Filipino American National Historical Society - Greater Seattle Chapter

02/23/2026

01/31/2026

Filipina American Principal Dancer Angelica Generosa stars as Cinderella tonight (Sat 1/31) at 7:30 PM and Sunday Feb 8th at 7 PM at the Pacific Northwest Ballet McCaw Hall.

01/15/2026

International Examiner/Adrian Alarilla: “In 1906, after the Spanish–American War and U.S. colonization of the Philippines, American sugar plantation owners brought in the first Filipinos to work on their fields in the then-territory of Hawai‘i. From there, some Filipinos moved on to work the farmlands of the West Coast and canneries of Alaska, laying down the groundwork of Filipino migration to the U.S.
But rather than be welcomed for doing the hard farmwork that no one else wanted to do, Filipinos were met with suspicion and even hostility. Jonathan Okamura, Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, studied how Filipinos came to be stereotyped as criminals and dangerous foreign entities. This heightened tension peaked with a wave of anti-Filipino riots that spanned across the West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s. While the most famous were the Watsonville riots of 1930 in California, the first anti-Filipino riots in the U.S. actually occurred in Yakima Valley back in 1927. Back then, Filipinos were portrayed in mainstream discourse as uncivilized, criminal savages stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.
Much of that rhetoric continues today. In 2024, Trump and the Republican party ran on a platform of anti-immigration, with calls to “stop the migrant invasion,” “stop the migrant crime epidemic,” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”"

On December 21, Greggy Sorio, an ailing Filipino migrant and detainee at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma, was finally allowed to visit a doctor from outside the detention center. This came after months of alleged medical neglect from the private, for-profit corporation GEO Group, whi...

11/10/2025

Veterans Day 2025 Remembrance
https://vimeo.com/477423607
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Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS)
Filipino American Vietnam Veterans Oral History Project Videos
Preview: https://vimeo.com/145367703
Documentary: https://vimeo.com/170335291
Veterans Day Panel 2020 https://vimeo.com/488816601
Veterans Day Panel 2021 https://vimeo.com/645585852

This is "Silenced Stories: A Seattle Brotherhood & the Vietnam War" by Pereda Yano Productions on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people…

10/15/2025

Yale University will offer Filipino (Tagalog) courses for the first time in its 323-year history starting fall 2025, following months of dedicated student advocacy led by Tagalog @ Yale, an initiative within the university's Filipino student organization Kasama.

The Council on Southeast Asian Studies posted a job advertisement for a Filipino lector who will teach six courses annually under an initial three-year appointment, with possibilities for renewal and collaboration with Vietnamese and Indonesian language instructors to expand Southeast Asian Studies programming at Yale.

Student advocates collected over 380 signatures on their petition and worked closely with Erik Harms, Chair of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, to demonstrate the significant demand for Tagalog instruction—noting that it ranks as the fourth most-spoken language in the United States yet previously was only available through Yale's non-credit Directed Independent Language Study program.

Marissa Halagao and Janina Gbenoba, key student organizers, emphasized that the "Filipino (Tagalog)" designation recognizes the broader linguistic diversity of the Philippines, which has over 180 languages, and they hope this milestone will pave the way for additional Filipino language offerings and dedicated Filipinx Studies courses across departments.

The initiative represents what Gbenoba calls "a testament to the power of student voice and community," marking not an end but a foundation for continued advocacy to expand Asian language offerings at Yale, including underrepresented languages like Cantonese and Bengali.

10/10/2025

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Nobel Prize Author Viet Thanh Nguyen

The wounds of war leave deep scars that never fade in time. For the Filipino soldiers who struggled to survive the Bataan Death March in 1942, their resolve to fight under the American flag and their loyalty to the United States never wavered. But when it was all over, they were all forgotten by the very country they served – the United States of America. Theirs is a painful story of betrayal and a broken promise.

“As we celebrate Filipino American History Month, let us remember the courage and commitment of the more than 270,000 Filipino World War II veterans who gave their last full measure of devotion to a noble cause,” says FilVetREP Chairman Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (Ret). “They did their duty to country with valor and dignity. But they had to fight yet again in another battlefield to regain their rightful place in history, an honor that was denied them with the passage of the 1946 Rescission Acts.”

Read More: https://filvetrep.org/keeping-the-legacy-of-filipino-world-war-ii-veterans-alive/

10/01/2025

Happy Filipino American History Month!

08/31/2025