Filipino Americans in Chicago
120 Years in the Heartland — From the Pensionados of Hyde Park to the World's First Two-Michelin-Starred Filipino Restaurant
Chicago is not where most people expect to find one of America's oldest, most politically active, and most culturally proud Filipino American communities. But it is here — embedded in the South Side neighborhoods where pensionados once studied, in the Pullman cars where Filipino workers stood shoulder to shoulder with Black laborers in the labor movement, in the Rizal Center on Irving Park Road, and in a Ukrainian Village restaurant that earned two Michelin stars and put Filipino cuisine on the world stage.
Filipino Americans have been part of Chicago for more than 120 years. With approximately 169,000 Filipinos in Illinois as of 2024 — the majority in the Chicago metropolitan area — this is the seventh-largest Filipino American urban community in the United States. It is also among the most historically complex: a community shaped not by a single industry or neighborhood, but by three distinct waves of migration that each brought different people, different motivations, and different legacies.
This page is PinoyBuilt's definitive reference on Filipino Americans in Chicago — who came, why they came, where they settled, what they fought for, and what they built. It is written from lived experience. This editor grew up in Chicago before moving to Vallejo on June 3, 1979 — and Chicago's Filipino American story is part of his own.
Chicago's Filipino community did not happen by accident — and it did not happen for one reason. It was built in three distinct waves: by scholars sent on government grants, by working-class laborers recruited to Pullman rail cars, and by the post-1965 tide of nurses, doctors, and engineers drawn to the Midwest's hospitals and universities. No single neighborhood. No single industry. One community, built over 120 years, holding together by culture, church, and kapihan.
Three Waves: How Filipinos Came to Chicago
Unlike California's Filipino community, which was anchored by agricultural labor and the Navy, Chicago's Filipino community was built in three distinct and very different chapters. Understanding those chapters is the only way to understand why the community looks the way it does today — dispersed across neighborhoods, yet unified by culture.
Wave One: The Pensionados (1903–1920s)
The story begins with colonialism and a scholarship program. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 made the Philippines a U.S. territory, the U.S. government passed the Pensionado Act of 1903 — a program that sent young Filipino men to American universities on government scholarships. The goal was to train a generation of Filipino leaders in American customs and governance, then send them home. What no one fully anticipated was that many of them would stay.
These pensionados were mostly young men from privileged Philippine families — well-educated, English-speaking, and unlike most Asian immigrants of the era, legally permitted to enter the United States as nationals of a U.S. territory. They settled near their universities: Hyde Park, the Near North Side, and Garfield Park. They were unlike any Filipinos who had come before — or who would come next.
Manuel Quezon — later the second President of the Philippines — passionately lobbied the U.S. Congress for the Pensionado Act. His goal was to produce a generation of democratic Filipino leaders educated in American universities. The pensionados who ended up in Chicago were meant to be temporary students. Many became permanent Chicagoans.
Wave Two: The Workers (1920s–1940s)
The second wave brought a very different kind of Filipino to Chicago: working-class men from the provinces, many of them Ilocanos, arriving not for college but for work. They moved into South Side neighborhoods — McKinley Park, Bridgeport, Archer Heights, and Pullman — neighborhoods that in the 1920s and 1930s were hotbeds of the American labor movement.
The most consequential employer of this era was the Pullman Company, which operated luxury railroad sleeper cars across the country. As Black porters began organizing under A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Pullman responded by hiring Filipino workers — explicitly to use them as a wedge against the organizing effort. The strategy backfired: many Filipino workers became dues-paying BSCP members themselves. Filipino and Black workers shared meals, shared boarding houses in Pullman, and ultimately shared the struggle for fair wages and dignified treatment on the rails.
Before World War II, Chicago's Filipino community was overwhelmingly male. Among those over age 20, men outnumbered women 21 to 1. Filipino men worked in restaurants, private clubs, and domestic service. Anti-miscegenation laws, while inconsistently enforced, made interracial marriage difficult — and yet 90 percent of those who married did so outside the ethnic community, typically with American-born daughters of European immigrant parents. The result: a bachelor society of boarding houses, fraternal lodges, and boxing matches that would define Filipino Chicago until the War Brides Act of 1946 changed everything.
