Synopses & Reviews
Filipinos arrived in the Washington, D.C., area shortly after 1900 upon the annexation of the Philippines to the United States. These new settlers included students, soldiers, seamen, and laborers. Within four decades, they became permanent residents, military servicemen, government workers, and community leaders. Although numerous Filipinos now live in the area, little is known about the founders of the Filipino communities. Images of America: Filipinos in Washington, D.C. captures an ethnic history and documents historical events and political transitions that occurred here.
Review
Title: 'Images of America" book launched in D.C.
Author - Maurese Oteyza Owens
Publisher: Philippene News
Date: 12/11/09
Who were the Early Filipinos in the Washington, D.C. area? Ever wondered about this?
There"s a new book that tells that story -- 'Images of America: Filipinos in Washington, DC,' by Rita M. Cacas and Juanita Tamayo Lott. The book was launched December 1 at the Marvin Center of the George Washington University. Here's the story of Filipinos in the nation"s capital told through more than 200 vintage photos pulled mainly from family albums centering around settlements and stories of our community from 1900-1964 (before the beltway was constructed), as well as photos from the National Archives collections.
The book launch was sponsored by the Philippine Cultural Society of the George Washington University (GWU) in cooperation with the Philippine Arts, Letters, and Media Council (PALM). The Philippine American Foundation for Charities (PAFC) and the National Federation of Filipino American Associations supported the project.
The launch, organized by Mitzi Pickard of PALM and Kaye Ablen, president of the GWU Philippine Cultural Society, drew a diverse audience. Questions from the audience elicited curiosity and awe at who these Filipinos were at the turn of the century. Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park Larry Shinegawa was present and applauded the publication of the book. Filipino Americans who are interested in their history will find this 128-paged pictorial both fascinating and informative.
Copies of the book may be purchased from PAFC. Please contact Ador Carreon at [email protected]/tel. 240.475.2645 or Maurese Owens at [email protected] or 703.606.8796.
Review
Title: Authors shine a light on local Filipino heritage
Author - Brooke Kenny
Publisher: Gazette.net
Date: 1/27/10
Rita Cacas decided to remedy a situation that disturbed her. After realizing that most accounts of Filipino immigration to the United States focus on the West Coast, the Silver Spring resident created the book "Filipinos in Washington, D.C." to spotlight the lively community and rich culture that exist on the East Coast.
She teamed up with demographer and fellow Filipino-American Juanita Tamayo Lott to research and write the book. It is part of Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series that seeks to preserve the history of various communities across the nation.
"Filipinos in Washington, D.C." documents area Filipinos from the early 1900s to the present, from pioneers through the generations that followed, mostly through pictures of families, cultural events and workplaces. The photographs have detailed captions that place the people and events in a larger historical context.
According to Cacas, Filipinos who came to the U.S. between 1900 and 1945 sought education and opportunity. The book highlights the lives of ordinary people who served in the U.S. military in World Wars I and II and Vietnam, and continue to be an important part of the military, as well as academia and the private sector.
Both women brought a wealth of personal and professional knowledge to the project. Lott, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Colesville, is a retired demographer and policy analyst who worked as the special assistant to the U.S. Census Bureau director.
Cacas, who works at the National Archives, is an experienced photographer. Her father arrived in the D.C. area in 1929. He tried to tell his children about his experiences, but "We weren't ready to hear those stories."
Later, when her father began to suffer from Alzheimer's disease, Cacas realized it was time to document his experience and those of other Filipino immigrants he knew.
"A lot of the stories that he tried to tell us about were disappearing," she says.
In 1993, Cacas received a small grant from the Prince George's Arts Council to document the local Filipino community through photographs and began her project, "A Visit with My Elders: Portraits and Stories of Washington area Filipino Pioneers." She presented the photographs and gave talks at conferences, libraries and cultural centers. Along the way, she connected with even more people in the Filipino community.
The project laid the groundwork for the book that Cacas and Lott began working on in earnest in 2008.
"Trying to collect pictures for the book was one of the biggest challenges," Cacas says, explaining that some of the older people she dealt with did not save old family photos.
Fortunately, she found mounds of pictures collected by the Toribios, long-time family friends. She gathered some 1,000 photos, and chose about 250 for the book, the ones she thought best told the local Filipino story.
Another challenge, Cacas notes, was that publishing guidelines dictated that the captions could not exceed 70 words. Boiling down life stories was difficult.
Cacas feels the stories in the book have value to anyone interested in the immigrant experience in America, and hopes to encourage young people to keep track of their family histories.
"You have to understand and appreciate your past to move forward," she observes.
Lott believes the personal nature of the stories makes it easy for readers to connect with the experiences.
"We tell the story of people who overcame a lot of things so that they could have the American dream," she says.
"Filipinos in Washington, D.C." is available at Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffee Shop, 5015 Connecticut Ave., Washington, D.C, as well as online at www.arcadiapublishing
.com or www.amazon.com. The authors will sign copies of their book from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on April 18 at Barnes and Noble, 4801 Bethesda Ave., Bethesda, as part of the Bethesda Literary Festival.
Review
Title: FILIPINOS IN WASHINGTON DC: A revealing documentary of our history in America
Author - Rene Villaroman
Publisher: Asian Journal
Date 5/1/2010
Clemente Castro Cacas was born in Narvacan, Ilocos Sur in the Philippines in 1910 and came to the United States at age 19 in 1929 -- a few years before the Great Depression.
Cacas came to the United States on a whim. He belonged to a few, select group of Filipinos that were allowed to travel to the America during the American Occupation of the Philippines. That group included pensionados, United States Navy men, students, and adventurers like him.
