Filipinos are generally unaware of the personal histories of Filipino Americans who played significant roles in the transitional period of the Commonwealth, the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, and the postwar republic.
Pioneering authors Craig Scharlin and Lilia V. Villanueva have produced two books on such key figures—Philip Vera Cruz, who led Filipino immigrants in the farm workers’ movement in the United States alongside other Filipinos such as Larry Itliong and the Mexican labor leader Cesar Chavez, and Narciso L. Manzano, who was the top Filipino intelligence officer in Central Luzon during the Japanese Occupation, serving under Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
The first book, “Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers’ Movement” (University of Washington Press, 1992 and 2000), is a collaboration between the husband-and-wife team of Scharlin and Villanueva; the second, “The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano” (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2024), was authored by Scharlin. The authors’ personal acquaintance with the two subjects added to their scholarship and meticulous attention to detail.
The book on Vera Cruz acquires special relevance in light of recent revelations on Chavez’s sexual exploitation and abuse of young women, including his co-organizer Dolores Huerta. Vera Cruz, Itliong and others had criticized Chavez for his political tactics and dictatorial ways.
Prince and pauper
Manzano and Vera Cruz came literally from opposite ends of the social and economic scales, and it is intriguing to compare their respective life experiences and insights vis-à-vis the United States when it was flexing muscle on the world stage as a postwar imperial power.
Vera Cruz migrated to the US in 1926 and experienced the difficulties of being a migrant discriminated against due to race and lack of education and as a colonial subject. But he was not your typical manong who came to the US as an innocent abroad. He was similar to Carlos Bulosan in that he already spoke English well (albeit with a Filipino accent) when he arrived, and was armed with some years of high school education that he had hoped to complete and augment with college studies in the US.
His American mentors in the Philippines had motivated him to seek his fortune in the promised land of “unlimited” opportunities. Like today’s overseas Filipino workers, he also aimed at earning enough money to support his siblings in their own academic and professional quests back home.
Manzano was also sui generis. His father was a Spaniard from Asturias in Northern Spain who married a Filipino, Josefa Samson Imperial, and, as the representative of Tabacalera and eventually an independent copra trader, became the wealthiest man in Atimonan, Quezon.
Sising, as Manzano was called when he was a child, grew up speaking Tagalog with his playmates; he was raised following the local mores and customs, to the point of undergoing circumcision, which was not a Spanish custom. In fact, the Manzano father and son did not, and could not, speak each other’s language. Nevertheless, the father’s plan was for his children (even without their mother’s permission) to travel to Spain to learn to be Spanish, beginning with learning to speak the language and to live with relatives in their native town of Teverga.
This acculturation was to include high school in the Liceo Poliglota in Barcelona. For Manzano, this was to form the core of his being. He said: “In religions, I am agnostic; in economics, I am Marxist; in government, I am an internationalist; and I believe that the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness, not of money.”
Returning to Manila in 1915, Manzano pursued engineering studies at the University of Santo Tomas. In 1921, he became a district inspector of streets and bridges in the City of Manila.
In August 1921, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army, setting the direction of his career. In 1939, he was appointed assistant department engineer and sent to Bataan as area military commander to prepare the peninsula for war. But earlier, in 1927, he married the love of his life, Rosario “Charo” Gomez, with whom he would have three sons and a daughter.
Farmworker, community leader
On the other side of the Pacific, Vera Cruz found a job in Cosmopolis, outside Seattle, in 1926. Thereafter, he simply followed the trail of available employment, such as in Spokane, Washington; Manville, North Dakota; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Odd jobs would sustain him, but he persevered in completing his high school education and even did one year at the Jesuit Gonzaga University.
Vera Cruz appeared to reach the same conclusion as Manzano. “It was during my year at Gonzaga University…that I became an agnostic,” he said, adding: “I came up with my philosophy on religion: anything excessive is harmful, including religion.”
He was self-taught. By the start of the war in 1941, he had been around the job market a long time.
But “it wasn’t until I moved out to Delano (California) from Chicago because of the war and became a farmworker that I found myself with time to educate myself more about politics and economics for the first time since I arrived in the US…” Vera Cruz said. “It was only then that I found an outlet to do something meaningful for myself as well as for my fellow workers, and that was joining a union… The UFW (United Farm Workers) changed my life.”
Wartime activities
By 1941, Colonel Manzano had participated in the siege of Bataan and Corregidor and even been imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell. During his four-month stay in concentration camp, he was able to put together a plan with Lt. Osmundo Mondoñedo for underground work to be pursued on their release.
Manzano was appointed director and coordinator of Luzon intelligence activities. One important mission assigned to him—which concerned someone regarded by the guerrillas as a collaborator—was a project of the Free the Philippines movement under Lorenzo Tañada.
However, a persistent problem was the infighting among MacArthur’s general staff. To begin with, Manzano was never favored by MacArthur. Adding to this was the conflict between Major General Willoughby and Brigadier General Whitney, MacArthur’s intelligence officer and lawyer, respectively. Whitney’s critics called him “MacArthur’s Rasputin.” Willoughby was an admirer of the Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and Whitney did not hide his contempt for Filipinos.
Due to this feud, valuable information was kept from MacArthur, resulting in incidents in which, according to Manzano, friendly fire killed Filipino soldiers. Manzano’s reports on the Luzon guerrillas were also kept from MacArthur. Finally, Manzano was also prevented by Whitney from reaching Australia.
