Why Did the Manongs Stay Single?

Not all Filipinos in the United States during the 1920’s and 30’s remained single however, because of the negative social currents and open racism against them, starting a family in America was extremely difficult for most Manongs. Filipina wives and girlfriends were forbidden by U. S. law to join their sweethearts.

Matters became worse in 1926 when the state of California passed anti-miscegenation laws that prevented Filipinos from marrying white women, including Hispanics. However, some men simply drove out of state in order to marry their white sweethearts. On January 26, 1930 a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge ruled that all marriages between Filipinos and Caucasians performed since 1921 were invalid.[i]

Desperate, some Manongs attempted to pay a bride pay and enter arranged marriages:

Early on the morning of 2 December 1929, police raided the room of Perfecto Bandalan, 25, and found in the darkness two scantily attired white girls, Bertha and Esther Schmick, ages ten and sixteen. To a shocked public it was announced in court that the father of the girls had wanted to sell Esther to Bandalan for $500.[ii] Subsequently he charged that his wife had urged the deal so that she could “live on easy street.”[iii]

A flood of what editor David P. De Tagle coined “Filiopinomania” swept the state.

“…if the present state of affairs continues….there will be 40,000 half breeds in the State of California before ten years have passed”

~Judge D. W. Rohrbach, The Watsonville Evening Pajaronian, 10 January 1930

Until 1931, women who dared marry foreign born men with dark skin faced being stripped of their own U.S. citizenship.

While many whites also hardened their stance, young white girls still fell in love with their ardent “little brown brothers,” causing the occasional scandal: Dorcia Wilson (15) eloped on 21 March, and Velma Espinosa (15), “a mere slip of a child with golden brown curls falling to her shoulders, and blue eyes filled with tears,” was dragged into Salinas court on 1 July for marrying Rufo Canete.[iv] [v]

In 1932 Salvador Roldan filed suit in Los Angeles County, testing the anti-miscegenation laws.[vi] An Appellate Court ruled that Roldan could marry Marjorie Rogers, an Anglo woman because Filipinos are "Malays, not Mongolians." Marriages between Chinese men and white women were prohibited by existing anti-miscegenation laws.

This ruling did not sit well with the white majority. Anti-Filipino forces soon persuaded California lawmakers to pass legislation adding to the existing anti-miscegenation laws. Filipinos were again prohibited from marrying white women. All marriages between Filipino and white Californians were legally invalidated in 1933.

By 1936, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington also enacted laws prohibiting marriages between Filipinos and whites. Consequently, some white women became common-law wives.

Other Manongs, believing they had no alternative but to remain single, lavished their attentions on taxi dancers. Given that in 1920 the ratio of Filipino males to Filipina females was twenty to one and the 1930 rate was fourteen to one, it was only natural that the Manongs would seek companionship with women of other races. However many white citizens believed that meetings between the young Filipinos and taxi dancers, women whose morals were assumed to be questionable, led to “inappropriate behavior.”

“The Filipino male is often still portrayed as a rake, especially by the Western male observer. But this stereotype too does not account for the majority of Filipino men who are good fathers and husbands. In many ways, what attracted white women in the 1920s and 30s was not so much the sexual passions of the Filipino male, but their ability to care for and treat a woman, of any race.”[vii]

Not being able to find a wife was not always a matter of race. The opinion of some young Filipinas toward men of the Manong generation were not favorable. They too looked down upon Manongs and “fished” for all gifts, clothing, and jewelry they could get.

“The "ladies of the evening" saved young Filipinas from the sexual aggression of the manongs in the 1930s and 1940s.

They were reviled as "taxi dancers" or "ladies of the evening," the women who fulfilled the sexual proclivities of the manongs (Filipino farmworkers) in the 1930s and the 1940s. But to us, Pinay and mestiza (mixed race Filipinas) teenagers growing up in Stockton, California at that time, they were our buffers and saviors. Without them, we would have been aggressively and sexually pursued by the lonely bachelors, ages ranging from 17 to 30 years old, who outnumbered us girls by 14 to 1.”

~Anita F Bautista[viii]

Not all Filipinas held such catty notions. Just as women today hold a wide varity of opinions on any given subject, so did the women of yesteryear. Having grown up in the “Skid Row” section of San Diego, another Filipina claimed it was “not a scary place because it was home.” She and her siblings walked the streets without care, even after dark or when carrying shopping money. She recalled members of the Manong Generation as friendly, kind, and frequently purchasing candy for the neighborhood children.[ix] Our perspectives color our memories of the past. It is important to listen carefully to all points of view. Sometimes, there is more than one “truth.”

Not until after WWII was the constitutionality of anti-micegenation laws challenged.

Before the 1st Regiment departed for the western Pacific in May 1944, Colonel Offley had a major dilemma on his hands. Even though his regimental chaplains were prepared to perform marriage ceremonies between the Filipino soldiers and their white girlfriends, the strict anti-miscegenation laws in California prevented the men from applying for marriage licenses. Colonel Offley solved this by sending his soldiers and their sweethearts to Gallup, New Mexico on chartered buses that soon came to be called the "honeymoon express."[x]

Finally, in 1948, the California Supreme Court, in Perez v. Sharp, ruled that the Californian anti-miscegenation statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment. California repealed it’s law. Some Manongs chose to finally begin a family, often marrying women one or two generations younger than themselves.

However, it was not until 1967, during the height of the civil rights movement, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. Horrifyingly, on that date, 38 states still had such laws on their books.

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

~ The United States Supreme Court

Statistics today show that U.S.-raised Filipino Americans have a very high level of intermarriage with people of other races.[xi]

Let us always cherish the memories of all early interracial couples. We too must stand with courage and tenacity in order to prevent injustices from continuing as couples today fight for right to marry.

ENDNOTES
[i] Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano, Phd. “A General Timeline of Filipina/o American History” http://magnorubiounit.wikispaces.com/Timeline
[ii] “Salinas Index-Journal”, 2 December 1929 and 6 Decmber 1929
[iii] Meynell, Richard B., “Remembering the Watsonville Riots” http://www.modelminority.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271:remembering-the-watsonville-riots-&catid=40:history&Itemid=56
[iv] “Salinas Index-Journal”, 11 August-24 September 1930.
[v] Meynell, Richard B., “Remembering the Watsonville Riots” http://www.modelminority.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271:remembering-the-watsonville-riots-&catid=40:history&Itemid=56
[vi] Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano, Phd. “A General Timeline of Filipina/o American History” http://magnorubiounit.wikispaces.com/Timeline
[vii] Manasala, Paul Kekai. “New Historical Perspectives” http://asiapacificuniverse.com/pkm/phil.htm.
[viii] Bautista. Anita F. “Love in the Time of Taxi Dancres” Filipinas, Oct. 2007
[ix] Hemminger, Carol. “Little Manila: The Filipino in Stockton Prior to World War II”, Part II The Pacific Historian, Vol. 24 (Spring 1980) p. 214
[x] Fabros, Alex. S. “california and the Second World War: California’s Filipino Infantry” http://www.militarymuseum.org/Filipino.html
[xi] Le, C.N. "Interracial Dating & Marriage" Asian-Nation: The Landscape of Asian America. http://www.asian-nation.org/interracial.shtml