Ernesto Mangaoang

Ernesto Mangaoang (1902 – 1968) was a Filipino American labor organizer. A communist and longtime leader of immigrant Filipino laborers, Mangaoang was closely associated with Chris Mensalvas, and was a personal friend of the famous Filipino American intellectual and activist Carlos Bulosan.

Born in 1902 in the Philippines, then a colonial possession of the United States, Mangaoang came to the United States in the 1920s, permanently settling in 1926 and finding work among the Filipino cannery workers in the Pacific Northwest. Dissatisfied with working conditions among the migrant and immigrant Filipino workers – a largely migrant workforce working in the isolated salmon canneries in Alaska in the winter and toiling in the fields of California during the summer months – Mangaoang would rise to become a leader within Filipino American workers' movement from the beginning of the 1930s.

The fuller trajectory of Mangaoang's work as a labor activist was compelled not merely by his awareness of the poor working conditions of the Filipino longshoremen and cannery workers, but also by an early consciousness of racial divisions among the working class responsible for debilitating the workers' movement: as white laborers occupied the top rung of the labor hierarchy, minority workers systematically endured the harshest of obstacles in seeking work during the 1930s Great Depression unemployment wave. Meanwhile, black workers were employed as strike-breakers when white workers protested dissatisfaction with their own conditions, thereby devaluing the gravity of white workers' own demands for progressive change. Terminated from work at the beginning of the Depression years, Mangaoang wrote a letter to the Oregonian in response to a report on the layoff of 60 Filipino hopyard workers: noting the systematic racism in the state's employment practices, Mangaoang concluded with a call for Filipino self-determination, linking the struggle for Filipino independence to the fight against racism in the U.S. Northwest.

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