Filipino Americans in Washington State
140 Years Deep — From the Alaskero Canneries to the First Filipino-Led Union to Bob Santos' Gang of Four to the ILWU Martyrs
The first documented Filipino in Washington State arrived in 1883 — more than two decades before the first sakada stepped off a ship in Honolulu, more than four decades before the first pensionado arrived in Chicago. Washington was not a destination that happened to Filipinos. It was the first door they found open on the American mainland, and they walked through it knowing they would have to fight for everything that came after.
They fought in the canneries of Alaska, organizing the first Filipino-led union in United States history out of a Seattle hall in 1933. They fought in the courts, when Pio de Cano challenged Washington State's Alien Land Law and won in 1939. They fought in the International District, when Bob Santos and the Gang of Four stood in front of bulldozers to save a neighborhood that had housed Filipino workers for 60 years. They fought — and two of them were killed — when Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes tried to democratize their union and were shot dead inside their own hall in 1981 by gunmen with ties to the Marcos regime.
Today, approximately 243,000 Filipino Americans live in Washington State — the fifth-largest Filipino American state in the country, concentrated in Seattle, Federal Way, Renton, Tukwila, and the South King County communities that have been Filipino territory for over a century. This is their story.
Washington was the Pacific gateway. Seattle was the nearest major American port to the Philippines, and as a U.S. territory after 1898, the Philippines fed a steady stream of young Filipino men — classified as nationals, not aliens — into Washington's canneries, farms, railroads, and lumber camps. By 1910, the Filipino population of Washington was twelve times greater than in California. The International District in Seattle became their winter home. The canneries of Alaska became their summer workplace. And the union hall on King Street became the place where they decided enough was enough.
The Alaskeros: Seattle's Filipino Labor Backbone (1900s–1940s)
To understand Filipino Washington, you have to understand the Alaskeros — and the life they built in the rhythm between two worlds.
Every spring, hundreds of Filipino men would gather in Seattle's Chinatown-International District, board ships bound for the Alaska salmon canneries, and spend the summer doing the hardest, lowest-paid work in the processing chain: sorting, gutting, cleaning, and canning fish. Every fall, they returned to Seattle — sharing rooms in the cheap hotels and boarding houses of Jackson Street, picking up farm work in the Yakima Valley, and waiting for spring. Seattle was their anchor. The International District — the SRO hotels, the pool halls, the dance halls, the Filipino restaurants on Jackson Street — was their community.
The conditions they faced were brutal by design. In the canneries, Filipino and Alaska Native workers were assigned the dirtiest jobs while white workers ran maintenance and operations. There were two mess halls — one with steak and eggs for white workers, one with fish heads and rice for Filipinos. Housing was segregated. Pay was discriminatory. And back in Seattle, Washington's 1921 Alien Land Law barred them from owning or leasing land — even as U.S. nationals.
Bob Santos, who grew up in the International District in the 1930s and 1940s, described the cannery experience in his oral history: white workers received "pork chops, and steak, and breakfast sausages — all the good stuff you'd get in a good restaurant." The Filipino mess hall got fish and rice — "sometimes on Sunday you get chicken." Santos went to the Alaska canneries himself as a high school student, and the segregation he witnessed there became one of the formative experiences of his life as a civil rights activist.
Carlos Bulosan in Washington
The literary witness to the Alaskero experience was Carlos Bulosan — the Filipino poet and writer who worked the canneries and fields of Washington, Oregon, and California in the 1930s and channeled those years into America Is in the Heart (1946), the essential memoir of Filipino migrant labor in America. Bulosan was based in Seattle for stretches of his life, and the International District's Filipino community — its violence, its solidarity, its dreams — runs through every page he wrote. He also edited the 1952 ILWU Local 37 Yearbook, one of the most remarkable documents in Filipino American labor history.
