Where Pinoy Came From: The Paper Trail Starts in San Francisco, 1917
Where Pinoy Came From: The Paper Trail Starts in San Francisco, 1917
Nobody has found the person who first said it. What survives is a 1917 San Francisco playlet, a 1926 headline that carries Pinay too, and a weekly in Capiz named Pinoy.
The word is in the name of this site, and it is in every Filipino American family group chat: Pinoy, and Pinay when she is the one being described. Neither is the formal word for who we are. Both are older than most of us assume, and, according to historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, both began not in Manila but in the United States, among people who spent their days in fields and factories.
So when, and where? The honest answer comes in three parts. The earliest known appearance in print is a San Francisco newspaper article from December 1917. The people credited with creating the word are Filipino migrant workers. And the individual who said it first has never been identified. This piece lays out the paper trail as it exists today, marks where the evidence is thin, and leaves the gaps open instead of papering over them. It is part of our FAHM series for October 2026.
The earliest known print appearance of Pinoy is tied to Rizal Day, a playlet written for the occasion. And Pinay was in print by 1926, in an article about Filipino women in the U.S. excelling in their courses and moving into business and politics.
Bakya BAHK-yah
Meaning: a wooden clog; in slang, lowbrow or mass-market taste.
It is the word that was hung on Pinoy in the 1960s by newcomers who thought the label beneath them. A generation later, activists and artists reclaimed Pinoy itself.
This one started on my phone this morning, Monday, October 12. I shared a reel on Instagram by Ruby Veridiano about the origin of Pinay, and it did what good history does: it sent me looking for the other half of the pair. I run a site called PinoyBuilt. I owe readers the story behind the first word in its name.
— J.F.R. Perseveranda
The Short Answer: San Francisco, December 1917
The earliest documented use of Pinoy sits in a San Francisco newspaper, The Bulletin, in an article dated December 28, 1917, headlined "Filipinos to Honor Their National Hero." The article previewed a Rizal Day program. Among the entertainments was a playlet called Pinoy, written by Juan F. Salazar. The paper explained the title as a nickname that Filipinos in San Francisco had, by its account, generally earned.
Read that closely, because it is both the best evidence we have and a limited one. A newspaper that can name a play after a word, and explain the word in a single clause, is describing something already circulating. A playlet is a use of the word, not its invention. Salazar is the first named person attached to Pinoy in print. Nothing in the record makes him its author, and nothing here claims he was.
It also matters that the earliest known appearance is attached to Rizal. The word entered the written record next to a gesture of pride, a program honoring the national hero. For a diaspora that would spend the next century being told who it was, that detail is worth sitting with. We take the history as it comes, and this part of it is quietly beautiful.
Who Coined It? A Community, Not a Person
Mabalon, the late Filipino American historian and author of "Little Manila Is in the Heart" (Duke University Press, 2013), wrote that Pinoy and Pinay were coined by Filipinos who came to the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century, mostly farmworkers and factory workers. That is the best-supported answer to "who," and it is an answer about a group. It is also an answer that fits the era: this is the manong generation, the workers whose story we followed in our Carlos Bulosan piece earlier this month.
Mabalon also described how the word was used. Historically, she wrote, it referred to Filipinos born or living in the United States, and it has been in constant use since the 1920s. In her account, it was a name for people who lived the American experience, and it was later reclaimed and politicized by Filipino American activists and artists in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
There is a competing guess in circulation. It ties the word to the pensionados, the government-sponsored students nicknamed the "Fountain Pen Boys." No one has produced evidence for it, so it stays a guess. It is worth noticing what the guess would do, though. It would hand the word to the scholars, while the historian's account hands it to the workers.
How the Word Is Built
The usual explanation is simple. Take the last four letters of Filipino, "pino," and add the diminutive "-y," the same move that gives us nicknames like Noynoy, Kokoy and Toytoy. Pinay follows the same logic from Filipina: "pina" plus "y." It is warm, clipped, and a little cheeky, which is exactly what a nickname for yourself should be.
