There has always been a Filipino community of Seattle. Yes, even before its formal establishment as an “umbrella” organization in 1935, which changed the small “c” in community to a capital “C.”

Hopefully, there will always be a Filipino Community of Seattle—notwithstanding whining detractors and power-hungry secessionists who are ever present to negate all the good works, good intentions, and oft-times foibles of its hard-working officers, stalwart members, and supportive constituents for the last 60 years.

This is not to say that The Filipino Community of Seattle, Incorporated, always has been perfect. Of course not. What human organization is? The fact of the matter is Filipino Americans (Pinoys, as the community founders called themselves) have attempted, struggled, achieved, and, in a host of other ways, failed to do their job under the aegis of the corporate umbrella. Nevertheless, Seattle has had and continues to have “The Community.” Ours.

After all, what is a community by way of a Pinoy definition? As has been said, get two Pinoys together and they have a community. That communal sense of pakikisama was already in evidence with the first Filipino social club in 1870 in New Orleans as a hallmark of the First Wave of Filipino Immigration to the U.S. from 1763 to 1906.

In the State of Washington, the Filipino community could have started with the arrival of an adventurer by the name of “Manilla.” Not lingering in Seattle, he opted instead to work in a sawmill at Port Blakely on Bainbridge Island. His documented arrival was in 1883—six years before Washington became a state in 1889. It is believed he was among other Filipino sawmill workers.

In 1903, the steamship Burnside docked in Seattle with a crew including 40 Filipinos. The crew was engaged in laying telephone cables connecting Alaska to the U.S. mainland. After their three-year U.S. government job was done, it is reported these Pinoys stayed in Seattle to become its first residents during the era beginning the Second Wave of Filipino Immigration to the U.S. from 1906 to 1934.

Of course, Seattle’s first Filipino American family moved to Seattle in 1909. Its matriarch was Rufina Clemente Jenkins from Bicol—a war bride of the Spanish-American War and married to an African-Mexican American sergeant, Francis Jenkins. They had four children—the oldest born in the Philippines and the rest in various U.S. Army posts—and have descendants now bordering on the sixth generation in Seattle.

Thus began, 86 years ago, the Filipino “community” in a family way—that is, if two births are also counted among other Filipinos—namely the 50 Bontoc having been exhibited in the “Igorrote Village” of the Alaska-Pacific Exposition in 1909 on the University of Washington campus.

Some 150,000 Filipinos—men, women, and children too—left the Philippines for the U.S. between 1907 and 1930 to become the pioneering Filipino Americans… Pinoys. Seventeen were counted in the State of Washington in 1910. By 1920 there were 958 Pinoys; by 1930, 3,480.

In Seattle, the Pinoy cluster sprang from the Jackson/King Street/Chinatown area to First Hill and Cherry Hill, with St. James Cathedral, Maryknoll, the Filipino Methodist Church, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and Providence Hospital as the neighborhood landmarks.

Contrary to academic myths perpetuated by so-called “authorities” of Filipino American history, including naïve university professors, the Seattle Pinoy community—like all other dense clustering of Pinoys elsewhere in the U.S.—boasted of students, women, families, children of the Second Generation (with some even in the Third), professionals (especially women in nursing), university degree-holders, lodges, businesses (with women entrepreneurs, yet), newspapers, church groups, socials, sports and recreation (gambling in particular) in a supposedly stereotypical bachelor-oriented, common-laborer society.

Of course, Seattle, being on the edge of America’s Far West, topped by hardy territorial Alaska, was an emerging frontier town when Pinoys began to arrive in larger numbers during the 1920s and 1930s. The Pinoy community endured more than its share of blatant racism, failures, and poverty, coupled with violence in the forms of internecine murders, shootings, stabbings, fights—let alone police harassment, searches, and more bigotry.

But through it all, in good times and bad, the Seattle Filipino community (small “c”), the Filipino Community of Seattle (capital “C”), and Filipino Americans survived and attained measures of achievement in their own way—etched with a dignified work ethic in the Filipino American Experience—to give a legacy of a stable Pinoy Community to their children and to those who followed in the succeeding Third Wave of Filipino Immigration to the U.S. from 1945 to 1965 and the Fourth Wave since 1965.

Unlike another community, Seattle also was in possession of a Pinoy-dominated union that served as an economic opportunity for men, plus students, to work in the Alaskan salmon canneries. From this cannery-farmworkers union (actually there were two at times) came Seattle union leaders to lead the Community, and union members, who came from throughout the U.S., to help contribute substantially to the financing of the long-held dream of a Community clubhouse.

The term “Filipino Community” is Pinoy-originated, meaning it is an American coinage with organizational implications. Early Filipino American pioneers of the Second Wave, by the 1920s, invented this Pinoy phenomenon of “Filipino Community” to resolve their mutual needs within a formal organization made up of their kababayans and spouses and governed by a constitution and/or charter with duly elected officers.

In the case of the then-Filipino Community of Seattle and Vicinity, Incorporated, its 1946 charter mandated all “to promote and protect the interest of Filipinos; to cultivate unity and cooperation among all Filipinos; to foster and establish better relations and sympathetic understanding between Filipinos and non-Filipinos; to encourage a unified observance of Philippine events of national or historical importance; to provide members with facilities for wholesome recreational, social, educational, and cultural activities; to foster and instill civic spirit and cultural pride among Filipinos; to coordinate with the city, county, state, and national officials in all matters affecting the welfare of Filipinos…”

Our Community, blessedly, has been fortunate in having leaders of vision for more than 60 years.

Although the Filipino Community of Seattle began to develop informally in existence as a viable ethnic enclave as early as 1926, its formal organization did not take shape until the Philippine Commonwealth Executive Committee, under the chairmanship of Pio De Cano, first met in 1935 in the Strand Dance Hall at 6th Ave. S. and S. King St.

Unity was the concern then, as it still is now.

The Community’s pioneering leaders believed that in achieving that unity two priorities were uppermost in their minds: a central organization and a clubhouse.

The first priority was to establish a “central community organization” which would “serve as an ‘umbrella’ organization for all Pinoy clubs, lodges, associations, societies, and other special-interest groups within Seattle.”

Thus, on November 15, 1935, was established the Philippine Commonwealth Council of Seattle with 300 members and De Cano its first president.

This 60th anniversary celebration acknowledges that unincorporated Commonwealth club as the root of the formal establishment of the Filipino Community of Seattle, Inc., and De Cano, a powerful contractor and lodge chieftain, as the Community’s first president.

After the Commonwealth of the Philippines assumed its independence to become a republic, the Philippine Commonwealth Council became the Filipino Community of Seattle and Vicinity in 1946.

Its present Washington State corporate title as the Filipino Community of Seattle, Inc. (“FCS” or “FCSI”) became effective in 1952.