#fahm2022

[filipeanut]

In the US this October, Filipinos celebrate Filipino-American History Month. I always think about my dad around this time, Albert Balbutin Sr, who rode a steamship from the Philippines to San Francisco Bay in April of 1929. I was told it took about a month, and it was only until a few years later that the Golden Gate Bridge was finally built. As you can imagine he was quite old by the time I was born, but I remember stories of him climbing coconut trees back in Camiguin where he grew up. Life was simpler for him back then, as he would later work various jobs in America from farms, steam ships, and factories.

[filipeanut]

Here is Albert Balbutin Sr., Ernie Balbutin, and Delphin Balbutin, left to right. Their vibrant and classy suits, as Mina Roces put it, “transformed them from lower-class agricultural laborer or Alaskan cannery worker to fashionable dandy and temporarily erased the stigma of manual labor.” After the US colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, around 150,000 Filipinos, mostly men, immigrated to the US for work. Around the same time, 122 million board feet of Philippine lumber and timber was exported from the Philippines to the US and other countries. Forests in the Philippines dwindled from 70% forest cover at the start of US colonization, to almost half forest cover by 1932. Illustrated in the graphic are the remaining birds living in Camiguin, some endemic or only found there. Many known for their beautiful plumage.

Immigration info: SAGE Enyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies. Roces 2016.

Forest info: Ponce 1939, Bankoff 2007.

Birds: Camiguin Hanging-Parrot, Black-naped Monarch, Orange-bellied Flowerpecker (all subspecies endemic to Camiguin).