Celebrating the Life and Legacy of UCLA’s ‘Uncle Roy’

Royal Morales may be a distinguished UCLA lecturer, a prominent Filipino American community leader and author, but everybody calls him ‘Uncle Roy.”

Like everyone’s favorite uncle, the Los Angeles-born former social worker is accessible and kind, and ever ready to listen and give a helping hand.

“Taking his class is like meeting a long-lost uncle [and having him] tell you where you came from,” said Daniel Gumarang, a former student. ‘There is no wall between Uncle Roy and his students.”

Today, Morales, 63, one of the most popular teachers at UCLA, is retiring after 15 years there, and the university is hosting a big bash. It is also creating the Royal Morales Prize in Pilipino American Studies--an annual award for the most outstanding undergraduate paper on the subject.

“This is quite an honor,” said Morales, an unassuming man whose hallmark is humility.

He is stepping down to “make room for talented younger people” to take his place, but he will always be Uncle Roy, Morales said.

And he will continue to be available for community work in Los Angeles and in his ancestral town in the Philippines, where he is helping support a high school his parents helped found half a century ago.

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Though UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center won’t be the same after today, Morales’ influence will live on in the lives he has touched.

“I gained my Filipino identity in his class,” said Gumarang, who grew up among Latinos in Los Angeles. “I learned not to be ashamed of my Filipino heritage but to be proud of it.”

Don T. Nakanishi, director of the center, calls Morales a “national living treasure.”

“He has influenced literally thousands of Filipino American students to be of service not only to the Filipino American community but to make America a better place,” he said.

For more than three decades, Morales has been a model to young Filipinos--’helping to preserve Filipino values within the structures of the values they find here in America,” in the words of an old friend.

With an uncommon knack for making the complex and diverse Filipino American experience come alive, he imparts knowledge. His teaching combines storytelling, music-playing, field trips and historical analysis with his observations gained as a social worker and community leader in his native Los Angeles.

“He makes history so real,” said Andre Morimoto, a Japanese American senior. “He is a walking database of information you can’t find anywhere.”

What Morimoto and other students especially appreciated were the ‘community tours” Morales conducted on Saturdays.

Starting at the landmark Filipino heritage mural at Beverly Boulevard and Union Avenue--the heart of Los Angeles’ Filipino Town--Morales led his students to the Filipino Christian Church, the oldest surviving Filipino institution in Los Angeles, the Pilipino American Reading Room and Library, and the Bunker Hill and Civic Center area, home to a thriving Filipino community in the 1920s and ‘30s.

By 1932, when Morales was born on Bunker Hill, Filipinos by the hundreds had settled there. His family lived in an apartment house where the Music Center now stands.

At the Filipino Christian Church, which his father helped found, Morales became “everybody’s son” because there were so few Filipino children in the predominantly bachelor community. “Hundreds of Filipino bachelors lived lonely lives in crowded apartment houses--sometimes 10 to a room,” said Morales.

They slept in shifts, and worked as houseboys, cooks, gardeners and chauffeurs, he said. When they got paid, they oiled their hair and walked down the hill to “taxi dance halls” in the area bounded by 1st, 3rd, Broadway and Hill streets.

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In Morales, America and the Philippines live side by side.

Though he was born in Los Angeles, he spent most of his childhood in his ancestral country. His parents returned to their native Ilocos in the northern Philippines during the Depression.

They had come to Los Angeles in the late 1920s to study to be Christian missionaries.

In Ilocos, American-born Roy quickly learned Ilocano and became Filipino.

When he turned 18, his parents sent him to his uncle in Hawaii for a university education.

Morales wanted to attend the University of Hawaii, but he had forgotten so much English during his stay in the Philippines that he failed an entrance examination.

At the urging of his uncle, he came to Los Angeles, where he eventually earned a degree in social work from USC. After a stint in the Army in the 1950s, Morales worked with troubled youngsters in Los Angeles. People in the community still talk about the many kites he used to help them make.

With the influx of large numbers of Filipino immigrants in the 1970s, Morales saw growing problems among Filipino youths. So he helped found the Search to Involve Pilipinos, a key community agency working with Filipino American youth.

Long a proponent of using “Pilipino” with a P--the pre-Spanish alphabet of the Philippines has no F--Morales has been a key player in mobilizing “positive ethnic consciousness of cultural pluralism” in America.

His mission is to help Filipino Americans--California’s largest Asian group--to understand their history: the struggles, the contributions and the challenges.

“It is not enough to think: ‘I am taking care of myself and that’s sufficient,’ ” he said. “We need to look at the bigger picture.”

UCLA won’t be quite the same after today.

‘He has influenced literally thousands of Filipino American students.’