Who Built Filipino American History Month? The Archivists, the Galleon, and the Fight to Be Taught
Who Built Filipino American History Month? The Archivists, the Galleon, and the Fight to Be Taught
October was not handed to us by Washington. Two Seattle archivists, a 1587 landing at Morro Bay, and three decades of volunteers built it, and Congress caught up later.
I arrived in Vallejo in June 1979, a Marikina kid by way of three Chicago winters, and at Springstowne Junior High I casually knew Phillip Orpilla. I did not know of his brother Mel until Facebook, sometime in the 2000s. When I found him there, I found the keeper of our city's Filipino memory: the author of Filipinos in Vallejo, a Balintawak Arnis master, and a man I have since photographed refereeing at Vallejo's Pista Sa Nayon. Mel had spent years doing what historians do, quietly, in the same town I grew up in: collecting the photographs, the oral histories, and the family papers that would otherwise be thrown out when a lolo passed.
On October 2, 2015, that work put Mel at a podium in Washington. As president of the Filipino American National Historical Society, he helped open the first-ever White House celebration of Filipino American History Month. That afternoon is the reason this essay starts here instead of in Washington. Filipino American History Month did not begin in Congress or at the White House. It began with two archivists in Seattle, a ship's log from 1587, and a volunteer network of historians like Mel, who spent years insisting that our story was American history before anyone in power agreed. As October opens, this is the record of who actually built it.
Filipinos stood on California soil 33 years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth. A plaque set into a rock at Coleman Park in Morro Bay marks the October 18, 1587 landing. It was dedicated on October 21, 1995 by the Filipino American National Historical Society's California Central Coast chapter: a landmark declared by Filipino American historians themselves.
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Kasaysayan — ka-say-SA-yan
History. The word grows from the root saysay, meaning sense, significance, or worth. In Tagalog, history is not just what happened; it is what happened told so that it means something. That is exactly what the Cordovas set out to do: gather the scattered facts of Filipino life in America and give them their saysay.
October 18, 1587: The First Footprints, Told Honestly
The month is anchored to a single day. On October 18, 1587, a small three-masted vessel called the Nuestra Señora de Buena Esperanza (often shortened to Esperanza), commanded by Pedro de Unamuno, dropped anchor in what is now Morro Bay on California's Central Coast. It had left Asia in July and would end its voyage in Acapulco that November. Unamuno sent a landing party ashore: a Franciscan friar, a dozen armed soldiers, and, according to the historian Eloisa Gomez Borah's reading of Unamuno's own log, about eight men he recorded as "Indios Luzones." Filipinos from Luzon. They are the earliest documented Filipino presence in what would become the continental United States.
It is worth telling the rest of that day honestly, because the decolonized version of this story is more interesting than the proud one. Those Filipino crewmen were not explorers. They were labor. The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, which ran from 1565 to 1815, was built and sailed in large part by Filipinos pressed into service by the Spanish crown. The landing party raised a cross made of branches and claimed the land for Spain, land that already belonged to the Indigenous people who lived there. Two days later, those people attacked the party, and one of the Filipinos was killed. Unamuno gave up on that stretch of coast and sailed on. Historians still debate exactly where the boat came ashore, and the marker's location has its doubters.
So the first Filipino footprints on this coast were made in the service of somebody else's empire, planting somebody else's flag, on somebody else's land. That is not a reason to be ashamed of 1587. It is a reason to tell it carefully. It is the whole Filipino American story in one afternoon: we arrived as the workers of a colonial project, we paid for it in blood, and we were left out of the official account for four centuries. FANHS chose this date to begin our history. It is fitting that it is not a simple one.
The congressional resolutions that would later recognize the month cite a second anchor as well: 1763, the year FANHS recognizes for the first permanent Filipino settlement in the United States, at St. Malo, in the bayous of Louisiana. FANHS member and later president Marina Espina documented those settlements in her book on the Filipinos of Louisiana. Between Morro Bay and St. Malo, the point is made twice: Filipinos were in North America before the United States existed.
The Archivists: Fred and Dorothy Cordova
Every month on the calendar has a founder. Ours has two. Fred Cordova was born in Selma, California, in 1931, and grew up across the state's farm country; his adoptive parents, Leoncio and Lucia Cordova, contracted migrant farm laborers, and he always called Stockton his hometown. In 1948 he moved to Seattle to attend Seattle University, where he met Dorothy Laigo. Both were second-generation Filipino Americans, and both wanted to understand a heritage their schooling had barely touched.
