Going to the Land of Baking Powder Biscuits
To paraphrase my father, in the 1910s and 1920s, Filipina/o emigrants who were eating steak in the Philippines did not come to America, but those whose diets
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relied on tuyo and rice made their way to the United States by the thousands. The influence of American public schooling and the poverty and deteriorat- ing economy of the provinces, coupled with the attractive prospect of gaining a college education in the United States, drew more than 150,000 Filipinas/os to Hawai‘i, Alaska, and the United States by 1946. As American nationals, they could enter freely, unchecked by Asian exclusion laws. Moreover, because of traditional gender roles, most emigrants left their wives and children behind. The result was a sex-ratio imbalance of fourteen men to one woman in Cali- fornia before World War II. Planters in Hawai‘i and farmers on the West Coast were in desperate need for cheap labor. Filipina/o populations swelled wherever there was agricultural work: the sugar plantations in Hawai‘i, the salmon canneries in Alaska, and the fertile farmlands of California and Wash- ington state. Filipinos in the navy were drawn to bases in Vallejo, San Diego, and Brooklyn. Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco attracted busboys and domestics, and hundreds of Filipinas/os attended colleges and universities.
Luckily for these immigrants, rice was abundant. Earlier Asian immigrants had pioneered rice farming in California and truck farming Asian vegetables. Large-scale rice production exploded in the California Delta in the 1910s with Japanese short-grain varieties, known now as Calrose.34 Other familiar foods and staples such as soy sauce (toyo or suyo), noodles, and vegetables like bitter melon,
Figure 7.1. Filipinas learn how to make baking powder biscuits in a domestic science class in the Visayas, Philippines, in the early twentieth century. Photograph by Frank Mancao. Courtesy of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
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eggplant, okra, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and coconuts were grown or imported by Asian immigrant tenant farmers. The sweet short-grain rice called malagkit, prized for kakanin (rice desserts) was already being grown and used for mochi by Japanese Americans. Bay leaves, ginger, peppercorns, vinegar, and garlic were readily available. But not until after World War II could Filipina/o-owned gro- cery stores import products like bagoong, banana leaves, and patis (fish sauce). In those intervening years, Filipina/o cooks creatively adapted local ingredients and made substitutions when necessary. Because of the sex-ratio imbalance, Fil- ipinos were forced to learn how to cook for themselves, which challenged tradi- tional gender roles, and most campo cooks were men. Filipina immigrants’ lives were grueling: they worked as laborers and campo cooks, in addition to raising children, keeping house, and maintaining ethnic culture.
When the Depression pushed farm labor wages down to ten cents per hour and service-sector work disappeared, Filipinas/os crowded into tiny rooms in residential hotels and shared grocery and cooking expenses. As aliens, they were ineligible for New Deal relief. Often the one or two Filipinas/os in a group of friends or relatives who had a job would support the rest.35 To exclusionists, reports of dozens of Filipinos crowding into hotel rooms and eating unfamiliar foods in squalid conditions were further evidence that they were morally and culturally unassimilable and racially unfit for citizenship. In a front-page decla- ration in the Watsonville, California, newspaper Evening Pajaronian, Judge D. W. Rohrback claimed that Filipinos had a “low standard mode of housing and feed- ing.” “Fifteen Filipinos will live in a room or two, sleeping on the floor and con- tenting themselves with squatting on the floors and eating fish and rice,” a hor- rified Rohrback wrote.36 Editors of The Torch, a Filipina/o American newspaper based in Northern California, dismissed Rohrback’s insults. “To discuss the Fil- ipino diet is stupid,” the editors responded. “Each nation has a particular diet.”37
Perhaps the uncles who loudly protested my father’s stinky dried-fish lunch were attempting to distance themselves from the stereotype of dirty, emascu- lated, barbaric, rice-and fish-eating savages popularized by Rohrback (and by Samuel Gompers in his inflammatory 1906 tirade against Chinese workers, “Meat vs. Rice”). Some Filipinos took to extremes the relationship between consumption and Filipina/o fitness for independence. Hilario Moncado, founder of the powerful Filipino Federation of America (FFA), insisted that his members eschew red meat, labor unions, dance halls, drinking, and gam- bling in favor of a mostly raw, vegetarian diet. The most spiritually dedicated members subsisted on peanut juice they called mug-mug and a compressed bar of honey, oats, and raisins.38 Filipino labor union leaders, whose strikes were often broken by federation scabs, derisively claimed that the diet made FFA
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members too weak for farmwork. But the second-generation children of FFA members, like Jean Hipolito Labuga, sometimes bent the rules. In the 1930s, Labuga used to trade her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to her classmates for bologna sandwiches and hot dogs.39
Jackrabbit Adobo: Working, Cooking, and Eating in the Campo and the Cannery
By the mid-twentieth century, Filipinas/os, along with Mexicans and other Asians, had transformed California into an agricultural empire and one of the world’s largest economies. By 1930, Filipinas/os comprised more than 80 per- cent of the total number of asparagus workers in the San Joaquin Delta region and almost 14 percent of the total farm labor force in California.40 Filipinas/os traveled as far north as Alaska for salmon cannery work in the early summer, and as far south as the Imperial Valley to pick grapes in the early fall. Filipi- nas/os also followed the crops to across California to Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. These laborers picked asparagus, grapes, lettuce, sugar beets, prunes, tomatoes, peaches, apples, berries, melon, potatoes, celery, brussels sprouts, artichokes, onions, hops, and more. Because Filipinas/os occupied the lowest rung of the farm labor racial hierarchy, they received the lowest wages and substandard working and living conditions.