Wave Three: The Professionals (1965–present)
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 changed everything. The Hart-Celler Act abolished national-origin quotas and opened U.S. immigration to Asians on equal footing. What followed was an extraordinary influx of Filipino professionals — nurses, physicians, engineers, teachers — who transformed Chicago's Filipino community from a small working-class enclave into the large, educated, suburban-dispersed population it is today.
This third wave settled differently. Rather than clustering in ethnic enclaves, these professionals bought homes near their workplaces — hospitals, universities, tech firms — across the North Side and expanding into suburbs like Glendale Heights, Morton Grove, Skokie, and Waukegan. By 1980, the Filipino population in the Chicago area had grown to over 41,000. By 2000, it reached nearly 100,000. By 2024, Illinois was home to more than 169,000 Filipinos and Filipino Americans.
There is a deep pattern behind the Filipino American tendency to buy homes near their workplaces rather than near other Filipinos. As the Filipino American Council founder explained: "From our standpoint, back home it's very difficult to own a home. Here, if you have a good job and good credit, you can buy one." The result: a community defined not by a zip code, but by shared values, institutions, and culture — spread across 7,000 square miles of Chicagoland.
Key Milestones in Chicago Filipino History
Where Filipino Chicago Lives
Ask a Chicagoan where the Filipino neighborhood is, and they will not give you a single answer. That is the first and most defining feature of Filipino Chicago: unlike Chinatown or Pilsen, there is no single enclave. The community is spread across the city and suburbs in a pattern that reflects its three waves — South Side roots, North Side professional settlement, and suburban dispersal.
Era: 1903–1920s · Wave One. The first Filipinos in Chicago settled near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park — the pensionados. A century later, the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago would also be founded here, preserving what those early arrivals built.
Era: 1920s–1940s · Wave Two. South Side neighborhoods where Filipino workers lived alongside Mexican and Black laborers, shared the labor movement, and built the bachelor community of boarding houses and fraternal lodges that characterized pre-war Filipino Chicago.
Era: 1974–present · Wave Three. Home of the José Rizal Center at 1332 W. Irving Park Road — the cultural heart of Filipino Chicago for 50 years. Seniors dance at kapihan. Children learn Filipino martial arts. The community comes here to be Filipino together.
Era: 1970s–present · Wave Three. Post-1965 professional settlement on the North Side, near hospitals, universities, and transit lines. Among the most residentially stable corners of Filipino Chicago.
Era: 2020–present. Home of Kasama, the world's first two-Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. A neighborhood not historically associated with Filipinos, now holding the most celebrated symbol of Filipino American culinary excellence in the country.
Era: 1980s–present. Healthcare workers, engineers, and home-owning families form the Filipino suburban diaspora. The largest concentrations of Filipino Americans outside the city are here — near hospitals, not near each other by ethnicity, but bound together by culture and community organizations.
The Rizal Center: 50 Years of Community
No single institution better represents Filipino Chicago than the Dr. José Rizal Memorial Center at 1332 W. Irving Park Road in Lake View. Named after the Philippine national hero — the novelist, poet, and patriot executed by the Spanish in 1896 — the Rizal Center has served as the community's living room, town hall, and cultural stage for five decades.
Opened in 1974 by the Filipino American Council of Greater Chicago, the center hosted everything from Miss Philippines-Chicago pageants to senior dances to political organizing against the Marcos dictatorship. By 2017, a protracted ownership dispute had left it in disrepair — floors splintered, walls bare, halls silent. The Filipino community mobilized. Volunteers rebuilt it tile by tile. By 2022, it had reopened: the kapihan restored, children's library installed, Filipino martial arts classes running on Sunday afternoons.
Chairman Jerry Clarito, who led the Rizal Center's restoration, arrived in Chicago in 1980 when there were, by his own account, only two Filipino storefronts in the city. His governing philosophy: "We are rebuilding the center one tile at a time and building the community one person at a time."
Raising Hell in the Heartland: The Anti-Martial Law Movement
One of the most consequential and least-known chapters of Filipino American history took place not in California but in Chicago. When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines on September 21, 1972, Filipino Americans in Chicago did not stay silent.
U.S.-born Filipino Americans formed the National Coalition for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines (NCRCLP) — the first organized U.S.-based opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. Headed by activist Melinda Paras, the coalition united around four principles: opposition to martial law, restoration of civil liberties, release of political prisoners, and an end to U.S. support for Marcos.
