Fighting from a Distance: How Filipino Exiles Helped Topple a Dictator

Preface

Preface On May 19, 1973, a gathering of students and young professionals slowly filled the seats in the auditorium of the Holy Name School on West 97th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Most were Filipinos and their American friends, drawn mainly by the news of events in Manila. Eight months earlier, on September 21, martial law had been declared by the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. Reports, both good and bad, traveled across the Pacific Ocean to confused relatives and friends in New York and other cities with large concentrations of Filipinos. There was peace and order in the homeland, they were told. In the meantime, because of the suspension of constitutional rule and the imposition of martial law, Marcos decrees were now the law of the land. The people filing into the auditorium felt the need to initiate some kind of collective response. As challenges to martial law spread in the Philippines, they moved to forge an overseas counterpart to the homegrown dissent. At that meeting, the outlines of an organized opposition took tentative form. On September 22, almost a year to the day after the declaration of military rule, a national conference was convened, at which the first U.S.based resistance to Philippine martial law was formally organized. It called itself the Movement for a Free Philippines—the MFP for short. The group named officers, issued resolutions, and formed committees. It placed an advertisement (5½ inches wide by 8½ inches deep) in the New York Times on September 27, announcing its formation (see illustrations). The ad appealed to the “Filipinos in the U.S. . . . to the American People . . . to viii . Preface the People of the Philippines,” declaring the movement’s intent to “work peacefully for the return of constitutional rule” to the Philippines. The MFP was soon followed by a number of other groups. Among the major ones were the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) and the Californiabased Katipunan Ng Mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP)—the Union of Democratic Filipinos. From the start, the leaders of these groups differed on goals and tactics. Strong personalities and deeply held political philosophies made consensus problematic. They were driven mainly by an abiding hatred for a dictatorship . They were focused on two goals: to expose the effects of martial law and to either cut or eliminate U.S. military aid to the Marcos regime. The members, mostly newly arrived immigrants who still had close ties to the Philippines, were acutely disturbed by the martial law directives that had muzzled the press, dissolved the legislature, jailed political opponents or driven them into exile, and outlawed organized dissent. They were witnessing a sudden shift to a state of affairs in their country that they had never experienced. These were new immigrants, most of whom had arrived during the late 1960s. They had spent the formative years of their lives under American tutelage after the liberation of their country from Japanese occupation in 1945. From the Americans they had learned the basic tenets of freedom and democracy. Now they were watching as their homeland’s loss of those values was ignored by the same U.S. government that had made it possible for them to enjoy these freedoms. Also of concern were the uncertain fates of their families and friends back home under the new regime. Who were those Filipinos who answered the call to gather in Manhattan on that spring day in 1973, and then a few months later came back together in larger numbers in Washington, D.C., to formally lay the foundations of a nationwide movement to resist the imposition of a new political order in their homeland? For the most part, they were two generations away from the first Filipinos who had come to the United States at the turn of the century. Their ancestors were the farmworkers who had toiled in the pineapple groves of Hawaii and the lettuce fields of California, the cannery workers at Alaska’s fish factories, and the shrimpers on boats in Louisiana. By the 1960s and 1970s, this third generation included professionals who had entered through the urban immigrant gateways of the East and West Coasts. College students, medical workers, accountants, engineers, office workers—they swelled the Filipino population to close to a million. But beyond their numbers, they brought with them a life experience from Preface · ix the country that they had only recently left...