Filipino Students at San Francisco State
Filipino Students at San Francisco State
The campus where the right to study our own history was not granted but taken — by students who struck for five months, and by a Filipino organization that helped start it.
PACE
Every other campus guide on this site opens with what an organization does for its members. This one has to open somewhere else, because the organization at San Francisco State did something that changed what is possible on every campus in the country, including the ones covered elsewhere in this series.
The Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor — later renamed the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, PACE either way — was founded at San Francisco State in 1968. Its founding leaders included Patrick Salaver, Ronald Quidachay, Robert Ilumin, and Alex Soria.
PACE was not founded as a protest organization. It was founded to tutor and recruit Filipino American youth for college — practical, unglamorous work aimed at getting more Filipino kids through a door that was barely open.
Members ran tutoring programs in Bernal Heights and in Central City, the district now called South of Market. PACE was allotted forty admission slots and spent the summer of 1968 recruiting Filipino high school and city college students to apply for them. Salaver built membership to roughly seventy students to sustain the effort.
PACE needed money and an office. The grant that funded the tutoring program and a temporary space came through Estrella Salaver — Patrick's mother — who used her connections in the Presbyterian inner-city church community to secure it.
The first College of Ethnic Studies in the United States traces back, through a chain of consequences, to a Filipina mother making calls through her church. Anyone raised in a Filipino family already knows this is how things actually get done. It is rarely written down.
The Strike
In the spring of 1968, PACE joined with the Black Student Union, the Mexican American Student Confederation, the Latin American Student Organization, Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, and the Asian American Political Alliance to form the Third World Liberation Front.
The name was deliberate. These were students who understood their situations as connected — a shared history of colonial and imperial rule, playing out on one campus in California while the United States was fighting a war across the Pacific and drafting their classmates into it.
The strike ran from November 6, 1968 to March 22, 1969 — about five months, and still the longest student-led strike in United States history. The strikers drafted fifteen demands, including a school of Third World studies and a Black studies department. They wanted an ethnic studies curriculum, more faculty of color, and a hand in admissions and institutional power.
Five months is two academic terms. Students who struck lost time, credits, and money they did not have. There were arrests. Governor Ronald Reagan took a public interest in breaking it. This was not a march or a semester of rallies — it was a sustained refusal at real personal cost, by students who mostly came from families that had sacrificed to get them there in the first place.
Salaver described the aim as educating Filipinos to the contradictions and hypocrisies of American society, and to presenting themselves as a community rather than being spoken for. He said that in February 1969, with the strike still going.
What Was Won
PinoyBuilt exists because Filipino American history is not taught, not archived, and not kept unless we do it ourselves. That is the premise of every page here.
San Francisco State is the counterexample and the origin story at once. It is the place where students decided that not being taught was unacceptable, and made an institution do something about it. They did not write a better article. They stopped the university for five months.
PACE Today
PACE did not become a historical marker. It has run continuously and still operates as a student organization at San Francisco State.
An annual student-run production presenting Filipino and Filipino American cultures through the performing arts. PACE describes it as the longest consecutively running PCN in the country — a claim worth taking seriously given the organization's founding date.
Students learn Filipino history, culture, and community involvement while working alongside PACE's leadership, with structured reflection on their own histories and ancestors. Few campus organizations anywhere run something this deliberate.
A separate graduation open to students of any major and any degree level, growing out of the campus's own history. Families should ask about the date early in the spring — student-organized ceremonies run on the students' calendar, not the university's.
PACE continues to run mentorship alongside its performance and graduation programs. The organization was founded to tutor and recruit, and nearly sixty years later that remains part of what it does.
Choosing SF State
A College of Ethnic Studies with a real faculty and a real curriculum, on a campus where studying your own community is not an elective indulgence but the institution's most consequential achievement. For a Filipino American student who wants to understand where they came from with academic rigor behind it, there is no equivalent in the CSU system.
This is San Francisco. Housing is the constraint that shapes everything else, and many students commute from farther out than they would like — from Daly City, from the East Bay, from down the Peninsula. Ask current students what they pay and how long the trip actually takes before you build a schedule around it.
SF State draws heavily from community colleges. An Associate Degree for Transfer in a matching major carries an admission guarantee within the CSU system. Ask your transfer center in your first semester — see the Solano and DVC guides for how those pathways work.
The city with one of the highest concentrations of Filipino Americans per capita in the United States sits immediately south of campus. That proximity is not incidental to what PACE was able to build in 1968, and it is not incidental now.
PinoyBuilt is looking for student correspondents. What it is like to study in a college your predecessors struck five months to create — that story has not been written by the students living it.
Student Correspondents →PACE is the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, founded at San Francisco State in 1968 and originally called the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor. It was created to tutor and recruit Filipino American youth for college. In the spring of 1968 it joined the Black Student Union and other organizations of color to form the Third World Liberation Front, and it remains active on campus today.
The Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front struck from November 6, 1968 to March 22, 1969 — roughly five months, the longest student-led strike in United States history. Students demanded an ethnic studies curriculum, increased hiring of faculty of color, and expanded admission for students of color. The strike produced the first College of Ethnic Studies in the nation.
Yes, as founding participants rather than late arrivals. PACE was one of the organizations that formed the Third World Liberation Front in spring 1968, alongside the Black Student Union, the Mexican American Student Confederation, the Latin American Student Organization, Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, and the Asian American Political Alliance. Filipino American students were central to the formation of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State.
Yes, and PACE describes it as the longest consecutively running PCN in the nation. It is an annual student-run production presenting Filipino and Filipino American cultures through the performing arts. PACE also runs a nine-week internship program covering Filipino history, culture, and community involvement, along with a student-run Filipino graduation known as FilGrad.
The founding leaders included Patrick Salaver, Ronald Quidachay, Robert Ilumin, and Alex Soria. Salaver was born in Mindanao in 1945, immigrated to the United States in 1953, and became a citizen in 1961. His mother, Estrella Salaver, used her connections in the Presbyterian inner-city church community to secure a grant that funded PACE's tutoring program and a temporary office.
Because the right to study Filipino American history in an American university was not granted. It was won at this campus by students who gave up five months of their education to demand it. A student enrolling at San Francisco State is entering an institution that Filipino students helped force open, and the College of Ethnic Studies is the standing proof.