Filipino Chicago raised money, organized demonstrations, published dissident newspapers, and used its churches as sites of political organizing. For 14 years, Filipino Chicagoans maintained sustained resistance to a dictatorship 8,000 miles away while building lives in the American heartland. Historian James Zarsadiaz documented this history in "Raising Hell in the Heartland: Filipino Chicago and the Anti-Martial Law Movement, 1972–1986" — one of the most important works of Filipino American history scholarship of the last decade.
Filipino ethnic newspapers in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s promoted Philippine nationalism, criticized U.S. foreign policy toward Marcos, and encouraged Filipinos to think of themselves as Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in service of people living under dictatorship. It was a model of diaspora activism ahead of its time — and it happened in the Midwest, not on the coasts.
Kasama: Filipino Cuisine at the World's Highest Level
In July 2020 — the middle of a global pandemic, on a block in Chicago's Ukrainian Village — two chefs opened a Filipino bakery and restaurant. They had no idea they were about to change the way the world sees Filipino food.
Tim Flores and Genie Kwon, a husband-and-wife team who had trained in fine dining — Flores at Oriole in Chicago, Kwon at Eleven Madison Park in New York — opened Kasama with a vision: Filipino food, French pastries, and a neighborhood restaurant that felt like home. They named it Kasama — Tagalog for "together."
In 2022, the Michelin Guide awarded Kasama one star — making it the world's first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. In 2023, Flores and Kwon won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes. In 2025, Kasama earned its second Michelin star. As Kasama wrote after representing the Philippines at the inaugural Michelin Gala in Manila: "Filipino food is not a fad and not a trend. It is the result of an incredibly influential and resilient history."
Tim Flores grew up in Chicago, the son of a mother from Imus, Cavite. Genie Kwon was born in New Orleans of Korean descent. Their partnership is itself a Chicago Filipino story — two people, two culinary traditions, one restaurant built on the idea that Filipino food deserves to be taken seriously at the world's highest level. It does. Kasama proved it.
Notable Filipino Americans of Chicago
Co-owners of Kasama — the world's first and only two-Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. 2023 James Beard Award winners for Best Chef: Great Lakes. Flores grew up in Chicago, son of a mother from Imus, Cavite. Together they cook with what the Michelin Guide called "striking originality" — reimagining traditional Filipino preparations in ways that honor the food's roots while earning its place at the world's finest table. Read PinoyBuilt coverage →
A self-taught cultural historian, co-author of Filipinos in Chicago (Arcadia Publishing), and founder of the FAHSC in 1986. Alamar spent her life collecting photographs, film reels, documents, and artifacts documenting Filipino American life in Chicago. Her archive — over 300 16mm film reels dating from 1926 — is now preserved at the Chicago History Museum. She passed before her own video interview could be filmed. The urgency of her loss accelerated the work to preserve what she spent her life saving.
Arrived in the United States by ship in 1926, worked as a migrant farmer in the Pacific Northwest before settling in Chicago. For over six decades, Viernes documented Filipino American life on 16mm film — baseball at Grant Park, picnics at Calumet Park, everyday neighborhood life. His more than 300 film reels constitute the single most complete visual record of Filipino American life in the first half of the 20th century.
Arrived in the United States in 1928. Founded the Filipino American Council of Chicago in 1940 and served as its long-time president. Llapitan was the patriarch of organized Filipino civic life in Chicago for five decades — the institutional memory of the community through its most difficult and most triumphant years.
Arrived in Chicago in 1980. Led the campaign to restore the Rizal Center after its near-collapse, overseeing its revival as a community hub. His philosophy: "We are rebuilding the center one tile at a time and building the community one person at a time." That sentence is the whole story of Filipino Chicago in miniature.
Community & Culture Today
The Filipino American community in Chicago in 2026 is a community in full. It does not fit neatly into any one neighborhood or any one story. It is a nurse working the overnight shift at Northwestern Memorial. It is a family eating lechon at a reunion in Skokie. It is a line around the block in Ukrainian Village at 8 a.m. for Kasama's mushroom adobo. It is seniors dancing at the Rizal Center kapihan. It is a kid at an Albany Park public school who speaks Tagalog at home and English everywhere else and is somehow both, entirely.
