Southland Rifts : Filipinos--A Search for Community

Hostile rivals lock a president out of his office. The press dubs it a “bloodless coup.” The embattled leader summons his followers and tries to regain control of headquarters.

The air seethes with mistrust and intrigue. As angry opponents mass outside, police cars race to the scene.

Forget the bitter rifts that routinely topple national governments. This is politics --the Filipino-American Community of Los Angeles Inc. trying to straighten out its latest tiff.

“We have customs--if you’re hurt you have to fight,” explained Roland B. Fernandez, president of the nonprofit community group known as FACLA. “It’s not for the benefit or welfare of the community. It’s pride.”

Hard at Work

Despite the stormy events of that March afternoon, Filipino leaders say they are working harder than ever these days to create a more unified community in Los Angeles.

And they have reason: Filipinos are now believed to be the largest Asian ethnic group in Southern California, with 155,000 living in Los Angeles County alone, a United Way study found.

Yet if the community has grown dramatically, it remains remarkably invisible to those outside it. Filipinos often have Spanish last names, speak English and blend into the mainstream. There is no Philippine version of Chinatown or Little Tokyo; efforts to create one sparked rival factions that called a truce only recently.

“If we were to group together, to work as a team--wow--it would be a very powerful force,” said Solomon U. Lorenzana, whose market on North Vermont Avenue offers Philippine videos and magazines and such native cuisine as embotido , a sort of meatloaf with raisins.

Acknowledges Barriers

But Lorenzana knows that unity won’t come easily: “I could go 50 miles from one town in the Philippines to another and not understand a single word--not a single word. We don’t understand each other. We have different characteristics.”

That may be an understatement. The Philippines is a cacophony of dialects on a jumble of islands. Ninety languages are spoken in the land of 7,100 volcanic islands (mostly unnamed and little-populated) sprawling between Taiwan and Indonesia. “For us to be able to communicate with each other is a marvel in itself,” said Artemio G. Pagdan, a neurologist in Pomona who came to the United States in 1962.

Efforts are not always successful. Elections at FACLA--which has about 4,000 members but is just one of hundreds of Filipino organizations in the area--have sparked lawsuits, countersuits and at least one near-riot in recent months.

The confusing leadership fracas at FACLA headquarters is still being fought out in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“If we hadn’t intervened, that had the potential to become a big brawl,” recalled Ernie Valdez, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Asian Task Force, who called for backup units after arriving at the FACLA building in March.

Then there is the matter of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the Philippines’ deposed ruler. Passions over his regime split the community bitterly in recent years, although the divisions may be gradually fading.

“People in the Philippines take their politics personally,” Pagdan added, in a statement heard over and over in conversations with Filipinos.

How personally? “There’s a lot of vote-buying,” said Ernie Lopez, a Los Angeles police officer from Manila, of past elections for the FACLA presidency. “I’m talking about people mortgaging their house and borrowing huge sums of money to get this position.”

If politics can polarize, there is one thing the Filipinos share: a strong historical link to the United States.

The first immigrants, or Pinoys, arrived here in the 1760s when Filipino sailors deserted Spanish galleons to build wooden houses in the bayous of Louisiana, according to historians. In 1898, as a result of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines became a U.S. colony, after 350 years of Spanish domination. The islands did not gain independence until after World War II.

The colonial legacy endures: English vies with Tagalog as the most widely understood tongue. The languages even mix together in a slang known as Taglish. “Filipinos are comfortable in the (U.S.) language and the culture. Maybe overly so,” observed Gil Roy D. Gorre, editor of the Philippine American News in Los Angeles.

Language Proficiency

English skills help many Filipino immigrants get jobs quickly in the United States. Many arrive here prepared for work in health care and other professions. More than 8% of the registered nurses in Los Angeles County public hospitals and other health facilities are from the Philippines, according to the county’s Department of Health Services.

Most gauges of the Filipinos’ economic success in America are out of date, relying on 1980 census data. But they suggest that many recent immigrants have fared well.

An analysis of 1980 census data by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that Filipinos, after 10 years in this country, had higher incomes than comparable Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants. They also surpassed the earnings of white Americans.

In Los Angeles County, a United Way study ranked Filipino household income of $23,693 in 1980 as the highest of all Asian ethnic groups (Japanese-Americans placed second.)

Yet the very assets that help Filipinos thrive in America may also have a down side. The Filipinos, for example, seem to place lower emphasis on helping new immigrants with credit and other social support than do some other Asian groups.

“Our individual assets become a detriment to us collectively,” lamented David C. Guillermo, a Los Angeles public school teacher. “Each individual can say, ‘I don’t need you. I’ll push ahead on my own.’ ”

In fact, many Filipinos live in inconspicuous enclaves throughout Southern California. There are concentrations close to downtown--both near Temple Street and on Wilshire Boulevard--and in San Pedro, Wilmington, Cerritos, Carson and West Covina.

But these neighborhoods have never spawned visible centers of commerce and culture, such as Little Saigon--the Vietnamese hub in Westminster and Garden Grove--or booming Koreatown in Los Angeles.

“For the first five or even 10 years, the Koreans who come to America are most likely to go to a Korean bookstore, grocer and insurance agent,” Gorre maintained. “That creates a geographically defined center for them. But the Filipinos don’t feel subject to those same forces.”

