TELLTALE SIGNS

At an Aquino family reunion just before the 2004 presidential elections, the Ninoy Aquino sister who actively campaigned for the incumbent, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA), chided her brother for supporting a “killer” – Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson. The brother snapped back, “Doesn’t matter if he’s a killer, at least he’s not a thief.”  Continue reading →

Anita Sanchez passed away quietly in her own bed at her San Francisco home at 2:35 AM on November 19, 2013 finally succumbing to colon cancer. On June 29, 2012, Anita was honored at San Francisco’s City Hall when she retired as Executive Director of the San Francisco Civil Service Commission which oversees Continue reading →

I arrived at the San Francisco federal court last week about 10 minutes late for my 8:00 a.m. hearing. Federal Judge William Alsup asked me to explain why I was late and he added that my excuse “better be a good one”. I told him it was my birthday and my wife wanted to have breakfast with me before I left. He smiled and said “OK that’s a good one but you can only use that excuse once a year”. Continue reading →

Wikipedia’s History of Filipinos in America lists the first landing of Filipinos in America as October 18, 1587 when the Manila galleon ship, Nuestra Senora de Buen Esperanza, under the command of Pedro de Unamuno landed in what is now Morro Bay, California with a crew that included Filipinos, then known as “Indios Luzones”. But no mention is made in Wikipedia about the second group of Filipinos to set foot in the Americas. Continue reading →

On September 25, 2009, the state of California officially declared October as “Filipino American History Month” to honor the first Filipinos to set foot in California 426 years ago. After studying this bit of California lore, some may conclude that Filipinos were among the first to “discover” California, at least in the same Eurocentric sense that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492 and  Ferdinand Magellan “discovered” the Philippines in 1521.  Continue reading →

For the past 41 years, Philippine newspapers have continuously reported that Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on September 21, 1972. Ironically, the news reports commemorating that dark chapter in Philippine history were often accompanied by a copy of the front page of the Sunday Express displaying a photo of Marcos with the banner headline “FM Declares Martial Law”.  Continue reading →

In two world stage events occurring simultaneously last week, China presented two starkly different faces. On one stage, China acted as a big power statesman and in the other, as a petty barnyard bully. Continue reading →

More than 75 years ago on August 19, 1938, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Luis Quezon reflected on the “state of the Philippine soul” in a speech delivered to 40,000 students and teachers. Continue reading →

Few Filipino Americans, or Asian Americans for that matter, are as deeply respected and as highly regarded in the field of journalism as Lloyd LaCuesta, who retired last year after working at Oakland TV station KTVU for 35 years, most recently as its South Bay bureau chief. He was the founder and first president of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and has won six Emmy Awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Continue reading →

At a fund raiser for the Filipino Advocates for Justice in Oakland on June 20, I sat down with Joe, the former national chair of Bayan USA, to ask him if his group planned to join the July 24 global protest against China s occupation of the Ayungin Reef. Continue reading →