Manzano was operating in Manila in plain sight of the Japanese. They must have been aware of his role and activities, but must have regarded him as more valuable in free operation than in prison. In 1944, he was able to leave his house for Mindanao. But the Japanese arrested his wife and detained her in Fort Santiago for four months, and used their children to force her into divulging his whereabouts.
Despite the torture, Rosario Gomez Manzano heroically withheld any information on her husband.
At the end of the war, Manzano was invited by both Presidents Sergio Osmeña and Manuel Roxas to head the Philippine military. He was denied the first offer and he turned down the second in the expectation that he would be promoted by the US military to full general and named head of the US forces in Central America. However, due to a misdiagnosis of his health condition, he was medically discharged and thereby failed to reach his goal.
With the Philippines in shambles and in political turmoil due to collaboration charges hounding its erstwhile leaders, Manzano decided instead to devote his remaining years to providing his family with a comfortable life in the United States. This he was able to do in spades: They lived in a penthouse on Nob Hill in San Francisco; the children went to the best schools.
But Manzano never abandoned his concern for his native land and publicly opposed then President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ imposition of martial law in the Philippines. His stance coincided with the concerns of Scharlin and Villanueva, who were active in the anti-Marcos movement of that era.
The Filipino role in UFW
When the Mexican Chavez was just beginning to get his bearings in organizing agricultural workers in California, Filipinos under the leadership of Vera Cruz, Itliong and others were an equal and influential force in the struggle.
“The Filipinos…were the major minority in the union…There were probably more Filipinos involved with the union than Mexicans,” Vera Cruz said.
As time went on, however, the Filipinos became a minority within a minority. The Mexicans could replenish their ranks because they were so close to their own country, whereas the Filipinos (many of whom did not marry due to the ban against miscegenation) dwindled in number.
Another issue was the typical fragmentation of the Filipino community into their respective language groups, and disagreement on what Filipino leadership meant. They were also disadvantaged because Spanish became increasingly dominant in the Chavez-led movement, and Ilocano, not English, was their lingua franca.
Vera Cruz did not mince words in criticizing Chavez on the latter’s undemocratic leadership of the UFW. A bigger disillusionment was Chavez’s explicit support for the martial rule of Marcos, from whom he accepted an all-expense-paid trip to the Philippines and whom he lauded.
Vera Cruz’s criticism of Chavez’s many failings was eventually backed by Huerta’s recent acknowledgment of Chavez’s sexual exploitation of female members of the UFW.
In recognition of his lifelong service to the Filipino community in America, Vera Cruz was given the first Ninoy M. Aquino Award. The award included a trip to the Philippines in early 1988 to meet then President Corazon Aquino in Malacañang. It was his first trip back to his native land since his departure in 1926.
Vera Cruz found the country far different from the one he had left in his youth. He was shocked to encounter far more widespread poverty than what he had known 60 years earlier. Moreover, he found that the members of his family, who had benefited from his sacrifices, had their own specific concerns and, naturally, did not quite know how to react to this relative/stranger in their midst.
Ironically, he had no family of his own because of the US ban on racial intermarriage during his prime.
Their legacies
Both Vera Cruz and Manzano were profoundly influenced by the country that colonized the Philippines and framed their ideals in its language.
In Manzano’s opinion, “the greatest political document ever produced by men is unquestionably the American Declaration of Independence.” He also firmly believed that all human beings are equal “regardless of color, race, religion, sex, and national origin.” For him, life’s purpose is the pursuit of happiness, not wealth.
Vera Cruz cast a critical eye at the capitalist system and upheld the view that “the struggle of the workers in [the US] is the most important struggle…” and that “it’s crucial that the minorities who live in [the US] understand the rules of the system, the capitalist rules.”
An important topic that runs through the two books is racism. Colonel Manzano reached the highest rank then possible as a Filipino military man in the American system, but did not achieve his goal of becoming general and commander of the US forces in Central America. Given the attitudes of that day, would that have been possible?
Manzano claimed that the Fil-Hispanic system from which he emerged was not marked by the blatant racism often experienced by Filipinos in the military. The lack of credibility with which his American superiors regarded his guerrilla and intelligence activities backs up this claim.
Being mestizo, Manzano also enjoyed being at the top of Philippine social circles. His son Jaime, in his own memoir, wrote that his parents “believed so strongly in their superiority in race, class and intelligence” and spoke of his father’s “cultural and racial biases.”
“At that time, all other things being equal, my guess is that he’d chosen to take orders from a mildly prejudiced American than an intelligent, socially inferior Filipino,” Jaime Manzano wrote.
But neither Vera Cruz nor Manzano cut his umbilical connection to the Philippines, proudly claiming to be Filipino to the very end.
Masterful work
Craig Scharlin and Lilia V. Villanueva have each done masterful work in documenting the lives of two outstanding Filipino Americans. About 34 years separate the publication of the two books, the common format of which is a variation on the memoir form.
The book on Vera Cruz was written when Scharlin and Villanueva were working in the activist, academic world of Northern California, backdropped by the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship.
The second on Manzano came about due to Scharlin’s close acquaintance with the subject, having worked as assistant to the retired colonel. Piecing together a personal memoir when the subject had already passed was a challenge that he met with the trove of written materials left in various libraries and archives for posterity.
These two books continue to be a source of inspiration and a fount of material that testifies to the heroic record of Vera Cruz and Manzano. CS
Virgilio A. Reyes Jr. is a career diplomat of 35 years. He served as Philippine ambassador to South Africa (2003–2009) and Italy (2011–2014), his last posting before he retired. He is now engaged in writing and traveling, and is dedicated to cultural heritage projects.
