\u201cIt really feels like you can see the movement happening when you trace each decade,\u201d said Josen Diaz, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. \u201cPeople literally coming to the shores and then ending up making the city their own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two countries tied together<\/p>\n
The U.S. took control of the Philippines on the cusp of the 20th century.<\/p>\n
The Philippines had been a Spanish colony for hundreds of years. But in 1898, as part of a peace treaty with the U.S., Spanish leaders transferred authority over the country<\/a>. They struck that agreement even though Filipino leaders had declared independence, sparking a brutal war for independence between Filipino revolutionaries and U.S. military forces.<\/p>\n Some Americans were openly afraid that annexing the Philippines would make all of its residents U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n Rick Baldoz, a professor of American Studies at Brown University, said that was partly because many white Americans saw Filipino people as racially inferior. U.S. news reports from the time depicted them as \u201cuncivilized savages,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court denied citizenship to Filipino residents, creating a new classification called \u201cU.S. national.\u201d Federal courts also banned Filipino immigrants from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens based on their race.<\/p>\n \u201cThey owed allegiance to the U.S., but they were not U.S. citizens,\u201d Baldoz said.<\/p>\n In the 1920s and 1930s, young Filipino men began immigrating to the U.S. as laborers.<\/p>\n They were able to travel to the U.S. freely because of their status as U.S. nationals. But they were barred from voting in the U.S. and faced racial segregation<\/a> in where they could live and work.<\/p>\n The earliest generations were attracted to San Diego because of opportunities to work on farms and in canneries. They began to build communities in places like the South Bay and downtown neighborhoods<\/a>.<\/p>\n Independence fueled by exclusion<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long before Filipinos experienced the rising tide of anti-Asian racism throughout the U.S. during that time.<\/p>\n It was the era of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act<\/a>. Amid an economic downturn and consolidation of wealth by powerful railroad companies, Congress had passed multiple laws aimed at banning Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the country.<\/p>\n Filipino immigrants defied those racial conventions of the time. According to Baldoz, many young men would spend time at taxi dance halls, nightclubs that allowed mixed-race dancing. They would also flout laws against interracial marriage, driving to Mexico or Canada to get married.<\/p>\n Their defiance incensed white nationalist leaders, Baldoz said, who organized campaigns of vigilante violence against Filipino communities across the West Coast. They began lobbying Congress to look for ways to ban Filipino immigrants from the U.S. too.<\/p>\n Those anti-immigrant, or \u201cnativist<\/a>\u201d activists soon began to focus on a new goal: Philippine independence.<\/p>\n \u201cAs long as the Philippines was a colony of the U.S., Filipinos would have the right to immigrate here,\u201d Baldoz said. \u201cSo nativists end up switching gears and deciding to focus their efforts on securing Philippine independence as really the only way to achieve their goal.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1934, Congress bowed to the pressure. They passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act<\/a>, which laid out a decade-long pathway to independence. It also immediately put severe restrictions on Filipino movement to the U.S.<\/p>\n Baldoz points out that the decision wasn\u2019t only a victory for anti-immigrant activists. Filipino nationalists had long pushed for independence, and the law also had some backing from the Midwest farming industry.<\/p>\n But he argues that the specifics of the law show that the nativists had won out.<\/p>\n \u201cIndependence in 10 years \u2026 exclusion immediately,\u201d Baldoz said. \u201cSo that\u2019s interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. Signal Corps via Ricardo Trota Jose<\/p>\n A general view of the 4th of July ceremonies which inaugurated the independence of the Philippine Republic. July 4, 1946.<\/p>\n A plan upended by war<\/p>\n World War II upended that exclusion plan as the Philippines swiftly became a major front in the Pacific theater.<\/p>\n On the same day as it attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese government launched a bloody occupation of the island nation. Hundreds of thousands of Filipino people signed up to fight under the U.S. flag<\/a> to liberate the country. In exchange for their service, Congress promised them a streamlined path to U.S. citizenship.