The America about which their domestic science teachers had bragged in the Philippines was far from the reality of the campo, the Filipino nickname for the farm labor camp. Filipina/o workers in the Delta and the San Joaquin Valley lacked electricity, running water, and flush toilets. They lived in segre- gated ramshackle wood bunkhouses, old barns occupied by animals, or aban- doned boxcars. In addition to working on farms, the women also had jobs as bookkeepers, contractors, and campo cooks.41 Filipina immigrants expecting gleaming, modern American kitchens were shocked to find that they had to cook over open fires and gather their own firewood and water. “I cooked for about fifty men,” recalled Camila Carido.
We used to complain because they had a bathroom in the [farmer’s] house and electricity, but we had a butane stove. I used to have to carry the wood. You have to burn it because you have to cook rice, but I didn’t complain. I had to help my husband. I made thirty five cents an hour.42
Farmers and contractors charged up to seventy-five cents per day for room and board and served the cheapest possible food—fish and rice—at a time
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when most workers made a dollar a day. “You have no choice,” said George Montero. “You get what they cook . . . I had no car. I had no money.”43 Work- ers fell into debt because they were charged for room and board during the off-season. Once Filipinas/os rose in the ranks to become contractors, many took advantage of the encloso system, in which workers deducted expenses for things like groceries and work tools from their total earnings. The cook, who was sometimes the wife of a laborer or contractor, would also receive a cut. George Montero’s workers used the encloso system and took turns cooking. All the expenses were divided. “We just get what we want to eat,” he said. “If the men want to have roast pig, we get roast pig. Or if they want chicken, we’d just go and buy chicken.”44
To many Filipina/o immigrants, life in America, even in the campos and canneries during the Depression, still occasionally afforded a richer and more varied diet than what they had subsisted on in the province. Campo cooking was basic: fish, either fried or in soups, stews, or stir-fries (gisa) of meat and vegetables. Leftover rice was fried for breakfast, with eggs and coffee. Chick- ens’ feet, fish heads, and pigs’ necks, bellies, tails, and feet were cooked as sin- igang, adobo, as flavoring in monggo/balatong (mung bean stew), or nilaga (boiled), since these cuts were flavorful and cheap or free from the butchers and grocers who supplied the camps. A dish in Angeles Monrayo Raymundo’s campo cooking repertoire in the 1920s and 1930s was pigs’ feet cooked adobado style (braised with vinegar, soy sauce, and pickling spices).45 In their parents’ farm labor camp in Winton, California, Henry Dacuyan and his sister Helen remember a kitchen that consisted of two giant iron kawa (woks) set on brick foundations with gas jets under them and a wood stove. Helen Dacuyan Vil- laruz remembers cutting vegetables and washing stacks of dishes in the campo kitchen.46
To supplement these meals, Filipinas/os might enjoy the fruits of their labor: surplus peaches, grapes, asparagus, tomatoes, celery, potatoes, and other fruits and vegetables. “I used to help our boss bake bread,” Segunda Reyes remembered. “And then, for the rest of our food, my husband gets potatoes, celery. He would go over there and pick up potatoes by the sack and that’s what we eat all day.”47 Filipinas/os raised chickens and planted gardens. In the 1930s and 1940s on the Juanitas family farm in the Delta, the family grew long beans, patola (Filipino squash), bitter melon, bell peppers (the young leaves were also eaten), a green called alugbati, onions, garlic, water cress, okra, gowgi (another Filipino green vegetable), beets, squash, Chinese lettuce and cabbage, and tan- glad (lemongrass), Violet Juanitas Dutra remembers. Her father Cirilo even made wine from local grapes.48
