When Clarissa Aljentera wanted to teach her 6-year-old son about the impact of Filipinos in Chicago, she ended up in what some might consider an unusual place: a re-creation of a boxcar from the historic Pullman Company , where train porters served luxury travelers beginning in the 1880s.

“Some of the images that we see here on the wall, there’s someone who is helping a passenger get ready for bed. There’s someone who’s folding what maybe looks like linen,” Aljentera said. “These jobs were held sometimes by African Americans, [but also] Filipinos and even Mexicans.”

And that point is important to Aljentera, who learned about the connection after attending a talk. “My husband is African American and I’m Filipino, and so [creating a tour] was a very practical way that my son, AJ, could kind of see both of our communities working together.”

Like Aljentera, I’m a Filipino American. When I recently moved to Chicago, I sought out that community — but found something interesting.

There’s not one neighborhood but small enclaves in almost every region of the city. The story of why is intertwined with the inherent diversity of the Philippines, U.S. war policy and colonialism and, perhaps most importantly, the resiliency of the Filipino culture itself.

The pensionados

The Filipino community has a long history in Chicago that can be traced over three major waves of immigration to the city. “The first significant wave of Filipinos were the pensionados,” said James Zarsadiaz, author of Raising Hell in the Heartland: Filipino Chicago and the Anti-Martial Law Movement .

Kind of like a one-way exchange program, these Filipinos were mostly young men from wealthy families. They were unique among immigrants in the early 20th century, as most from Asian countries were barred due to racist immigration policies.

But the Philippines had just become a U.S. colonial territory after the Spanish-American War in 1898. Then, in 1903, after the Philippine-American War, the U.S. government began giving these students scholarships to attend American colleges. The goal: to bring American customs back to the Philippines.

The first significant wave of Filipinos immigrants to Chicago were known as pensionados, a group of young men from the Philippines who were given scholarships by the U.S. government to attend American colleges.

Courtesy of the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago.

“The expectation is that Filipinos in the Philippines are going to assimilate to the American way, because embracing the American mores and traditions is the quote-unquote ‘civilized and modern way of living,’ ” Zarsadiaz said.

Pensionados settled around their college campuses like in Hyde Park and other parts of the South Side. This first wave of Filipinos paved the way for the next wave in the 1920s and 30s.

Workers fighting for rights

While the first wave of Filipino immigrants came from wealthy families, the next wave was made up of decidedly more working-class people — service and domestic workers and porters for the historic Pullman Company .

Their neighborhoods moved west to areas like McKinley Park, Bridgeport, Archer Heights and Pullman — neighborhoods that at the time were a hotbed for the swelling labor rights movement. After Black porters began organizing in the mid-1920s, the Pullman Company hired hundreds of Filipinos to pit them against their Black counterparts.

But the Filipino workers pushed back.

The second wave of Filipino immigration established communities on the South Side Chicago, top and bottom right. Many worked in the service sector, like a bellhop, left, and for the Pullman Company, below.

Courtesy of the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago (above).

Women boarding a train with assistance by a Pullman porter (right) and a conductor (left), circa 1915.

“There were places of solidarity between both communities,” said Aljentera, the mom who created a tour for her son. “The two communities worked together as the Filipino Americans joined the Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to protest the management about working conditions.”

It took 10 years for BSCP to win its first labor contract in Chicago . But this local fight helped workers across the country win fair pay, safer conditions and the right to bargain collectively. The events are “a testament to the resiliency,” Aljentera said. “Where you are is where you build community.”

A permanent community

South Side neighborhoods may have been an early hub, but today, many people associate the North Side with Filipino Americans. This could be because of the Rizal Center in Lake View is where a lot of Filipino folks communed in Chicago, especially after the third wave of immigration.

“I came here in 1980 … and I can remember there were only two Filipino storefronts,” said Tito Jerry Clarito, chairman of the Jose Rizal Center and the Filipino American Council of Greater Chicago. It was opened in 1974 and named after national hero of the Philippines José Rizal .

Ribbon cutting opening of the Rizal Center during Philippine Week in 1974.

Courtesy of the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago.

Clarito was among 500,000 Filipinos who immigrated in the decades after the U.S. ended quotas for immigrants coming from certain countries, in 1965. Many Filipinos of this third wave had professional careers such as nursing. When the U.S. colonized the Philippines, the government also established American-style nursing programs and schools. Even after independence in 1946, Filipinos continued the American curriculum — which inadvertently prepared them to work in the U.S.

“The kind of long-standing histories between the U.S. and the Philippines because of colonialism … that really shapes how Filipinos are able to navigate their communities in places like Chicago,” historian Zarsadiaz said.

The final result is a community not tied together by location but cultural values. These professional workers settled near their workplaces — places like Edgewater, Lincoln Square, Albany Park and many northern and northwest suburbs.

Filipino artists performing on Piyesta Pinoy stage in 2019 in Bolingbrook, one of the areas where many settled during the third wave of immigration.

Courtesy of the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago.

Today, the Rizal Center continues to be a major hub, not just a place for the community to socialize but also organize, like they’ve done around legislation addressing workers and veterans rights .

“There’s a multiplicity of reasons why Filipinos were able to build community in different parts of Chicagoland, and much of that has to do with these histories,” Zarsadiaz said.

Clarito seconded that sentiment: “In the Philippines, we have 7,000 islands and we have about 100 languages. That’s just [the] way we are, but we have this common unifying character: We are Filipinos.”