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C H A P T E R T W O A Home or a Parking Lot? Human Rights versus Property Rights, 1968–69 Resistance and Leadership “We Want to Stay in Our Neighborhood,” read a placard carried by a demonstrator as elderly members of the little-known Filipino community on Kearny Street marched in front of the International Hotel on November 17, 1968. A San Francisco Chronicle reporter commented that the march to save the elderly Filipinos’ home and the remnants of their once vital community was a “sad, quiet demonstration,” the tenants seeming “to plead” rather than to demand.1 The reporter’s perception that the demonstrators were pleading may have been based on their reserved, gentlemanly demeanor. It was a time when raucous student demonstrations were often confrontational; a time when the movements for African Americans’ and other minorities’ rights were often, quite literally, incendiary. In reality, the elderly men were asserting what they felt was so altogether self-evident that it required only direct, dignified articulation to receive a sympathetic , common-sense response from the public. These first-generation Filipinos believed they were entitled to stay in the home in which some of them had lived for more than fifty years. The fact that the building, which had become both home and community, would be destroyed to build a parking lot only served to underscore the low regard in which these elderly workers were held: A parking lot simply added insult to what would already be a devastating injury.2 The owner of the hotel, Milton Meyer and Company, had applied for permission to demolish the hotel in June 1968. But the tenants only learned of the owner’s intent in October. When the first eviction notice was sent to the occupants , panic ensued, and approximately one-third of the tenants quickly left. The elderly were particularly vulnerable and limited in their choices. From November 1968, when the first demonstration was held, to the middle of June 1969, when the first agreement for a lease was signed, the number of tenants age sixty-five and older decreased only slightly, from eighteen to fifteen. In contrast, the number of tenants age forty to sixty-four declined from ninety to twentytwo .3 The elderly had fewer alternatives for mobility and fewer resources than the middle-aged and young tenants. Though few in number, the elderly tenants would provide the backbone to the resistance in great part because of their lack of choices. At the beginning of December 1968, 182 people lived in the International Hotel’s 184 rooms. The majority of the residents were Filipinos. According to a count taken on April 9, 1969, seventy-three tenants (52.5 percent) were Filipino, twenty-eight (20.2 percent) were Chinese, and thirty-eight (27.3 percent) were from other ethnic groups. By the end of May 1969, after the panic caused by the first notice of intent to demolish the hotel, approximately sixty-five tenants remained; slightly more than fifty of them were Filipinos.4 The second-largest group was Chinese; the remainder were single, male Latinos and blacks and a few low-income families of a variety of ethnicities.5 Of the hotel’s 120 tenants in the summer of 1971, 60 percent were Filipino; 30 percent, Chinese; and the rest, white, Latino, or black.6 Thus, from the beginning of the anti-eviction movement, the composition of the tenants, while always diverse and volatile depending on the possibilities of eviction, was overwhelmingly Filipino. And many of the Filipinos were elderly or aging members of the early immigration to the United States. Mr. Arzadon, as described in the Chronicle article, was typical of the I-Hotel’s residents. He left Ilocos Norte in the Philippines in 1918 to come to the United States, and he resided at the hotel off and on for about fifty years. Mr. Arzadon received a small pension from his years of working as a merchant seaman, and he expected to live out the rest of his days in familiar surroundings . According to the Chronicle reporter, Mr. Arzadon did not “know where he [was] going to live” after the eviction, which was scheduled for January 1, 1969. He had no choice, and, like the other tenants who remained, he had decided to protest out of a sense of desperation mixed with injured pride. Mr. Arzadon and the other pickets may have seemed “sad” to the reporter, but he was not aware that, by simply...

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