Little Manila: Stockton's Filipino Quarter Before the War

Filipino workers began arriving in Stockton in large numbers in the nineteen twenties, recruited by agricultural labor contractors to cut asparagus and celery in the tidal fields of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The work was brutal: bent double over rows of asparagus in fields that flooded with cold delta water, cutting at a pace set by contractors who were paid by the crate. The community they built in Stockton along El Dorado Street, the district that would come to be called Little Manila, was, by the nineteen forties, described as the largest Filipino community in the United States.

It is worth pausing on the geography of that claim, because the geography explains the labor. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the largest estuary on the West Coast of North America. Its peat islands were farmed by Chinese workers in the nineteenth century, then by Japanese American workers in the early twentieth century, and then by Filipino workers beginning in the twenties, each community arriving through the same recruitment pipeline and facing the same structural condition: recruited specifically to provide an alternative to the last group, a labor-division strategy that kept wages low by ensuring no single community could organize effectively without the others.

The Filipino community in Stockton organized anyway. They built restaurants, barbershops, pool halls, and social clubs along El Dorado Street. During World War Two, they served in the segregated First Filipino Infantry Regiment, a United States Army unit formed from the Philippine community in California. After the war, urban renewal projects in the nineteen sixties and seventies removed much of what they had built on El Dorado Street. The preservation effort that eventually produced the Little Manila Historic Site did not begin until the nineteen nineties, when demolition was already underway.

The interpretive markers that exist in the area today are the record of a community that built one of the most significant Filipino districts in the United States and had most of it taken from them before anyone thought to document it. The first-person accounts from that community, what the historians call the period voice, are largely inaccessible to this production. The UCLA Center for Oral History and the Online Archive of California collections are the recommended next step for anyone who wants the story in the words of the people who lived it.