We should be plain about the status of that explanation. It fits the pattern of Filipino nicknaming, and it is repeated across reference works. But no dated linguistic study of the formation turned up in our research, so it remains the working explanation, not a proven derivation. If you know of one, tell us in the comments.
The Paper Trail, 1917 to the 1970s
Here is every early appearance we could find, in order. Read the Year column as "earliest record located," not "year the word began."
| Year | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| 1917 | San Francisco. The Bulletin, December 28: a Rizal Day playlet titled Pinoy, by Juan F. Salazar. |
| 1924 | Chicago. The Philippine Republic, January: an essay by Dr. J. Juliano, a faculty member at a Chicago school, uses Pinoy in questions about being mistaken for other Asians. |
| 1926 | The Filipino Student Bulletin carries both Pinoy and Pinay, in an article on Filipino women in the U.S. excelling in their courses and moving into business and politics. |
| 1926–27 | Capiz, Philippines. A weekly named Pinoy, from the Pinoy Publishing Company, is listed in Carson Taylor's "History of the Philippine Press," published in 1927. |
| 1930 | Manila. The constabulary magazine Khaki and Red describes an Intramuros gang formed to protect Pinoys from abusive American soldiers. |
| 1946 | Carlos Bulosan's "America Is in the Heart" uses Pinoys for the farmworkers of the harvest trail. |
| 1970s | Pinoy pop and Pinoy rock take off in the Philippines; the Juan de la Cruz Band was performing "Ang Himig Natin" by 1973. |
Chicago, 1924: A Word Inside a Fight About Race
The 1924 essay is easy to skim past, and it should not be. Its author asks, in effect, why a Pinoy takes it as an insult to be mistaken for Chinese or Japanese, and what a Pinoy should do when addressed as one or the other. That is the word at work in an essay about being mistaken for someone else, which makes it a good deal more than a cute nickname. Chicago, where I spent part of my childhood, is in the record this early.
Capiz and Manila: Did the Word Go Home?
A common version of the story says Pinoy was coined by Filipino Americans and later adopted back home. The paper trail does not contradict that, but it does complicate it. A weekly named Pinoy was being published in Capiz by the time Taylor's reference book appeared in 1927. By 1930 the word turns up in a Manila magazine, in a story about protecting Pinoys from American soldiers' abuse. That is Philippine print within about a decade of the San Francisco playlet, and the 1930 usage is not a nickname either. It is a word of protection, in a colonial city, aimed at colonial soldiers.
What the record cannot tell us is the direction of travel. Did returnees and newspapers carry the word across the Pacific? Or was something like it already being said in the Philippines, and simply not preserved? Print dates appearances. It does not date the speech that came before. No source we found documents a Philippine-side coinage, and none rules one out. That is not a loophole in the Mabalon account; it is the limit of what any printed archive can prove.
Pinay in the Record
The 1926 Filipino Student Bulletin item matters for a reason that is easy to miss in the usual retelling. Both terms appear in the same article, and the article is about Filipina women: their coursework, their move into business and politics. Mabalon cites it as an early attestation of both Pinoy and Pinay. So the word for the women is not an afterthought tacked onto the men's. It is in the record at the same moment. Which came first, we do not know. That Pinay is documented in an article about women excelling is a good reason to stop telling this as a story about men.
From Bakya to Banner
The word did not win automatically. Many of the middle-class Filipinos who arrived in the 1960s looked down on it as lowbrow, as bakya. Then the era turned. Filipino American activists and artists in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s took the word back, and made it political.
