Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Epilogue

162  Since 1965, the Filipino and Mexican communities have undergone a series of demographic, geographic, and economic changes. The 1965 Immigration Act, for example, abolished all national origins quotas, allowing for increased immigration of both Filipinos and Mexicans.1 As a result, Filipino and Mexican communities have mushroomed all over San Diego. Filipinos in San Diego currently number 135,272, while Mexicans number 805,326. The size of their populations has also changed dramatically across the United States. At over 2.3 million, Filipinos are now the nation’s second-largest Asian group, while the United States’ proximity to Mexico ensures that Mexicans still comprise the largest segment of Latinos in the country.2 Although census numbers do not provide specific details as to the numbers of Mexipinos in San Diego, given the historical mixing and increasing demographics of Mexicans, Filipinos, and the mixed-race Asian-Latino population, it is likely that their numbers also increased. Class differences define most Filipino immigrants after 1965. They are predominately professionals who were given occupational preference status and moved to newer, upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods in San Diego County. These occupations include doctors, nurses, engineers, and other professionals .3 Moreover, recent suburban Filipino communities were established in the northern area San Diego County (north of the I-8 Freeway), including Mira Mesa (also known as Manila Mesa), Rancho Peñasquitos, Scripps Ranch, Poway, and Murrieta. Many Filipino professionals and some navy retirees also live in the suburban community of East Lake area in Chula Vista, located on the eastern portion of the South Bay.4 A number of well-to-do Mexican immigrant and U.S.-born Mexican families also reside in the Chula Vista–East Lake area and, like their Filipino counterparts, are also professionals and business owners.5 Their class status has been much higher than that of earlier Mexican and Filipino residents who initially settled in San Diego prior to 1965. Residents who settled in the Southeast and South Bay areas after 1965 are still primarily working class and Epilogue reside in the same blue-collar communities with other long-established residents , including a substantial number of navy families. Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children, and small pockets of undocumented populations, also live in the rural areas of North County San Diego.6 Mexican immigrants continue to dominate the county’s agriculture, landscaping, construction, and service industries. Another change that defined the post-1965 generations was the rise of political consciousness through the cultural nationalist movements of the mid-1960s and early 1970s. With the advent of the Chicano movement, for example, Chicano nationalism reigned as the ideological force that bound a large part of the Mexican American community, particularly among the youth who now identify as Chicana and Chicano.7 Student groups such as M.E.Ch.A. (Movimiento Estuduantil Chicana/o de Aztlán) and community activist groups like the Brown Berets of Aztlán were a part of the larger Chicano movement, which empowered their communities as they fought for self-determination and neighborhood control. In Barrio Logan, the Chicano community and their allies took over a piece of land by the bay that eventually became Chicano Park.8 Filipino cultural nationalism also emerged in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, which stemmed from their participation in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), which ignited the student strikes at San Francisco State University (SFSU) in 1968 and 1969. Students demanded an education and curriculum that were both relevant and accessible to their communities. Out of this struggle came the first School of Ethnic Studies in the United States. This event occurred during the rise of the Asian American, Chicano, Black Power, and American Indian movements, which were influenced by the larger global Third World movements.9 Organizing was also directed at particular sites, such as in the fight to save the International Hotel in San Francisco for retired elderly Asian Americans; Filipino students from San Diego organized and fought alongside the elderly. Filipino students also got involved in political affairs in the 1970s, which were intimately tied back to the Philippines. San Diego’s Katipunan Demokratikong Ng Mga Pilipino (KDP), for example, organized anti-Marcos protests to denounce martial law in the Philippines and the U.S.-backed dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos.10 The rise of these cultural nationalist movements created both tension and cooperation between Filipino and Mexican groups, especially when they overlapped with preexisting social or labor...