<\/p>\n After the war, the first cracks in the U.S.\u2019s racial immigration restrictions began to emerge.<\/p>\n In 1946, the same year that Congress granted Philippine independence, it also passed a series of laws that challenged racial immigration restrictions<\/a>. The War Brides Act<\/a> allowed women who had married U.S. service members overseas to immigrate. The Luce-Celler Act<\/a> repealed bans on Filipino and Indian immigrants becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n Despite those changes, movement from the Philippines to the U.S. was still heavily controlled. That\u2019s partly because the U.S. didn\u2019t keep its promise of citizenship.<\/p>\n After the war, federal immigration officials raised the same anti-immigrant fears that U.S. lawmakers had decades earlier: That thousands of Filipino immigrants who had fought for the U.S. would suddenly become citizens.<\/p>\n Baldoz said the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to ICE, withdrew their naturalization officers assigned to the Philippines. That left hundreds of thousands of Filipino service members with nowhere to apply for the status they were promised.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. had deliberately made it essentially impossible to apply,\u201d Baldoz said.<\/p>\n Soon, Congress officially revoked that citizenship promise with the Rescission Act of 1946<\/a>, sparking a long-running civil rights battle for Filipino veterans that continues today.<\/p>\n Judy Patacsil, a professor of Filipino Studies at San Diego Miramar College, stands for a portrait at the KPBS offices in San Diego, California on June 9, 2026.<\/p>\n Generations of change<\/p>\n Despite those ongoing limits on immigration, San Diego was one of the few Filipino communities in the U.S. that continued to grow, largely due to the expanding military presence in the region.<\/p>\n San Diego\u2019s community was able to grow, Baldoz said, largely because it was a major Navy port. In the Navy, Filipino sailors traveled all over the world and had more opportunities to apply for naturalization than soldiers in the Philippines.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a really unique case in San Diego,\u201d he said. \u201cThey sort of occupied a really kind of narrow space of Filipino American life.\u201d<\/p>\n More families started moving into places like National City, San Ysidro and the Paradise Hills neighborhood of San Diego \u2014 a hub for Navy families<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Those that were here then brought wives back and started families,” said Judy Patacsil, a professor of Filipino Studies at San Diego Miramar College. “And that’s when the community I believe actually started to grow.”<\/p>\n Filipino leaders started landmark community organizations, including the Filipino American Veterans Association and the Filipino American Women\u2019s Club.<\/p>\n In the following decades, the U.S. government made sweeping changes that opened doors for many more immigrants from the Philippines.<\/p>\n In 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act<\/a>, ending strict racial limits on immigration from Asian countries. Lawmakers approved measures aimed at reuniting families and incentivizing specialist workers to immigrate.<\/p>\n In the Philippines, the authoritarian government of Ferdinand Marcos also launched an effort to encourage workers to move abroad and send money home, a national strategy to grow the young nation\u2019s economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMany Filipino Americans start sponsoring their family members back home to immigrate to the U.S. to escape some of the political turmoil in the Philippines, as well as economic dysfunction,\u201d said Baldoz.<\/p>\n Across the country, Filipino communities saw new generations of immigrants. Families in San Diego began to move outward, forming community hubs in Chula Vista and northern San Diego neighborhoods like Mira Mesa and Rancho Penasquitos.<\/p>\n Filipino Americans are now the largest Asian American community<\/a> in San Diego, and the second-largest in California.<\/p>\n Congregation members from St. Mary\u2019s Catholic Church in National City offer roses during an annual fiesta in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary of Manaoag, an image of the Virgin Mary with deep roots in the Pangasinan province of the Philippines, on May 30, 2026.<\/p>\n \u2018Echoes from the past\u2019<\/p>\n Today though, few remember the fact that the Fourth of July marks the signing of the Treaty of Manila and a turning point in U.S. and Philippine history.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782738383_724_.jpeg\")
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