograph by Marciano Perseveranda Jr. (Tito Sonny), Manila International Airport, August 19, 1976.
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FOUNDER & EDITOR
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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