San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mourning Filipino Americans’ fervent scholar
They say no one is ever really gone as long as someone is around to remember.
It will be hard to forget Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, who died of an asthma attack on a beach in Hawaii during a vacation in August. She was a vital woman, a teacher and a scholar who was full of plans, talk and energy.
“It was very sudden. Unexpected,” said Alan Manalo, who knew her well.
Dawn Mabalon was not well-known in the larger community — her passing was not reported in the Bay Area’s mainstream media — but she was a major figure to California’s Filipino Americans. That’s important because there are close to 4 million people of Philippine descent in the United States, the second-largest group of Asians in this country. In the mosaic that is modern California, they are major players.
“Dawn believed in the importance of Filipino American history in American history,” said April Veneracion Ang, a San Francisco community activist. “She thought our stories were important and had to be told. She was a treasure, an unsung hero.”
Mabalon’s own life was a California story. She was born in the hardluck town of Stockton, right in the heart of the state. She was the daughter and granddaughter of farmworkers, who worked their way out of the fields of San Joaquin County into the mainstream middle class of American life.
Dawn was smart, ambitious and fascinated with the story of her own people. By the end of her relatively short life — she was 45 when she died — she had earned a doctorate in history, had become a college professor, had written three books and was working on a fourth.
She focused serious academic study on Little Manila, a small slice of downtown Stockton that for 40 years was the largest Filipino community outside the Philippines. “It was the heart of Filipino-American history,” Mabalon wrote. “It was Filipino America’s hometown.”
Little Manila began to develop in the 1920s, when Filipinos worked in the fields, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley. Little Manila was the center of their community — their business district, their Saturday night place. It was neither beautiful nor famous, a neighborhood full of residential hotels, coffee shops, gambling joints and dime-a-dance halls.
It was a ghetto. Discrimination against Filipinos and other Asians had been part of California’s identity for years. Chinese and Japanese immigrants could not be citizens, could not own land. But Filipinos were marginally different; the United States had seized the Philippines in 1898, so Filipinos had a special status in this country. They had come for a better life. “It was the land of milk and honey, it was the United States,” said Fred Cordova, a Filipino American historian. “And it so happened that the main street was called El Dorado.”
That was Little Manila with a main street named for dreams of riches. It was also Mabalon’s hometown, and she thought it needed a serious study. It was part of the American experience. Her work began as an academic exercise, the subject of a dissertation that earned her a doctorate in history from Stanford. It also became a book she called “Little Manila Is in the Heart,” published by Duke University Press in 2013 and now in its sixth printing.
The book is a small classic, with lively stories, struggles and a tinge of sadness. “I also feel the hurt of a generation,” Mabalon wrote. “It’s our story and it demands our love, our attention and respect, and we need to tell this story.”
It was personal, too. For years her family ran the Lafayette Lunch Counter, at Lafayette and El Dorado streets — “the crossroads of Filipino America,” she called it.
Mabalon was relentless in promoting the significance of Little Manila. She arranged for media coverage of the district and even got Little Manila listed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of America’s most endangered historic places.
But what passed for progress was also relentless. Much of the old Little Manila was razed. “Vanished in a cloud of dust,” Mabalon wrote. So she and Dillon Delvo helped found the Little Manila Foundation to preserve the memory and legacy of the district.
“Little Manila is alive with dreams for the future,” Cordova writes on the foundation’s website.
In the meantime, Mabalon became a professor at San Francisco State University and devoted her life to telling the story of a multicultural America. She was no dry academic: She was an expert on hip-hop and food.
“She was all life,” said Trevor Getz, chairman of the university’s history department. She was a fine teacher as well. “Her scholarship and teaching are what we are really about,” Getz said.
San Francisco State will hold a memorial service in her honor on Oct. 6.