Once they did. In the 1920s and 1930s Filipino pioneers who journeyed to California for jobs in canneries and farmlands settled in Little Manila, near today’s Civic Center.

But, in the first of a series of setbacks for the community, Little Manila was destroyed by redevelopment efforts. Many of the pioneers who lived there resettled in the area along Temple Street and Beverly Boulevard, between Union and Rampart streets.

After World War II, a different sort of immigration began, as more educated Filipinos opted for life in America. That wave accelerated when U.S. immigration barriers to Asians were eased in the 1960s.

Today, Filipinos make up 21% of the county’s entire Asian-Pacific population, according to the United Way study conducted in 1987. Americans of Japanese and Chinese descent each make up 20%. By some unofficial estimates, the Filipino community throughout Southern California may number 500,000.

“It is the largest Asian community in America,” Gorre declared. “The 1990 census is going to come up with a very big surprise on the Philippine community.”

While the new focus is on skilled, sophisticated immigrants, problems also are emerging. A few years ago, the Los Angeles Police Department counted 32 loosely knit Filipino gangs, with such names as Satana and Crazys, Lopez said.

Meanwhile, earlier immigrants face the travails of growing old, often with little money, in high-crime neighborhoods near downtown.

Leisure Times

“The old people are still there, playing cards under the trees,” said Connie L. Guerrero, executive director of the nonprofit Filipino American Service Group, which maintains a storefront community center next to a Chinese restaurant in a neighborhood of many Central American immigrants.

The recent report by the Civil Rights Commission pointed to a striking schism in the Filipino community. In contrast to the successful wave of recent immigrants, the U.S.-born families of earlier, unskilled Filipino immigrants suffered much more poverty than other longtime Asian-Americans.

Now, some Filipinos argue that the time has come to tackle these and other problems. The key, they say, is greater political clout through greater unity.

“We were here ahead of the Koreans and the Vietnamese and the Cambodians. All of them have accomplished a lot by getting together and asserting their rights, and we’re just minding our business individually,” said Pagdan, the neurologist.

Such arguments lead Filipinos straight to Philippine Town, the symbolic business-cultural hub that never has been achieved. But it isn’t for lack of trying.

A few years ago, Edgar O. Yap, an engineer from Manila, sought to build “the pioneer Filipino business-cultural complex in America” on the site of a vacant lot and some small buildings he owned on Temple Street a few blocks west of Alvarado.

Yap’s vision was ambitious: an eight-story hotel with a penthouse for foreign dignitaries, a professional building and a community center for the elderly. The hope was that other investors would follow, leading to a privately financed Philippine Town.

Yet it never got off the ground. “It’s a lot of dreams, I guess,” said Yap, 48, who has put his properties up for sale in an effort to bolster his battered finances. “I’ve got all the things in my mind, but it’s not working out the way I envisioned it.”

Lack of Funds

Zoning restrictions forced him to cut back the scale of his project, and he failed to recruit sufficient financial backing within the Filipino community, he said. Political support, meanwhile, ebbed and flowed as the Temple Street neighborhood was shuffled from the City Council districts of John Ferraro to Michael Woo to Gloria Molina.

Then, on top of everything else, a new group of Philippine Town advocates popped up. Perplexed government officials struggled to sort out the difference between Yap’s group, known as Nayong Pilipinas (Tagalog for Philippine Town), and the rival, which called itself the Philippine Town Movement.

“It’s not for me to determine who the Filipino leadership is,” Molina said in an interview. “I think they themselves have to talk about what the goals are and get it integrated in their strategy.”

The job of creating communitywide goals is far from done. Class divisions endure, for example, with a small Filipino elite keeping its distance from the broader ethnic community. “We don’t even talk to them,” Pagdan said of the wealthiest Filipinos. “We don’t even know who they are or how to get hold of them.”

Competing philosophies also linger on the role that personal profit should play in developing the community.

For his own part, Yap has not given up on developing a profitable hotel complex, and has lately taken his quest to British investors who he said are weighing the idea.

“If it will be successful, I can go to San Francisco--there’s a large Filipino community in San Francisco,” Yap said. “There’s a lot of Filipinos in San Diego and New York. We can have franchises.”

Others prefer to emphasize collective efforts, with profits from a community hub reinvested in the community.

Draws a Distinction

“When people are thinking that this (Philippine Town) is for the community--rather than to enrich sombody who has property in the community--those are two different things,” said Oscar Domondon, a Long Beach dentist.

Yet even as philosophical tensions smolder, signs of change are emerging.

Near Temple and Alvarado streets, for example, the $3-million Luzon Plaza is almost complete, its prospective Filipino tenants to include lawyers, a dentist and possibly part of the Philippine Consulate.

“One neighbor said, ‘Why are you taking such a risk?’ ” said Val G. Ramos, one of the plaza’s developers and a native of the Philippine island of Luzon. “We can’t just keep saying we need a Philippine Town. We have to take some action.”

It is a message that may be gaining currency. In recent months, the once-feuding factions behind Philippine Town have formed a joint advisory council to tackle issues of strategy and government aid.

Frank S. Ignacio, a caterer who is trying to spearhead unity efforts, recalls that he “almost had a heart attack” preparing for the first unity meeting last November.

But encouraged by the results, he now declares: “We’re coming of age. We’re dealing with the issue.”