Nowadays you can find Filipino people everywhere in California. I have met countless numbers of Filipino people living in the Bay Area, so I thought it would be interesting to research the history of Filipinos in California. In this research paper, I"m going to talk in depth about the history of the Filipinos in California, mostly from the time they immigrated, up until the 1960s. I will also give more current population information of Filipinos in California. Much of my research will come from Ronald Takaki's book entitled A Different Mirror, from websites, and from various other pieces of literature. By researching Filipinos in California, I aim to learn more about the Filipino people that I come in contact with on a daily basis. .
Filipinos have been living in California for about four hundred years. The earliest Filipinos in California can be traced back to 1587. Filipinos were among the crew and landing party of Captain Pedro de Unamuno who landed in the central California coast in 1587 (Borah 2001). There are a few other documented cases of Filipinos in the United States before the 1900's but the first major wave of Filipinos came in the early 1900's with the immigrant laborers. When the first wave of immigrants came to the California, like many immigrants, most came to make money. In around 1910, the first waves of Filipino immigrants began arriving in San Francisco and were transported to other areas such as Stockton, where they could find work on farms. About 60% of the Filipinos who came at that time worked on farms. About 25% of the Filipino population worked service jobs such as janitors, dishwashers, busboys or kitchen helpers. Others worked for Alaskan fisheries and would come back to California during the off season (Takaki, 1989).
To the surprise of many Filipino farm laborers, work was excruciatingly tough. One Filipino laborer recalled his first workday by saying "I worked about six hours that first day, and when my back was hurting I said to myself: "Why did I come to this country? I was doing easy in the Philippines.