They started with young people. In 1957 the couple founded Filipino Youth Activities in Seattle, a program that ran everything from soccer to folk dance to an award-winning drill team, and that became an organizing force in the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1970s Dorothy directed the Demonstration Project for Asian Americans, studying the problems Asian American communities faced and collecting their oral histories. When that project closed in the early 1980s, the Cordovas carried its work into something new.
On November 26, 1982, in Seattle, they founded the Filipino American National Historical Society. Fred served as founding president and created the National Pinoy Archives, now one of the largest collections of Filipino American history anywhere. Dorothy served as executive director. The next year, Fred published Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, a pictorial history running from 1763 to about 1963. The title is an argument in four words: Filipinos had been in America for centuries and were still missing from the books.
Fred Cordova died in December 2013, at 82. FANHS's own obituary credits him with starting the national effort to make October Filipino American History Month. The organization he and Dorothy built now counts more than 40 chapters across the country, and its national museum sits in Stockton, his hometown.
1991–1992: A Month Nobody Had to Approve
The idea became a resolution in 1991, when the FANHS National Board of Trustees passed a proposal, spearheaded by Fred Cordova, recognizing October as Filipino American History Month. The first observance followed in October 1992. FANHS's own pages date the start both ways, to 1991 and to 1992, and both are true in their way: the board voted in one year and the community celebrated in the next.
What matters is what happened after. For nearly two decades there was no federal recognition at all, and the month spread anyway. FANHS chapters organized programs. College Filipino student organizations adopted it. Museums, libraries, and community nonprofits built events around it. One state, county, and city after another passed proclamations and resolutions of its own. Nobody in Washington had to approve a single one of those Octobers. The month became real the way so many Filipino community institutions in America have: volunteers did the work, on their own time, because no one else was going to.
PinoyBuilt has been part of that grassroots record for a while. In 2018 we covered Chicago's Filipino American History Month celebration, in the city where my family first landed in America in 1976. Every one of those local celebrations, in every city, is a descendant of a board vote in 1991.
The Timeline, at a Glance
Washington Catches Up: 2009
When Congress finally acted, it moved on two tracks. On September 25, 2009, Representative Bob Filner of California introduced H.Res. 780 in the House, where it gathered 58 cosponsors from both parties. On October 1, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada introduced S.Res. 298, cosponsored by Hawaii's Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka and by Nevada Republican John Ensign, among others, and the Senate agreed to it by unanimous consent the same day. The House followed on November 2, 2009, passing H.Res. 780 by voice vote.
Popular summaries of this history often credit other well-known names with the 2009 resolutions. The congressional record says otherwise, and in an article about getting history right, that is worth saying plainly.
Read the text and you will hear FANHS's voice in every clause. The resolution names October 18, 1587 and the Morro Bay landing. It names St. Malo and 1763. It recalls the Filipinos who fought under the American flag in the Second World War, and the nine Filipino Americans who have received the Medal of Honor. It credits FANHS's mission statement for the central argument of the whole effort: that the roles of Filipino Americans and other people of color have been overlooked in how this country writes, teaches, and learns its own history. Congress did not write that sentence from scratch. Filipino American historians handed it to them.
One of the House members who has co-led those later bicameral resolutions with Hirono is Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia. His maternal grandfather was of Filipino ancestry, which makes him the first American with Filipino ancestry to serve as a voting member of Congress. That detail belongs in any FAHM reading list. So does the fact that it took until 1993 for it to happen.
October 2, 2015: A Vallejo Historian at the White House
Six years after the resolutions, the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the White House Office of Public Engagement hosted the first-ever White House celebration of Filipino American History Month. About 175 Filipino American leaders came from across the country. The program opened with remarks from Jason Tengco, the initiative's deputy director, and Mel Orpilla, then president of FANHS, who told the room about the society's 1991 effort to recognize October for the first time. Then Tengco surprised Mel and Dorothy Cordova with a message from President Obama.
That message, as reported by the Inquirer, honored the Filipino Americans who "helped build and defend" the United States. It recognized the Filipino veterans of the Second World War who were denied the compensation they had earned, and the Filipino labor leaders who organized farmworkers in Delano in the 1960s and early 1970s, the movement Larry Itliong led. A panel of Filipino American trailblazers followed, including White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford, apl.de.ap, Jo Koy, and Pixar's Ronnie del Carmen. PinoyBuilt marked that celebration in our own archive.