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Filipinas/os took advantage of their surroundings to feed themselves. In the 1920s and 1930s, the waterways of the San Joaquin Delta teemed with wildlife and wild vegetables. The forests and mountains surrounding Seattle, Dorothy Cordova remembers, were rich in game such as deer, as well as greens, birds, and exotic mushrooms. Filipinas/os fished in Delta rivers for salmon, catfish, and sea bass, gathered river snails (Filipinas/os called these sisi) and frogs, hunted pigeons and rabbits, and foraged for greens and mushrooms. “It was great because we really weren’t hungry when we lived out there [in the Delta],” remembered Anita Bautista, who was raised in the Delta in French Camp, California. “There were jackrabbits. There were cottontails. There were pheas- ants. There were ducks that flew in. We had the river there. The bass would be huge.” Bautista’s Ilocano father did most of the cooking for their large fam- ily in the campo. “I remember my father making the jackrabbit adobo,” she remembered. “And him shooting those illegal swans out in the asparagus field. Vegetables [were] out there growing wild. The pigweed, mustard greens.” The family also had a garden, chickens, and goats.49
In his memoirs, Alejandro Raymundo recalled that his family subsisted on rice, soy sauce, and mushrooms during the hardest years of the Depression: “1931 was depression time, and boy was it tough,” he wrote. “Those who have
Figure 7.2. Eudosia Juanitas and her children in their vegetable garden in the San Joaquin Delta area, July 1941. Juanitas, who arrived in Stockton in 1936, grew Philippine vegetables such as bitter melon (ampalaya) and malunggay to feed her family and to sell. Courtesy of Aileen Boyer.
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money would buy me a sack of rice and a bottle of soyo and that would last me over a month.” Raymundo collected tree mushrooms from willow trees. “Rice and fried mushroom,” he wrote. “That’s all we eat 3 times a day. Sometimes I wonder how we survived.”50 Foraging could be dangerous, however. In 1934, sixteen Filipinos died from eating poisonous toadstools they had found near their lettuce camp in San Luis Obispo County.51 If Rizaline Raymundo’s father Alejandro Raymundo was terrified that his family might starve, his children did not sense it. Many Filipinas/os growing up during the Depression felt for- tunate to have any kind of food and shelter. “Hard times I wasn’t aware of, we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads,” Rizaline Raymundo said. “Most of the time the food was rice and mushroom, rice and fish—what- ever was on the table we ate it.” Raymundo said she learned how to eat fish head, shells from the river, tripe, fried intestines, chickens’ feet, and frogs’ legs. “You name it, we ate it,” she laughed. “Filipinos have a knack for making any kind of food edible and delicious.” When their supply of rice fell, Raymundo’s mother turned to the campo cook’s supply of tutong, the crispy bottom of the rice pot, which he stored in burlap.52
The wild salmon swimming through Delta streams and rivers were prized catches, although fishing for them was illegal. In her diaries, Angeles Ray- mundo recorded the happy fall day in 1928 when her husband Alejandro and his buddies caught huge salmon by hand as the fish struggled from the ocean up a shallow stream to lay their eggs. “He made sinigang out of the head and we fried some of the stomach,” she wrote. The rest of the fish was cleaned, salted, and preserved to be shared with neighbors.53 Jean Hipolito Labuga of Livingston, California, remembers that her father and his friends would leave at night to fish illegally. “They did this so they could feed their families,” she remembered. Labuga’s parents would salt and dry the fish to make it last through the winter, and Labuga’s mother also dried and pickled eggplant.54 Lil- lian and Violet Juanitas helped their uncles and cousins clean, salt, and dry fish. “The fish were dried on the roof and when they were stiff and completely dried, they were stacked and bagged and used to help stretch food supplies,” Lillian recalled. The fish were stinky, she remembered.55
Massive celebrations marked the end of asparagus season in June in the Delta, and the end of lettuce in the Salinas area in early December.56 The center- piece of the party would be a lechon, or whole roasted pig (or several, depend- ing on the size of the work crew), cooked in a pit dug in the fields. “When we finished the crop, we would celebrate the end of the season, [because] that’s when everybody gets paid,” remembered Moreno Balantac, who was born and raised in Stockton. Every part of the pig was used. Balantac remembered that
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they used the blood and organs to make diniguan, or pork blood stew, and fried the belly for bagnet, an Ilocano specialty. Balantac also learned different methods that Visayans and Tagalogs used to make biko, a brown-sugar rice cake. “What I learned to do was squeeze the coconut, fry the juice, and mix the residue with the rice and then bake it,” he said.57