The same decades produced the naming fights that Filipino American campuses still carry. Students pushed for "Pilipino" over "Filipino," partly in a debate over whether the Filipino alphabet has an F at all, and partly as an act of defiance and choice. That is why campus groups still use the spelling, and why the spring ritual is called Pilipino Cultural Night. If you want the full picture, see our posts on Pilipino and PCN. One of the scholars who studied the period, Theo Gonzalves, has said he does not begrudge anyone their label, whether Pinay, Pinoy, Pin@y, or Filipino American. The part of the story he says he values is the choosing: renaming yourself when the time is right.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, "Pinoy music" took off in the early 1970s, a mix of rock, folk and ballads in Tagalog. It was used to oppose Ferdinand Marcos and his martial law, and Marcos himself ordered radio stations to play at least one Pinoy song an hour, later three. The word served the dictator's airwaves and the people who toppled him, which tells you how much ground it had covered since the Rizal Day playlet.
Naming fights did not end there. We wrote earlier about why we should stop using the term FOB. A community that built Pinoy as a badge has also, at times, handed newcomers a sneer. The history above is a reminder of how that has gone before.
What the Record Does Not Prove
An archive built to last for decades should say plainly where its knowledge stops. Here is where this one does:
| Question | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| Earliest use | December 28, 1917, in a San Francisco newspaper, as cited in reference works. We have not yet viewed the page image ourselves, and an earlier use may exist. One reference work mentions 1910s items, including advertisements placed in Hawaii by Filipinos, but its page-level citations are thin. |
| Inventor | Unknown. Salazar used the word; nothing shows he created it. |
| Place | The best-supported account says Filipino migrants in the United States. A Philippine-side origin is undocumented, and not ruled out. |
| Formation | The "pino" plus "-y" explanation is the usual one, but no dated linguistic study was located. |
| Pinay | In print by 1926 alongside Pinoy. Which is older is not established. |
| Pensionados | A guess with no supporting evidence. |
If you hold an earlier page, a family scrapbook, a labor-camp newsletter, a community newspaper from the 1910s or 1920s, that is exactly the kind of document that would move this story forward. Drop a note in the comments.
Why This Belongs Here
The most useful thing the record tells us is who the word belongs to. Not the dictionary. Not a ministry. The strongest account puts it in the mouths of farmworkers and factory workers, people with little institutional power in the country they had crossed an ocean to enter. They named themselves in a country that sorted them by someone else's categories, and they did it with a nickname, a clipped and affectionate one. Then the word showed up on both sides of the Pacific, got fought over in the 1960s, got played on radio in the 1970s, and ended up in the name of a site run by a kid who left the Philippines at nine.
That is the thread behind the story of who built Filipino American History Month, and behind every Filipino American story we run: communities that write their own names, and archivists who make sure the names survive. Say Pinoy. Say Pinay. And when someone asks where the word comes from, you can tell them: San Francisco, 1917, as far as the paper goes. And before that, the people.
- "Pinoy," Wikipedia (accessed October 12, 2026), for the earliest-usage timeline and its citations.
- "Filipinos to Honor Their National Hero," The Bulletin (San Francisco), December 28, 1917, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Dr. J. Juliano, "Reflections of a 'Traveler,'" The Philippine Republic, January 1924, p. 17 (University of Michigan digital collection), as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, "Little Manila Is in the Heart" (Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 20 and 37, for the 1926 Filipino Student Bulletin attestation, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Carson Taylor, "History of the Philippine Press" (1927), p. 59, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- "Khaki and Red: The Official Organ of the Constabulary and Police," Vol. 10, October 1930, p. 6, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Melinda L. de Jesus, "Pinay Power" (Routledge, 2005), p. 14, for Mabalon's account of historical usage, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Craig A. Lockard, "Dance of Life: Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia" (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), pp. 135–151, for Pinoy music and radio airplay under Marcos, as cited in the Wikipedia article above.
- Benjamin Pimentel, "Why Filipino Americans say Pilipino, not Filipino," Philippine Daily Inquirer (Global Nation), July 17, 2013, for Mabalon's account of who coined the terms, the 1960s "bakya" dismissal, and Theo Gonzalves on naming.
- Ruby Veridiano, Instagram reel on the origin of Pinay, shared October 12, 2026 (the prompt for this piece; not used as a factual source).
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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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