It was around 8 p.m. when the giant TV screens inside the Oakland Convention Center flashed the announcement that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. The hall erupted with joy and cheers. And tears.

At a table where volunteers had spent hours each day calling potential voters, a young white woman in an Obama T-shirt openly wept. Another elderly black woman also cried as she stared at the TV screen, an ecstatic look on her face.

My friend, Francis Calpotura, a veteran community organizer, turned to my son Paolo and me, saying, “This is historic! Historic!”

In Pareng Barack’s march to the presidency, Pareng Fran had been one of his street warriors. “Who wants to join in pounding the pavement for Obama in Reno?” he posted a few weeks ago on his Facebook status update. Nevada had been one of the battleground states in the campaign. It had voted Republican in the past.

But an army of volunteers, including hundreds of Filipinos from neighboring California, crossed the state line to campaign for Obama They went house to house, talking to residents, including many Filipinos who worked in the city’s hotels and casinos.

It was while knocking on doors in one part of Reno that he came across one Pinoy. He was 28 years old and worked in one of the casinos. A Philippine flag was displayed in his garage. The young man was a registered Republican, and had never voted Democrat. But he said he was voting for Obama. “He speaks to everyone, and seems that he can reach across the aisle,” he told Fran. “Obama is different from the rest.”

The view was shared by many others. Nevada voted Democratic this time around.

Down in southern California, another Filipino American, Prosy Delacruz, also poured everything into the campaign. “I cannot describe to you how I feel. For last few days, I gave the campaign my all,” she said in an e-mail.

Her involvement, she said, was personal. She had been immersed in LA’s multiethnic community for decades, and had been disappointed, even repulsed, by the racism in the Filipino American community. Sadly, even her late father shared the prejudiced views of many Filipinos. He once warned Prosy not to marry a black man.

“It dawned on me that in 1903, our ancestors came as fountain pen boys, pensionados, and one year later, in 1904, the St. Louis Exposition displayed our ancestors as if they were subhuman, and earlier depicted as monkeys, reptiles, snakes and ni---ers, to justify subjugation as subjects,” she told me.

“Now, a century and 10 years later, the later immigrants and with help of their Internet friends in the Philippines are circulating vile smears and falsehoods, treating Barack Obama the way our ancestors were treated in 1898. It is a disease of the spirit, it is poisonous to the soul and it is toxic to folks' minds and ‘ negatively and unconsciously’ colors our community's behaviors to exaggerate the mistakes of other folks of color.”

Shortly before the election, Fran encountered that prejudice during a flight from Manila in which he met a Filipina in her thirties who moved to America about eight years ago. The woman had just mailed in her ballot – she voted for John McCain. She was worried about “security,” she said, and thought McCain would do a better job. But eventually, she also admitted to Fran, she simply could not vote for a black man. “I just don’t trust them. Di ba sila, ‘yung laging naggugulo? Aren’t they the troublemakers? They’re so violent.”

But Fran and Prosy’s efforts paid off.

The night Obama won, Fran hugged his fellow community organizers in Oakland. Having worked most of his career as a community organizer based in the city with a huge African American population, he was tuned into the hopes and frustrations of that community. Many African Americans, he said, especially those old enough to remember the days of open discrimination in the south, were in a state of mild shock that it had actually happened – a person of color had won the presidency. “The old timers cannot figure out how this happened,” Fran told me, laughing happily.

Indeed, many Americans are happily pondering the same question.

There is much to say, and like many others, I have spent the past many months thinking about what this election contest means for me, my family, America and the Philippines. Now, I am sharing other stories and my own take on this historic campaign, including what it means for the Filipino story in America, in my book Pareng Barack: Filipinos in Obama’s America. Released by Anvil Publishing, Pareng Barack will be launched on November 26 at 6 p.m. at Bestsellers Ortigas, Robinson’s Galleria.

I invite you to join me.

I also invite you to catch the Cultural Center of the Philippines Tanghalang Pilipino production of my novel, Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street. I’m getting ready for a trip to Manila to watch the play written by Rody Vera and directed by Chris Millado, and starring Bembol Roco and Tommy Abuel. The novel was published last year by Ateneo University Press under the guidance of its director, my good friend Maricor Baytion.