LOOKING FOR LIL' MANILA

By Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
from Gidra Summer 2001, reprinted with the permission of Gidra

photo: courtesy Filipino American National Historical Society Stockton

Today, what is left of Stockton's Little Manila is a single block of decaying pre-war buildings. During a recent two months, more than six decades of history were razed in the name of urban renewal.
Few non-Asian Stockton residents know the area's rich history, and few Filipina/os younger than I have any idea that the intersection, long regarded as a city eyesore, was once more than a trash heap of tired buildings, drunks, drug dealers and homelessness.
We often lament that Filipinos lack a physical place on the cultural landscape that we can claim. But years ago, we did have a Little Manila, a place to call our own.

Little Manila, USA
My grandfather arrived in America in 1929 and worked all over the West Coast, sweating in the Alaskan canneries and stooping in the asparagus fields of the San Joaquin Valley, eventually settling in the sleepy Central Valley port city of Stockton.
He bought the Lafayette Lunch Counter with two neighbors in 1931. Until he sold the hole-in-the-wall restaurant in 1978, Lolo Ambo ran the business in the heart of Stockton's Little Manila, the Filipina/o community at the intersection of Lafayette and El Dorado Streets in downtown.
Approximately 6,000 Filipina/os lived here during its heyday in the decade before World War II. Thousands of new immigrants flocked to Stockton annually. They stayed because the area provided work year-round: pruning in the wintertime, asparagus in the spring, and tomatoes and grapes in the summer and fall. By the 1930's, numerous businesses, organizations, and families made Stockton their home.
"We used to own El Dorado," observes old-timer and second-generation Pinoy Jerry Paular.
My mother, Christine Bohulano Bloch, a second-generation Pinay, says, "I played there as a little girl, and remember seeing all the old-timers dressed up, giving me quarters because I spoke the dialect."

In With Renewal
By the 1960's, city officials began to cast a wary gaze on Chinatown and Little Manila. City officials, planners and developers were envisioning a bright, new city without the ethnic neighborhoods and accompanying litter: the low-cost housing in single-room occupancy hotels, ethnic grocery stores, working-class bars, pool halls, restaurants and dance halls and old churches.
Two blocks of Little Manila, north of Lafayette Street, were razed in the late 1960's to make way for the Crosstown Freeway. My cousin Joan May Cordova, a scholar of Filipina/o American studies, speaks about how the bewildered and angry old-timers watched as their homes and gathering spots were torn down. Relatives scrambled into the hotels to grab anything that wasn't bolted down while bulldozers stood ready to reduce the community to rubble.

Looking Back
It is May of 1999, and I am in front of a padlocked, abandoned Lafayette Lunch Counter, watching the demolition kickoff. The Gateway Project, as the Redevelopment Agency has dubbed it, will replace modest amenities serving the block's residents with a filling station and a fast-food restaurant.
The demolition took more than two months. The buildings had housed generations of tired, brown bodies. Bulldozers pushed in walls efficiently, if not ruthlessly. Backhoes deftly plucked bricks.
Today that block is a barren lot, just dirt and weeds. Several months after the demolition, construction on the new station was stalled. Apparently, the ground was contaminated by fuel tanks buried deep in the earth from the old Supnet Garage.
Last November, the City Council unanimously approved the proposal for the Little Manila Historic Site. The Filipino American National Historical Society Stockton Chapter is currently planning a memorial for the site within the next year. A long-range plan involves rehabilitating the area and building a Filipino American National Museum.
The markers and buildings of Little Manila are physical reminders of those generations who endured and struggled so that we can prosper. The struggle to preserve our history for future generations will continue.
Where others see blight, we see our history.
To get involved, contact stocktonfanhs@aol.com or dmabalon@stanford.edu. We especially need letters of support and funding for a Little Manila memorial plaque.
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at Stanford University. She wrote to Gidra, "A McDonald's will be placed in the block where my grandfather's restaurant used to stand."