“People think I’m half Hispanic. Even Filipinos do. But I’m full Filipino,” Joey Estrella told Anthony Christian Ocampo in his 2016 book “The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race.” “It’s hard to pinpoint who’s Filipino because there’s not a specific look. I have friends that look Chinese or Japanese, and their last name’s Gonzalez. And they’re full Filipino!”
Not knowing who is who from the get-go is a common sentiment shared across Filipino Americans, the third-largest group of Asian Americans in the country, despite their large population. According to the Census Bureau, 4.4 million Filipino Americans live in the United States, placing them behind Chinese Americans (5.2 million) and Indian Americans (4.8 million).
Filipinos have also been present in the United States even earlier than its birth as an independent nation. They were the first Asians to land in the continental United States of America in 1587 at Morro Bay, California. Even today, U.S. Census data shows California overwhelmingly leads the states with the most Filipinos at 1.2 million.
Filipino Americans are prevalent in American society, but their presence is not as evident. Stacker explored the reasons why Filipino Americans continue to be less visible in American society and how that may be changing.
Outsized Filipino American presence in US health care
In the past few years, many Americans have almost assuredly come across Filipinos, especially in hospitals. As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the United States, Filipino and Filipino American nurses inevitably worked on the frontlines, as they have done since World War II ended. The Philippines is the largest exporter of professional nurses to the United States, with over 150,000 Filipino nurses migrating to the U.S. since the 1960s, according to Catherine Ceniza Choy, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019, 1 in 20 registered nurses in the U.S….
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