Look at who was standing at the front of that room. Not a cabinet secretary or a senator, but the founder of the society that started the month and a community historian from Vallejo. I have written before about Mel Orpilla and the Filipino story of Vallejo, about the Mare Island shipyard and the manong generation he has spent his life documenting. On that October afternoon, the government of the United States was, in effect, thanking the volunteers for doing a job it had never done itself.
Why "History," Not "Heritage"
Notice the word FANHS chose. Not Filipino American Heritage Month. History Month. The name of the society that founded it ends in Historical Society. That choice matters more than it looks.
Heritage is what gets handed down: the food, the dances, the fiesta, the way a lola says your name. It is precious, and it is ours. But heritage can be enjoyed without asking a single hard question. History asks the questions. Who crewed the galleons, and who profited from them? Who picked the grapes in Delano, and who led the strike when the pay was not enough? Who fought under the American flag in the Second World War and waited decades for the compensation they had earned? Who staffs the night shift in American hospitals today, and what history put them there? A heritage month celebrates a culture. A history month insists that culture was shaped by power, and that Filipinos were actors in American history, not decorations on it.
This is the same argument we made in our essay on Renato Constantino's The Miseducation of the Filipino. Constantino showed how American colonial schools taught Filipinos in Manila to see their own history through a visitor's eyes. The Cordovas spent their lives fighting the stateside version of the same problem: Filipinos in America taught nothing about the Filipinos who came before them. On both sides of the Pacific, we have had to fight to be taught our own story. That struggle is also, at bottom, about kapwa, the shared self that psychologist E.J.R. David connects to colonial mentality in our earlier conversation on immigration and kapwa. You cannot see yourself in others if no one ever showed you who your others were.
What the Month Asks of Us
FANHS frames the month as something to do, not just something to celebrate. Its own suggestions are a good place to start: read the foundational books of Filipino American studies, learn the story of the Luzones Indios and of the Indigenous peoples of the Philippines, and, above all, record oral histories that capture how our history played out in your region. The society also points to the push for Filipino American curriculum in schools, from organizers in Seattle who won K-12 Filipino American studies curricula to the youth-led Filipino Curriculum Project in Hawaii that lobbied state legislators for an elective course. That is FAHM working the way the Cordovas built it to work: from the bottom up.
Here is what that looks like at the kitchen table. Sit down with the oldest Filipino in your family this month and record them. Ask where they were born, how they got here, and what they had to give up. Find out whether your city has a FANHS chapter, and if it does, show up; if it doesn't, the society will tell you how to start one. Learn the name of the first Filipino family in your town. In Vallejo, Mel already did much of that work. In your town, somebody may be waiting for you to do it.
I built PinoyBuilt as a cultural compass for my three children, so that one day they, and their own children, can learn here what is right and who their lolo was. The Cordovas understood something about that kind of project long before I did. An archive is an act of love, and it is also an act of resistance. A people that does not keep its own records gets its history written by someone else, or not at all. Fred and Dorothy Cordova made sure that would not happen to us. Mel Orpilla made sure it would not happen to Vallejo. The test I apply to everything on this site is whether it would hold up if my granddaughter read it in 2070. Filipino American History Month passes that test, because of who built it. This October, add one page of your own.
- Filipino American National Historical Society — Filipino American History Month Resolution (text of H.Res. 780 / S.Res. 298)
- FANHS — October is Filipino American History Month
- FANHS — Founders: Fred and Dorothy Cordova
- FANHS — Frederic A. Cordova, 1931–2013
- Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington — Fred and Dorothy Cordova
- Inquirer Global Nation — Fred Cordova: Bridging the Fil-Ams' two worlds
- Eloisa Gomez Borah, "The Filipino Landing in Morro Bay in 1587," Filipino American National Historical Society Journal
- The Historical Marker Database — Filipino landing marker, Morro Bay
- U.S. Congress — S.Res. 298, 111th Congress, as agreed to (October 1, 2009)
- ProPublica Represent — H.Res. 780, 111th Congress
- NBC News Asian America — Joint House, Senate Resolution Urges Recognition of Filipino American History (2015)
- GovInfo — S.Res. 856, 118th Congress (2024)
- Office of Rep. Bobby Scott — Biography
- Obama White House Archives — A Historic Celebration of Filipino American History Month at the White House
- Filipina Women's Network, via Inquirer — President Obama Celebrates Contributions of FilAms at the White House
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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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