THE MANONGS

THE MANONGS
Victorino P Mapa

They are forgotten now, the places where they once lived is hardly a memory. A city block in San Francisco - the area encompassing Kearny, Jackson, Washington and Montgomery streets where they once congregated, has completely disappeared. There’s a sleazy part in Los Angeles that starts from the corner of Alvarado Street and Temple that the city father’s designated as “Filipino Town” to remember them. But the Filipinos who live there now hardly know why it is so. What is perhaps characteristic of how they are recollected is a small, less than a hundred square feet cemetery in Maui where a few dozen of them are buried, some crosses askew, the names hand-scrawled. It is not at all noticed by the young who hie off to enjoy the pubs and bistros at nearby Lahaina.. These were the Manongs, the first Filipinos to come to the United States when the 20th Century was young , the predecessors who took the brunt of prejudice and discrimination for those who would come after them..
When first I set foot in the United States in the 50s. They had another appellation : OTs, or Old Timer - unbeknownst to them, a pejorative term given by the younger, better educated Filipinos who came after World War II. . The post-war Pinoys found the Manongs….…..”different.”. They were elderly, wore oversized suits bought off the rack, hair slicked back with pomade ala Rudolph Valentino and spoke a kind of patois that was a mixture of James Cagney English and words like “broo, pambrown, da kine” and referring to the mother country as “da islans”. “Hey bro, ya jus’ come from da islans? How’s t’ings down dere, da graff an corruption? “ Their questions were as offensive and grating as their ludicrous attempts to sound “stateside.” But the impudence was a shield to hide their inferiority, their lack of schooling. After the initial brashness however, their subsequent questions would denote a poignancy and homesickness that they cannot dislodge from their soul, “How does Manila look now? Has our country recovered from the war? Where are you from? My name is Ben Cruz. Have you heard of my family? I’m Ilocano and I haven’t heard much from my town since I left in……”I would begin to tell them what little I knew. The questions would gradually ebb and I would find myself the only one speaking . I was bringing them back to the land and people they have left behind , the motherland they have never stopped loving .
The first Manongs were like other immigrants who first set foot in America: the maltreated and abused , farmers working for obdurate landlords, the lowest of the low with no hope for a better future in their own homeland, Ignorant and unschooled they nevertheless shared the dreams of men who aspire to be free, the right to have his place in the sun, the privilege of steering his own future. They found that opportunity when America beckoned. She was beginning to flex her muscles at the turn of the 20th century. . She had built her skyscrapers and dug her coal mines with men from the old continent; built her railroads with the immigrant Irish and the Chinese coolie; In the expanding west her vast farms were now crying for men who were immune from the sun and the constant stooping that the work required. She conscripted the brown men from her new possession to work the sugar fields of Hawaii, the canneries of Alaska and the green fields of California.
The first wave arrived in 1902. The Manong couldn;’t have come at a worse time. The Philippine “insurrection” had just ended. There were tales about the atrocities of the war with yet more cruelties inflicted upon “our young American boys” by the dreaded “bolo-men” who attacked from ambush and just as suddenly disappeared, the press played up stories of the treacherous brown men who called you an “amigo” before hacking you from behind. “Behave yourself or Aguinaldo will come and get you!” was the admonition the mothers of America gave to their unruly children. And now they were here in America’s backyard. They heard the same gibes wherever they went, “You can worship with us but stand in the back of the church;speak our language but do not expect equality; work for our husbands but don’t mingle with our children! You may be President Mckinley’s little brown brother but you’re no brother of mine.”
They werer paid less than decent wages. couldn’t own property, weren’t allowed to live in “decent” neighborhoods and could not date white girls. Those that deigned to go out with them were labeled prostitutes. In fact, discriminatory laws were passed prohibiting the union between Filipinos and Caucasians TheManongs took work that the white man would not soil his hands with: Stoop farmer, busboy, barber, janitor, porter. Iinitially met them as fellow passengers on board an American President Lines ship on my first trip to the United States. I listened to their stories of how they fared when they came to America and took jobs that paid less than a dollar a day, of indentures in the canneries of Alaska that paid almost nothing, how they were beaten by red-necks and doors closed to them because they were……”different.” “during da depression bro, time was bad for all…we tram’ (tramped) on caboose treyns (trains) walked miles , find work, lose work, den’ we go ‘nother town, find work, anything, enywhere, but we help each other, no kababayan lef’ hungry, and we always find work….”
They were short-changed, conned and insulted at every turn. As with other émigrés that came before them the Manongs were made to go through the fire and forge of bigotry and exploitation before they could blend into the American mainstream. The mettle of the Manong shone through the hardships. His industry lending quiet dignity to whatever menial tasks were assigned to him.