He landed in San Francisco, then moved to Washington DC. There, he joined an already flourishing Filipino community who had established themselves since 1910. .
The US government did not allow Filipinos like Cacas to become citizens. Instead, they were regarded as US nationals, the same way Puerto Ricans are classified today.
Their children, however, became American citizens by birth. Clemente"s pioneering and historic beginnings would have remained unknown, if not for the efforts of Rita, one of his children, who co-wrote a book which documented the lives of Filipino families in the Washington DC area from 1910 until the 1930s.
As young kids, Rita and her sibling weren"t very keen on their father"s stories about his early years in the United States. But when he started to exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer"s Disease, Rita decided that it was time that she sat down with him and listened attentively to his stories.
She began her research in the late 1970s and early 1980s. "By that time my father was suffering from Alzheimer"s, and he started to forget about those stories," she reveals. "I realized there was not very much time left. I conducted a 3-hour interview with him; we looked at all his old photographs '" photo albums from the '30s and '40s-- and that brought back some of the memories. As he was talking about his experiences, he started talking about friends and colleagues, who I realized that outside of his personal stories, there were a lot of those families I did not know."
After that pivotal interview with her father, Cacas received a grant from the state of Maryland in 1993 that allowed her to secure the oral histories of 22 Filipino old-timers.
An experienced photographer, Cacas works at the National Archives in Washington, DC. She took museum-quality portraits of the families with the intention of publishing those in a luxury coffee-table picture book. But she had to abandon that project when she realized that such a book would cost between $80 to $100.
Images of America: Filipinos in Washington, DC was published by Arcadia Publishing, an addition to 20 other books about Filipino-Americans from various regions in the United States which they"ve published. Images of America is priced at $22 a copy and was launched last November.
"We presented a proposal to Arcadia Publishing in the summer of 2008, and we received our contract before the end of summer," Rita Cacas said.
Juanita Tamayo Lott, Cacas" co-author, was raised in San Francisco, but spent her adult years in Washington, DC. She is a retired Federal senior demographer, policy analyst and special assistant to the US Census Bureau director. She co-founded the first US Filipino American Studies in San Francisco State University in 1960, and the Filipino American Studies Program at the University of Maryland College Park in 2007.
Cacas began writing and collecting vintage pictures around November 2008. "The first problem we had was trying to get some of the vintage photographs from families because a lot of these persons were already in assisted living homes and they had to scale back on their possessions, and so the children did not want the black-and-white photographs and some just threw them away," Cacas said.
Lady Luck, however, smiled at her. "We found the Toribio family, who lived on Cobb Island, which is one hour away from DC. They have several Tupperware bins full of these historical photographs from the 1930s and 1940s," Cacas relates. She was able to scan and restore some of those photographs for the book. "A lot of those photographs documented some of the big, lavish parties that were held at a few DC hotels, like the Mayflower and Scouts Hotel. These are all very famous hotels around the '30s and '40s, and they still exist," Cacas reveals.
Arcadia required that they limit the picture selection to a maximum of 220 photographs, and the caption for each photographs to a total of 70 words. "That was difficult," Cacas said. Some of the manuscripts and photographs will go to the Library of Congress for use by other writers and authors.
"I feel that I"ve done what"s needed here, and whenever I go out to talk about the book, I try to encourage young people to write their own story because there are a lot of communities that have emerged since 1965 that need to be documented as well."
She wrote the book while working full-time as an archivist at the National Archives. "I have been working full-time with the Federal government for about 33 years '"at the National Gallery of Arts for about 20years, and then I went to graduate school, major in Library and Archives," Cacas said. "I would come home around six o"clock at night and I would be working until three in the morning," she relates. "That"s when my Library Archives training came in handy because I needed to be able to learn how to give a good summary of the persons" lives that would give justice to them in 70 words. These were people who were involved in historic events."
On April 24, at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in UCLA, Rita and five other authors had a book signing event. Their attendance there was under the auspices of Philippine Expressions Bookshop, the only Filipino-owned mail-order bookshop that is promoting the literary works of Filipino and Filipino-American writers.
The other authors who came to festival were Cacas" co-author, Juanita Tamayo Lott, Cecilia Manguerra Braid, who co-edited Finding God: True Stories of Spiritual Encounters with Marili Ysip Orosa; Carina Monica Montoya, author of Let"s Cook Adobo!, a cookbook for children designed by artist Eliseo Art Silva; Ming Menez Coben, PhD, author of Verbal Arts in Philippine Indigenous Communities: Poetics Society and History; and Carlene Sobrino Bonnivier, who penned Seeking Thirst, her second novel.
"Today has been very good, although, really much less than in previous years," Expressions owner Linda Nietes reports. "There were bigger years; I guess the economy affected a lot of people; although I noticed that the crowd is not so large compared to previous years, I think that our sales have been good as well. Every time we participate we always get new clientele '" beautiful'"and that"s why we are here; we want to outreach," Nietes said.
About the Author
Rita M. Cacas is a native Washingtonian and daughter of one of the Depression-era pioneers. A longtime federal government
employee, Cacas previously worked at the National Gallery of Art and currently works at the U.S. National Archives. Juanita Tamayo Lott was raised in San Francisco, but her adulthood has been spent in the Washington, D.C., area. She is a retired federal senior demographer, policy analyst, and special assistant to the U.S. Census Bureau director. She cofounded the first U.S. Filipino American Studies at San Francisco State in 1969 and the Filipino American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007.