San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement (review)

Scholars and students of Asian American studies have long been familiar with the late 1960s and 1970s protracted fight to save the International Hotel through Curtis Choy’s 1983 award-winning documentary, The Fall of the I-Hotel. Choy’s film dramatically captured the daily struggle of the manongs—the Filipino old-timers—and the young Asian American activists as they battled municipal and private corporate efforts to redevelop San Francisco’s central business district. Estella Habal’s San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement revisits this important chapter in Asian American urban and political history to recover the overlooked history of Filipino political organizing to chart the formation of a distinctly Filipino American consciousness. Despite the attention paid to the elderly Filipino residents, Habal argues that current narratives of the I-Hotel struggle as a pan-Asian political movement have worked to obscure and subsume the specific and complicated transnational history of radical Filipino American political organizing and consciousness within the larger narrative of pan-Asian political activism and history. Moreover, as she discusses in the book’s chapter on the history of San Francisco’s Manilatown, the gradual disappearance of the Filipino neighborhood from the cityscape as a result of urban renewal projects to expand the city’s central business district and economic development and expansion of Chinatown have further erased the historic presence of Filipinos in the area.

Habal approaches the study as both a scholar and participant in the I-Hotel struggle. In 1971, as a recent arrival to San Francisco and single mother of two young children, she joined the progressive Filipino political organization Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP), or Union of Democratic Filipinos. She eventually became one of a three-member KDP team working closely with elderly tenants to mount a multipronged campaign of publicity, civil disobedience, city petitions, and lawsuits to evade eviction and prevent demolition of the building. Her use of archival sources—newspapers, city and court records, and materials on the I-Hotel protest currently housed in the Manilatown Heritage Foundation—along with her own personal reminiscences work to create a complex narrative of the events leading up to the police’s physical assault on the building to forcibly remove the elderly tenants, organizers, and crowds of protesters in the early morning hours of August 4, 1977.

First and foremost, Habal does a remarkable job of detailing the twists and turns of the lengthy and complicated political and legal battle waged over the I-Hotel as the hotel changed hands from Milton Meyer and Company to the multinational Four Seas Corporation owned by a Chinese Thai businessman with local business ties to Chinatown. Habal makes great efforts to situate the struggle within the changing landscape of San Francisco politics that shaped the possibilities for ethnic and class-based coalition building or official support. For example, the move in 1976 to more grassroots-based district elections brought in a new wave of left-liberal officials such as Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk who were sympathetic to working-class and poor issues such as affordable housing.

While the book is a valuable contribution to understanding San Francisco politics of the period, particularly in regards to the struggle for affordable housing, Habal is at her best when she discusses Filipino organizing and community building. She narrates with great clarity the attraction of Filipino activism for second-generation Filipinas such as herself who grew up as the children of Filipino servicemen on military bases and communities that were physically and socially removed from the earlier communities of Filipino laborers who migrated decades earlier. Politically, she notes the difference in the labor radicalism of the manongs versus the postwar Cold War consensus liberalism of her...