What holds this community together is what has always held it together in Chicago: not geography, but culture. Seven thousand islands' worth of languages and regions, compressed into a shared identity forged by the experience of being Filipino in America. As Chairman Clarito put it: "In the Philippines, we have 7,000 islands and about 100 languages. That's just the way we are — but we have this common unifying character: we are Filipinos."
In Chicago, that character is on full display. In the kapihan. In the Kasama dining room. In the archive boxes at the Chicago History Museum. In the communities of Waukegan and Morton Grove and Glendale Heights where Filipino families bought homes near hospitals and built something permanent. Where you are is where you build community. And Filipino Chicago has been building for 120 years.
I was born in Makati and raised in Marikina before my family moved to Chicago. I left Chicago for Vallejo on June 3, 1979 — the date is burned into my memory. But Chicago made me before Vallejo did. I know what it is to be Filipino in the Midwest: dispersed, invisible to the national Fil-Am narrative, and completely at home. This page exists because that story deserves to be told with the same care and depth as any California story — and because the Filipino Americans of Chicago, from the pensionados to the Kasama line, have earned their chapter in the archive. — J.F.R. Perseveranda
→ Read all Chicago coverage on PinoyBuilt
→ Explore the Filipino American History archive
California · Chicago · Los Angeles · Hawaii · Stockton · Vallejo
As of 2024, approximately 169,000 Filipinos and Filipino Americans live in Illinois, the majority in the Chicago metropolitan area. The city of Chicago proper had approximately 145,000 Filipino Americans as of 2019 (Pew Research), making it the seventh-largest Filipino American city in the United States.
No — and that is intentional. Unlike Chinatown or Pilsen, Filipino Chicago has never been anchored to a single neighborhood. The community is spread across the city and suburbs. The cultural heart is the Rizal Center on Irving Park Road in Lake View, but Filipino Chicago lives everywhere — from McKinley Park to Ukrainian Village to Morton Grove.
The first significant wave arrived after 1903, when the Pensionado Act sent young Filipino men to American universities on government scholarships. These pensionados settled near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. A second wave of working-class Filipino migrants arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, settling in South Side neighborhoods including Pullman.
The Dr. José Rizal Memorial Center at 1332 W. Irving Park Road in Lake View is the cultural and civic heart of Filipino Chicago, operated by the Filipino American Council of Greater Chicago. Opened in 1974 and named after the Philippine national hero, it has hosted community events, cultural celebrations, and political organizing for 50 years. After falling into disrepair, it was restored and reopened in 2022.
Kasama, at 1001 N. Winchester Ave. in Ukrainian Village, is a Filipino bakery and modern restaurant owned by Tim Flores and Genie Kwon. In 2022 it became the world's first Filipino restaurant to receive a Michelin star. In 2025 it earned its second. It was also the 2023 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Great Lakes. Kasama matters because it placed Filipino cuisine at the highest level of global culinary recognition — and did so in Chicago.
When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972, Filipino Americans in Chicago organized the National Coalition for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines (NCRCLP) — the first organized U.S.-based opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. For 14 years, Filipino Chicagoans organized demonstrations, published dissident newspapers, and used churches as sites of political resistance. Historian James Zarsadiaz documented this in "Raising Hell in the Heartland" (2017).
The pensionados were young Filipino men sent to American universities on U.S. government scholarships under the Pensionado Act of 1903. Their purpose was to receive American education and return to the Philippines as democratic leaders. Many stayed. They were the first significant wave of Filipinos in Chicago and among the first in the Midwest.
Sources & Further Reading
Wikipedia — Filipinos in Chicago · WBEZ Curious City — Is There a Filipino Neighborhood in Chicago? (Feb. 2025) · Borderless Magazine — The Revival of Chicago's Filipino American Rizal Center (2024) · Chicago History Museum — Filipinos and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters · Chicago History Museum — The Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago · James Zarsadiaz — Raising Hell in the Heartland: Filipino Chicago and the Anti-Martial Law Movement, 1972–1986, American Studies 56(1), 2017 · Estrella Ravelo Alamar & Willi Red Buhay — Filipinos in Chicago (Arcadia Publishing) · Michelin Guide — Kasama · Pew Research Center — Top 10 U.S. Metro Areas by Filipino Population, 2019 · AAPI Data — Illinois Filipino Population, 2024
California · Chicago · Los Angeles · Hawaii · Stockton · Vallejo
