Philippine News at 50

The San Francisco-based weekly, Philippine News, celebrated its 50th anniversary last week when it published its 2,600th issue, an accomplishment that other Filipino American community publications can only envy. In fact, even long-established American mainstream media should marvel at this example of endurance at a time when newspapers are fast becoming extinct under the crushing weight of the Internet’s domination of advertising revenues.

The Internet future was the furthest thing on the minds of Alex and Lourdes Esclamado 50 years ago when they founded the Philippine News in the garage of their Sunset District home in San Francisco. All they envisioned then was a simple community newspaper that would report on the developments of the growing Filipino community in the United States and that would advocate for its issues.

A decade later, when I arrived in San Francisco in 1971, I read an issue of the Philippine News and dismissed it as the voice of “the Filipino community establishment” because it was filled with photos of Filipino community leaders posing with various San Francisco elected officials.

Many years later, when I became a regular columnist of the Philippine News in 1987, I lamented this “lumpia politics” mentality that was so prevalent then that even former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein commented to her staff that Filipinos were her “favorite community”. Unlike other ethnic communities who were constantly pressing her for appointments to major commissions or for city funds for their community projects, she explained, all her Filipino constituents wanted from her was to have their photos taken with her so that they could be published in Filipino community newspapers. So easy to please Filipinos.

But cynical as I was about the Philippine News in 1971, I admired its coverage of Filipino community events happening in the US which was in sharp contrast to the cut-and-paste practice of other Filipino community publications which simply copied and reprinted news articles from the Manila dailies often without attribution.

It was always ironic to me that the Philippine News reported on Filipino American news while its competitors, with names that included “Filipino American” in their mastheads, did not.

What truly won me to the Philippine News was its principled opposition to martial law and its fierce advocacy in support of Filipino WW II veterans.

After Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines on September 22, 1972, the Philippine government’s Secretary of Tourism, Jose Aspiras, decreed that all Filipino travel agencies should boycott the Philippine News or lose valuable government patronage and support.

As the Philippine News drew more than 80 percent of its ad revenues from travel agencies, the loss of these ad accounts proved financially devastating. Alex Esclamado had to mortgage his homes and would eventually lose them to foreclosure just to sustain the paper. Lourdes even had to sell her precious Mitra family jewelry just to meet payroll. But despite all the economic misfortune, the Philippine News somehow found a way to keep exposing the brutality and corruption of the conjugal Marcos dictatorship.

At one point, just as the Esclamados were one step away from declaring bankruptcy, a Marcos emissary offered them $10 million to buy their newspaper in order, of course, to silence it. The Esclamado family met to consider the offer and then unanimously agreed to firmly reject it. How many of us can do what they did?

Esclamado’s paper was also in the forefront of advocating for the naturalization of the Filipino WW II veterans. I first learned about the 1946 Rescission Act and the injustice inflicted on the war veterans by the US government from reading about the issue in the Philippine News in 1974.

When 77 Filipino WW II veterans filed their petitions for naturalization in the US federal court in San Francisco and appeared before Federal Judge Charles Renfrew in 1977, Alex Esclamado was allowed to address the court on this issue. Judge Renfrew would later admit that it was Alex’s passionate advocacy of the Filipino veterans’ cause that persuaded him to grant the petitions for naturalization of the Filipino veterans. The Renfrew Decision, in turn, opened the doors to hundreds and later thousands of other Filipino veterans to be naturalized as US citizens.

While I contributed a few articles to the Philippine News in the 1970s, it was not until after I passed the California bar in 1980, that I sat down with Alex to engage in a heart-to-heart talk about the Filipino community. As we discussed the issues and freely expressed our ideas, we found surprising common ground. We then agreed to work together to revive the Filipino American Political Association (FAPA) which was formed in 1964 when Alex organized a food caravan of Filipino professionals from San Francisco to bring food to Larry Itliong and the Filipino farmworkers in Delano  who were waging a strike for higher wages and better working conditions. (Itliong and Cesar Chavez would later go on to form the United Farmworkers Union.)

At one point, FAPA had 28 active chapters throughout California but when Marcos declared martial law, many of the Ilocano manongs in FAPA supported Marcos and this deep fissure led to the disintegration of FAPA.

Somewhere along the way, as Alex and I were working together to rebuild FAPA, I sort of ended up being Sancho Panza to Alex’s Don Quixote, as we worked to elect Filipinos to public office. After the People Power revolution in February of 1986, we invited all the “pro” and “anti” Marcos factions in the Filipino community to come to a healing and unifying conference in San Francisco in May of 1986 which formed the base for the historic 1987 Anaheim Conference that brought 1500 delegates from all over the US. Among the Anaheim delegates was future Hawaii Governor Ben Cayetano.

From that conference emerged the National Filipino American Council (NFAC) which started out with high hopes but which eventually fizzled out after a few years. NFAC’s demise brought Alex and I back to the drawing board to organize the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) which we formed in Washington DC in August of 1987 with Alex as the national chair. Though Alex has long since retired, NaFFAA still stands, stronger than ever, 14 years later, a living legacy of Alex’s “impossible dream” of politically empowering the Filipino community.

Long before the Internet and its Facebook and Google, it was the Philippine News that was informing and educating the Filipino American community about the need to fight racial discrimination and to advocate for Filipino American political empowerment. The paper’s readers and subscribers always formed the core of the national unity conferences where Filipinos learned to sublimate their egos to forge consensus.

Happy 50th birthday, Philippine News.

Post script. When I last saw Alex in Santa Rosa, California about three weeks ago, he was 84 and wheelchair-bound, packed and ready to retire to his hometown of Padre Burgos, Leyte by the end of August. As we talked about all the political battles we had waged over the last 30 or 40 years, I sensed in the gleam of his eyes his desire to put on his old armor and mount his horse to challenge the political windmills once again. As his faithful Sancho Panza, I stood ready to join him.

(Send comments to [email protected] or mail them o the Law Offices of Rodel Rodis at 2429 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, CA 4127 or call 415.334.7800).