The Historian Who Saved Stockton's Memory: The Legacy of Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
The Historian Who Saved Stockton's Memory: The Legacy of Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
Born on this day in 1972, Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon proved that local community memory could rewrite American history. Through her scholarship, activist preservation, and devotion to Stockton's Little Manila, she gave the manong generation a permanent place in the national archive.
Today would have been Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon's 54th birthday. She was born in Stockton on August 17, 1972 — one day, as it happens, after my late wife Tess, born August 16 of that same year. I never met Dr. Mabalon. But since I started PinoyBuilt, I've kept coming back to her work, because she did something this whole project is trying to do in its own small way: she took a community's memory and insisted it counted as history.
Dr. Mabalon died suddenly on August 10, 2018, five days before what would have been her 46th birthday, while vacationing with her family in Kauai. She was 45. In the ten years before that, she had already permanently changed how Filipino America understands itself.
Little Manila in Stockton was, for decades, the largest community of Filipinos living outside the Philippines. Highway construction and urban redevelopment demolished most of it by the late 1960s — the same decade many manongs had spent their whole working lives trying to build a home there.
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Kasaysayan — kah-sai-SAI-yan
History — but rooted in saysay, meaning or significance. Dr. Mabalon's own framing of her work: kasaysayan isn't a list of dates. It's the story that makes a people's experience mean something.
From the South Side to Stanford
Mabalon was raised on Stockton's South Side, part of a large, close-knit Filipino American family. Her grandfather, Pablo "Ambo" Mabalon, ran the Lafayette Lunch Counter, a gathering place in the Little Manila district and one of the neighborhood's longest-surviving Filipino-owned businesses. Her father was a Filipino guerrilla during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines — one of the thousands of veterans whose wartime service the United States spent decades failing to fully recognize.
She graduated from Edison High School — Class of 1990, where she edited the school paper and led the Asian Club — then attended San Joaquin Delta College, where she edited the student newspaper and worked part-time for the Stockton Record. From there she went to UCLA, earning a B.A. in History with a specialization in Asian American Studies (magna cum laude, 1994) and an M.A. in Asian American Studies (1997), with a thesis on the Pinay pioneers of pre-war Stockton. She completed her Ph.D. in History at Stanford in January 2004, under advisers Gordon Chang, Albert Camarillo, and Anthony Antonio. Her dissertation, "Life in Little Manila: Filipinas/os in Stockton, California, 1917–1972," would become the spine of the book that made her name.
She joined the San Francisco State University History Department faculty in 2004 and was tenured as an Associate Professor, teaching Asian American history, immigration, and Filipino American Studies until her death.
Fresh Out of College, They Went Home to Fight
In 1999, newly graduated and barely into her twenties, Mabalon returned to Stockton with her friend Dillon Delvo. What remained of Little Manila — a handful of buildings on Lafayette and El Dorado streets — was still being erased. That year the city cleared another historic block for a gas station and a fast-food lot. Mabalon and Delvo co-founded the Little Manila Foundation to stop the rest of it from disappearing.
It worked, at least in part. Their advocacy helped push the city to halt further demolition and led, in 2003, to the Little Manila Historic Site's listing among the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Most Endangered Historic Places — a designation that put a nearly-erased four-block Filipino district on the same national map as sites most Americans have actually heard of.
The Book: Little Manila Is in the Heart
Mabalon's 2013 book from Duke University Press, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California, is the reason her name reaches historians who never set foot in the Central Valley. Built from oral histories, newspapers, family photographs, and her own family's story, the book argued something that hadn't been argued with this much evidence before: that Filipino Americans in Stockton weren't passing through as migrant labor. They were building a city within a city — with its own economy, its own social halls, its own politics — under conditions almost none of them chose.
It's worth naming the book she was answering. Carlos Bulosan's 1946 America Is in the Heart is the canonical account of the manong generation's arrival in this country — a book about violence, itinerancy, and the terror of being unwanted. Mabalon never disputed that terror. She expanded the frame around it: despite everything, this generation built homes, and the women of that generation — often left out of the Bulosan-centered narrative entirely — did much of the building.
The book was well received in the field, earning an honorable mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award in 2014. It followed her earlier collaboration with the Filipino American National Historical Society, Filipinos in Stockton (Arcadia Publishing, 2008), and preceded a companion volume, Filipinos in San Francisco (Arcadia Publishing, 2011).
Restoring Larry Itliong to the Record
Mabalon's last major project reached a younger audience. Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong, co-written with Gayle Romasanta and illustrated by Rich Conde, tells the story of the Filipino labor leader who helped launch the 1965 Delano grape strike — the strike history books spent decades crediting to Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association alone, leaving out that it was Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, made up largely of Filipino manongs, who walked out first and invited the NFWA to join them. The book was published by Bridge and Delta Publishing in October 2018, two months after Mabalon's death.
What's Named for Her Now
The formal honors came fast, and they kept coming. During her career, Mabalon received the UCLA Pilipino Alumni Association's Distinguished Young Alumnus award (2003), the Community Service Award from Filipinas Magazine (2004) and from Legionarios del Trabajo (2005), and recognition in 2013 as one of the 100 Most Influential Filipinas in the World by the Filipino Women's Network. In 2016 she received the Community Service Award from Asians and Pacific Islanders in Historic Preservation, and in 2018 — her last year — the Mid-Career Award from the Filipino Section of the Asian American Studies Association.
After her death, San Francisco State established the Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon Memorial Scholarship in History, and the California State University system posthumously awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. In October 2022, San Joaquin Delta College — where she'd once edited the student paper — renamed its largest lecture hall, the West Forum, as the Dawn Mabalon Forum, making her the first Filipina so honored on that campus. A portrait was formally unveiled there in 2025.
Little Manila Rising, as the foundation she co-founded is now known, still runs after-school programs teaching Filipino history and culture out of the neighborhood she fought to save. In 2020, in direct response to her passing, the organization launched DAWN — Decreasing Asthma Within Neighborhoods — a community health initiative addressing the same South Stockton air quality her own family had lived with for generations.
Why This Matters for the Diaspora
Before Mabalon's scholarship, most American textbook treatments of Filipinos amounted to a paragraph about farm labor. She mapped out something denser: the urban, civic, and political life of a community that once held the largest Filipino population outside the Philippines itself, and did it by treating oral history and neighborhood memory as legitimate archival evidence — not folklore to be footnoted around real history, but the real history itself. That's the decolonial move underneath all of it: refusing to accept that only growers, developers, and city planners get to be the ones who made Stockton what it is.
For a site like this one, built explicitly as a legacy archive as much as a public guide, Mabalon's career is close to a working manual. She showed that saving a family's memory and doing rigorous scholarship were never in tension — they were the same project, done right.
Sources: SFSU History Department, In Memoriam · SFSU History Department, Faculty Bio · Duke University Press · KQED News · CSU Honorary Degrees · APA Living Today · CBS Sacramento · Positively Filipino · SOMCAN · Alliance for California Traditional Arts · Little Manila Rising
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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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