The First Filipino-Led Union in U.S. History (1933)
On June 19, 1933, in Seattle, a group of Alaskero workers did something no Filipino Americans had done before: they formed their own union. The Cannery Workers' and Farm Laborers' Union (CWFLU) Local 18257 — organized under the American Federation of Labor — was the first Filipino-led labor union in United States history. It was built in the heart of the Depression, by men who were earning next to nothing and owed their very presence in the country to a colonial relationship that classified them as nationals but treated them as anything but.
The Martyrs: Duyungan and Simon
The union was barely two years old when its first leaders were murdered. On December 1, 1936, Virgil Duyungan — the union's president — and Aurelio Simon, its secretary, were shot and killed inside a Seattle restaurant by the nephew of a labor contractor who stood to lose business if the union succeeded. Both men became martyrs. Both names should be known by every Filipino American in Washington State.
The union did not die with them. It grew. By the late 1930s, it had evolved into ILWU Local 37, affiliated with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union — the same union that was simultaneously transforming Hawaii. Local 37 became the most powerful Filipino American labor organization on the mainland, representing thousands of workers in the Alaska canneries and Western Washington fields for decades.
In 1982, a coalition of Filipino and Alaska Native cannery workers sued Wards Cove Packing Company for racial discrimination — decades of channeling minorities into the lowest-paid, least-skilled jobs while reserving the better-paying positions for white workers. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1989 issued a ruling widely seen as weakening the Civil Rights Act's protections. Congress responded in 1991 with the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which partially reversed the ruling. Filipino cannery workers' lawsuit literally changed federal civil rights law.
Pio de Cano: Fighting the Alien Land Law (1939)
While the Alaskeros organized in the canneries, a Filipino entrepreneur in Seattle was fighting a different battle — and winning it in court.
Washington State's Alien Land Law of 1921 barred Filipinos from owning or leasing land, even though they were classified as U.S. nationals. It was a deliberate legal mechanism to prevent Filipino workers from putting down permanent roots. Pio de Cano challenged it. He argued — correctly — that as U.S. nationals, Filipinos could not legally be classified as "aliens" subject to the land law's restrictions. In 1939, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in his favor, striking down the application of the Alien Land Law to Filipinos. It was a landmark victory — one of the first successful legal challenges to anti-Filipino discrimination anywhere in the United States.
Washington State's anti-Filipino discrimination was not limited to law. In 1928, white residents of Dryden and Wenatchee told Filipino farm workers to leave town or face violence. White ranchers in Central Washington who employed Filipinos faced threats of lynching. When 339 Filipinos arrived in Seattle after being exposed to spinal meningitis, the Seattle Times declared: "Seattle should not be a dumping ground for the carriers of an epidemic disease." The Seattle City Council reportedly responded by attempting to limit Filipino immigration. Two years later, the Surgeon General confirmed the meningitis could not be traced to Filipinos. The council's response: silence.
Bob Santos & the Gang of Four: Saving the International District
By the 1960s, the International District — the historic heart of Filipino Seattle, where the Alaskeros had wintered for 60 years — was under threat. Gentrification, stadium development, and city disinvestment were hollowing out the neighborhood. The people who had built it, and the elderly Filipino manongs who still lived in its SRO hotels, faced displacement.
Bob Santos was born in the International District in 1934, the son of a Filipino immigrant father and a Native American and Filipina mother. He grew up among the manongs, watched his father go blind from boxing injuries in a cramped hotel room, and came back as an adult to save the neighborhood that had raised him. From 1972 to 1989, Santos served as executive director of InterIm CDA — the International District Improvement Association — fighting every threat to the ID's affordable housing, culturally appropriate businesses, and elderly Filipino residents.
Santos did not fight alone. He formed the Gang of Four — a multiracial coalition of four community leaders who became the most effective civil rights organizing team in Seattle history: Santos for the Filipino and Asian American community, Bernie Whitebear for Native Americans, Larry Gossett for the Black community, and Roberto Maestas for Latino communities. Together, they occupied buildings, organized sit-ins, and forced Seattle's political establishment to take communities of color seriously — directly resulting in the creation of El Centro de la Raza and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center.
