Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s

Abstract

Much recent writing on the history of Asian Americans before 1965 has challenged the traditional image of Asian American bachelor communities. Madeline Y. Hsu, Xiaojian Zhao, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, and this reviewer have all emphasized the role of women and families, either on-site or across the Pacific, among Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans. By contrast, Linda España-Maram returns the story to the bachelors—Filipinos in Los Angeles between the 1920s and 1950s. She thus extends and deepens Carlos Bulosan's semiautobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946), which sketched the lives of young, Depression-era Filipino agricultural workers along the Pacific slope, much as social historians a generation ago re-envisioned the Chicago eastern Europeans of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). Because Filipinos faced economic discrimination, they lacked job security, as well as legal protection. As seasonal workers in California agriculture or in Alaska's salmon canneries, or as personal service workers in West Coast cities, they created mutual support networks, piled into battered automobiles to drive from job to job, and sustained themselves as a “portable community” (p. 9). The single-room occupancy hotels, tailor shops, pool halls, and restaurants of Los Angeles's Little Manila supplied a stopping point for these young men in motion. But their community rested on more than shared struggles to survive. As España-Maram demonstrates in three well-documented chapters, Filipinos also gambled, cheered countrymen such as the middleweight champion Ceferino “Bolo Puncher” Garcia at boxing matches, and avidly patronized taxi-dance halls where they drew hostile attention for flamboyant attire and for dancing with white women. Leisure created solidarity in a hostile world. In each arena, they made social space, grounded in their nationality, gender, and age. Of particular interest, each activity pitted Filipinos against other racial minorities: Chinese who owned the gambling dens, African Americans who boxed, and Mexicans who also dressed up to frequent the taxi-dance halls.