Cooking, Eating, and Becoming Filipina/o American before World War II
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
Eating Filipina/o American
My father Ernesto Tirona Mabalon arrived in Stockton, California, in 1963 to be reunited with his father, Pablo “Ambo” Mabalon, who had left their home- town of Numancia, Aklan, for the United States in 1929. My lolo (grandfather) Ambo ran a popular Filipino American diner, the Lafayette Lunch Counter, in the heart of Stockton’s Little Manila. Almost immediately after he arrived, my tatay (father) was “itching to have dried fish” and craved his favorite variety, called tuyo. When my lolo stepped out one afternoon, my father threw some tuyo on the restaurant’s hot grill. The reek of the fried, fermented fish wafted down Lafayette Street. Lolo rushed back to find angry patrons and warned Tatay never to fry tuyo again. After he ate, Tatay lambasted the customers. “I said, Mabaho pala kayo!” (You’re the ones who stink!), he remembered.
I said: When you left the country you were eating dried fish, were you not? This is what made you what you are! Dried fish! Because you are here [in America], you hate the smell of dried fish? You did not come to this country if you were eating steak in the Philippines!
For him, tuyo was a powerful symbol of his culture, his class, and his identity as a provinciano, or person from the provinces. To him, the old-timers were arrogant traitors who thought themselves too good for rice and fish.
After this tuyo debacle, he swore that “wherever I am, I will always eat dried fish, the old dependable.”1 My tatay’s story continues to intrigue me as a his- torian of Filipina/o American culture and community. If these immigrants come to despise the fish of their youth, then what kinds of foods sustained the 150,000 Filipinas/os who settled in the United States before World War II? How did American colonialism transform Philippine diets? Which recipes survived the journey, and which ones were transformed? Moreover, how did
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the experience of farm and cannery work influence what they cooked and ate? What roles did gender and class play in production and consumption?
This chapter explores these questions by discussing what Filipina/o immi- grants on the West Coast and in Alaska produced and consumed, and argues that what they cooked and ate made possible not only their survival but also the formation of a collective ethnic identity as Filipina/o Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century. The lack of specific Philippine ingredients and the poverty that forced cooks to improvise, embrace, and creatively adapt local resources, the extreme sex ratio imbalance in which very few women immigrated before World War II, the migratory nature of Filipina/o life, and the intermarriage and the close social ties of Ilocanas/os, Tagalogs, and Visay- ans gave birth to a unique Filipina/o American cuisine with cultural ties to the Philippines but with roots in the campos, canneries, and plantations of Hawai‘i, Alaska, and the West.
Previous scholarship on Filipina/o Americans focused heavily on labor experiences, immigration exclusion, and race relations, with less empha- sis on family formation, gender, class, community formation, and cultural production. In exploring the ways in which Visayan, Ilocana/o, and Tagalog emigrants became Filipina/o Americans through their food, I take to heart the call of the late historian Steffi San Buenaventura, who insisted that Fili- pina/o American history “should be as much a narrative of the cultural world they brought with them as it is an account of their life in the new country.”2 Studying Filipina/o American foodways allows us to explore the cultures and community that these immigrants created. “Foodways include food as mate- rial items and symbols of identity, and the history of a group’s ways with food goes far beyond an exploration of cooking and consumption,” writes historian Hasia Diner. “It amounts to a journey to the heart of its collective world.”3 Fil- ipinas/os turned to their family networks and kin and to fellow immigrants to survive, constructing a social world and ethnic identity grounded in their pro- vincial ethnic and class identities and shaped by new cultural traditions borne of the world they now inhabited. The unique Filipina/o American cuisine they created was a powerful symbol of their collective struggle to survive despite overwhelming odds.
What Filipinas/os produced in the fields and canneries and cooked and ate in the decades before World War II was shaped by the brutality of industri- alized agriculture, the grinding poverty of the Depression years, pitiful agri- cultural wages and conditions, anti-Filipina/o racist violence, exclusion and deportation, labor repression, and an extreme sex-ratio imbalance.4 That Fil- ipinas/os insisted on staying in United States demonstrated that the ethnic
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community that they had built together in the 1920s and early 1930s gave them the resources that allowed them to survive and even flourish. Just as the Mex- ican Americans of whom George Sanchez writes created new identities and possibilities for themselves in the 1930s and 1940s, so did Filipina/o immi- grants develop and assume “a new ethnic identity, a cultural orientation which accepted the possibilities of a future in their new land” by the 1930s.5 The Fili- pina/o American community survived and insisted, even demanded, that they be part of the nation. As they built this community and created new cultural traditions, Filipina/o immigrants, like the European immigrants that Diner studied, were able to enjoy more food than ever before.6 In this light, food became more than sustenance. According to food scholar Doreen Fernandez, for Filipinas/os since the American occupation, food has been “a vital field of study—even only as a vestige of war, as index of struggle.”7