Bob Santos passed away on August 27, 2016, at age 82. He was known as "Uncle Bob" to generations of Seattle activists — Filipino, Asian American, Black, Latino, Native American. In 2021, construction began on Uncle Bob's Place, a 126-unit affordable housing complex in the International District, built by InterIm CDA and named for Santos. The building's first floor houses the relocated Bush Garden restaurant — a nod to the karaoke nights and community meetings Santos was famous for hosting there. His legacy lives in the building, and in the neighborhood he refused to let die.
Silme Domingo & Gene Viernes: Murdered for Their Union (1981)
The most politically charged event in Filipino American history — outside of the Philippines itself — took place not in Manila but in Seattle, on June 1, 1981.
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were officers of ILWU Local 37, the Filipino American cannery workers' union that traced its roots directly to the 1933 CWFLU. Both men were also members of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) — a U.S.-based organization that actively opposed Ferdinand Marcos's martial law regime. They had been working to democratize Local 37, wresting control from corrupt leadership with ties to Marcos-aligned labor contractors. They had just returned from the AFL-CIO convention in Washington, D.C., where they successfully passed a resolution condemning the Marcos regime.
On June 1, gunmen entered the Local 37 union hall at 104 — 2nd Ave. S. in Seattle and shot both men. Domingo died that day. Viernes died the next morning. They were 29 and 28 years old.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary investigations in Filipino American history. Domingo and Viernes's families, represented by attorney Michael Withey, pursued a civil suit that ultimately linked the assassinations directly to Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda. In 1989, a Seattle federal jury found the Marcos estate liable for the murders — awarding $15 million in damages. It was the first time a sitting or former head of state had been held civilly liable in a U.S. court for political assassination. Silme Domingo's sister, Cindy Domingo, became a prominent activist and voice for Filipino American political consciousness. The case remains one of the most consequential intersections of Filipino diaspora politics and American jurisprudence.
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were killed just 11 days before Marcos was scheduled to visit the United States. Their murders were intended to silence opposition to that visit and to the Marcos regime's infiltration of Filipino American labor organizations. Instead, the murders energized the anti-Marcos movement in Seattle and nationally — and the evidence unearthed in the civil trial became part of the historical record documenting Marcos's crimes against Filipinos on American soil.
Where Filipino Washington Lives
The Filipino community in Washington State is concentrated in the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area — particularly in the South Seattle and South King County communities that have been Filipino territory for generations. The pattern reflects both the historical roots of the Alaskero era and the post-1965 professional wave.
The historic anchor of Filipino Seattle — where the Alaskeros wintered, where Bob Santos grew up, where the CWFLU and ILWU Local 37 were headquartered, and where Uncle Bob's Place now stands as a monument to the community's resilience. Beacon Hill and Columbia City, adjacent neighborhoods, have significant Filipino populations and are home to several of Seattle's most celebrated Filipino restaurants.
The South King County corridor is the center of Filipino American life in Washington today — concentrated along the I-5 corridor south of Seattle. Federal Way has one of the highest per-capita Filipino populations in the state. Seafood City Supermarket in Tukwila serves as a community anchor. These are working-class and middle-class Filipino American neighborhoods built by the post-1965 professional wave and sustained by family networks.
The agricultural communities of Eastern Washington — Yakima, Wenatchee, Toppenish — have Filipino roots stretching back to the early 1900s, when Alaskero workers spent their off-seasons in the apple orchards and hop fields of the valley. Filipino farm workers faced violent harassment in these communities in the 1920s and 1930s. Their descendants remain, and the Filipino community of Eastern Washington is distinct from the Seattle metro — more rural, more agricultural, and with a direct line to the manong era.
Tacoma's Filipino community traces its roots to military families — Joint Base Lewis-McChord has historically drawn Filipino American service members and their families to Pierce County — and to post-1965 healthcare professionals at Tacoma's major hospitals. Inay's Kitchen in Tacoma is one of the most beloved Filipino restaurants in the state.
Key Milestones in Washington Filipino History
Notable Filipino Americans of Washington State
Born and raised in Seattle's International District, son of a Filipino immigrant father and a Native American and Filipina mother. Founding executive director of InterIm CDA. Co-founder of the multiracial Gang of Four. Arrested six times fighting for civil rights. Appointed by President Clinton as HUD's Pacific Northwest director. Wrote Hum Bows, Not Hot Dogs. Mentor to a generation. The unofficial mayor of the ID. Read PinoyBuilt coverage →
Officers of ILWU Local 37 and members of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP). Murdered at ages 29 and 28 in their Seattle union hall by gunmen with ties to the Marcos regime — days after passing an AFL-CIO resolution condemning martial law. The civil suit brought by their families resulted in a 1989 verdict holding the Marcos estate liable — the first such ruling against a former head of state in a U.S. court.
A Filipino entrepreneur in Seattle who challenged Washington State's 1921 Alien Land Law — which barred Filipinos from owning or leasing land. In 1939, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in his favor, striking down the law's application to Filipinos as U.S. nationals. One of the earliest and most consequential legal victories for Filipino Americans in the United States.
The first Filipina admitted to the Washington State Bar, and in 1978 the first Filipino American appointed to the Seattle City Council — where she served more than 12 years. With her husband Martin, co-founded the Filipino Forum newspaper in 1977. A civic institution in Filipino Seattle for five decades.
Won election to the Washington State Legislature from Seattle's 11th District in 1992 — the first Filipina elected to a state legislature in the continental United States. At the time of her election, the highest-ranking elected official of Filipino ancestry in the country. Served multiple terms and was a consistent voice for the Filipino American community and communities of color in Olympia.
The defining literary voice of the Filipino American migrant experience. Worked the canneries and farms of Washington, Oregon, and California. Based in Seattle for stretches of his life. His 1946 memoir America Is in the Heart remains the essential document of the Alaskero generation — brutal, lyrical, and impossible to put down. Edited the 1952 ILWU Local 37 Yearbook. Died in Seattle at approximately 43.
Seattle Times staff reporter who won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing fraud in federal Indian housing programs. One of the first Filipino American journalists to win a Pulitzer. Later became a journalism professor and author — his posthumously published essay "My Family's Slave" in The Atlantic sparked a national conversation about the kasama system and Filipino domestic labor.
Born and raised in Seattle, Dorothy Laigo Cordova is the daughter of Ilocano immigrants who owned a grocery store in the International District. She and Fred met at Seattle University in the late 1940s and spent the next six decades building Filipino American civic infrastructure together. In 1957, they co-founded the Filipino Youth Activities (FYA) — folk dancing, soccer, and a drill team that became a hub for social activism. In 1982, they founded the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) — the only national organization dedicated to preserving and documenting Filipino American history — with Dorothy as Founder and Executive Director and Fred as Founding President. Fred authored the landmark 1983 pictorial history Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans and in 1991 led the push to establish October as Filipino American History Month — recognized nationally by Congress in 2010. Fred passed on December 21, 2013. Dorothy, now in her nineties and still known across the community as "Auntie Dorothy," continues to work on behalf of FANHS and its National Pinoy Archives in Seattle. The Cordovas are the reason Filipino American history has a national home — and that home is in Washington State.
Community & Culture Today
The Filipino American community in Washington in 2026 is 243,000 people deep and still growing. It is a nurse at Swedish Medical Center. It is a software engineer at Boeing in Everett. It is a family eating sinigang at Musang on Beacon Hill. It is a Seafood City grocery run in Tukwila on a Sunday morning. It is a senior in a SRO hotel in the International District where Filipino men have lived for a hundred years, and a baby born this week to a family in Federal Way who has never heard the word Alaskero but carries the whole history in their blood.
What makes Washington's Filipino community distinct is that its history is inseparable from the American labor movement, from multiracial civil rights organizing, from the legal fight for property rights, and from the global struggle against dictatorship. The Alaskeros built the first Filipino-led union in the country. Bob Santos saved an entire neighborhood. Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes died for their convictions and took Marcos to court from beyond the grave. Pio de Cano won in the Washington Supreme Court. Velma Veloria walked into the state legislature.
That is not a community at the margins. That is a community at the center of American history — and it has been building in this rain-soaked, cedar-scented corner of the continent since before most people knew Filipinos existed.
I never lived in Washington — my path went from the Philippines to Chicago to Vallejo. But the Washington story runs through the same veins as every Filipino American story I've documented. The Alaskeros who wintered in the International District were the same generation as the manongs who cut asparagus in Stockton. Bob Santos was doing in Seattle what Larry Itliong did in Delano. And Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes paid with their lives for the same thing Pablo Manlapit was exiled for in Hawaii. PinoyBuilt exists to connect these dots — to show that the Filipino American story is not a collection of local histories but one long, ongoing act of building, fighting, and refusing to be erased. — J.F.R. Perseveranda
→ Read all Washington coverage on PinoyBuilt
→ Filipino American History archive on PinoyBuilt
→ Immigration stories on PinoyBuilt
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As of the 2020 Census, approximately 243,000 Filipino Americans live in Washington State — the fifth-largest Filipino American state in the U.S. The majority live in the Seattle-Tacoma metropolitan area, particularly in South Seattle, Federal Way, Renton, Tukwila, SeaTac, and Kent.
The first documented Filipino arrived in Washington in 1883. Significant immigration began after 1898, when the Philippines became a U.S. territory. By 1910, the Filipino population in Washington was twelve times greater than in California — concentrated in Seattle's International District and the canneries of Alaska.
Alaskeros were Filipino seasonal migrant workers who spent summers working in Alaska salmon canneries and winters in Seattle's Chinatown-International District and the farms of Eastern Washington. In 1933, Alaskero organizers in Seattle founded the Cannery Workers' and Farm Laborers' Union — the first Filipino-led union in United States history.
Bob Santos (1934–2016), known as "Uncle Bob," was a Filipino American civil rights activist born and raised in Seattle's International District. He served as founding executive director of InterIm CDA, preserved the ID against gentrification, co-founded the multiracial Gang of Four coalition with Bernie Whitebear, Larry Gossett, and Roberto Maestas, and was appointed by President Clinton as HUD's Pacific Northwest director. Uncle Bob's Place, a 126-unit affordable housing building in the ID, is named in his honor.
Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were Filipino American labor leaders and ILWU Local 37 officers murdered in their Seattle union hall on June 1, 1981, by gunmen with ties to the Marcos regime. Ages 29 and 28. The civil suit brought by their families resulted in a 1989 Seattle federal jury verdict holding the Marcos estate liable — the first time a former head of state was held civilly liable for political assassination in a U.S. court.
Pio de Cano was a Filipino American entrepreneur in Seattle who successfully challenged Washington State's 1921 Alien Land Law. In 1939, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in his favor, declaring that Filipinos — as U.S. nationals — could not legally be barred from owning or leasing land. It was one of the earliest legal victories for Filipino American civil rights in the country.
The historic Filipino anchor is the Chinatown-International District — where Alaskeros wintered for 60 years and where Uncle Bob's Place now stands. Today, the largest Filipino American populations are concentrated in South Seattle and South King County — Federal Way, Renton, Tukwila, SeaTac, and Kent — along with Beacon Hill and Columbia City, where Seattle's most celebrated Filipino restaurants have taken root.
Sources & Further Reading
HistoryLink.org — Filipino Americans in Seattle · HistoryLink.org — Filipino American History Month, Washington · UW Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project — Cannery Workers' and Farm Laborers' Union 1933–39 · UW Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project — Filipino Cannery Unionism Across Three Generations · UW Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project — Bob Santos · Wikipedia — Bob Santos (activist) · Wikipedia — Alaskeros · Filipino Community of Seattle — filcommsea.org · Bob Santos — Hum Bows, Not Hot Dogs: Memoirs of a Savvy Asian American Activist (Chin Music Press, 2002) · Bob Santos & Gary Iwamoto — Gang of Four: Four Leaders, Four Communities, One Friendship (Chin Music Press, 2015) · U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey 2020 · FACSP Olympia — Fil-Ams in the U.S.
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