Filipinos have been in the United States since the 16th century, yet many of their stories remain untold. For the past months, Positively Filipino has been running a series on notable Filipino Americans who have made their marks in this country. There are hundreds, or maybe even thousands more, that need to be added to this story, and we need your help. If you know of a Filipino American who deserves to be included in this line-up, please send us their names and any supporting documents you may have to pfpublisher@yahoo.com. For now, we are including only those who are currently active and visible in the media and the community, regardless of their religious, sexual or political orientation. Thank you.

Ashley Lehualani Kierkiewicz, Councilmember, City of Honolulu, Hawaii

Ashley Lehualani Kierkiewicz (Source: ashley4puna.com)

First elected in 2018 to represent Council District 4, Kierkiewicz is serving her second term. She is chair of the Committee on Planning and Housing Agency, and vice-chair of the Committee on Governmental Relations, Operations and Economic Development, and the Committee on Human and Social Services. She was born and raised in Hilo. Her father, James, is from Massachusetts while her mother, Marieta Carino, moved to Pahoa with her four sisters and their widowed mother from Ilocos Norte, Philippines. Her maternal grandfather was a sakada who worked in the sugar plantation. She graduated from the University of Hawaii at Hilo with a political science degree. She is president of the Zonta International Club of Hilo, whose mission is to empower women through service and advocacy.

Gerard E. Francisco, M.D., Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

Gerard E. Francisco, M.D. (Source: uth.edu)

Francisco is one of the nation’s leading physicians in the field of brain injury, stroke rehabilitation and spasticity management. He is Chairman and Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PM&R) at McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and an Adjunct Professor of PM&R at Baylor College of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the University of the Philippines and completed his internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. His residency in PM&R was at the University of Medicine and Dentistry-New Jersey Medical School, where he was chief resident. Currently, Francisco is the Director of the UTHealth Motor Recovery Lab at TIRR and the TIRR Memorial Hermann S.T.A.R. (Spasticity Treatment and Research Center). He is principal investigator in research in various areas, including robotic therapy in persons with incomplete spinal cord injury and intrathecal baclofen and botulinum toxins for spasticity. He recently received a research grant to investigate novel treatment of spinal cord injury-related pain. He has received numerous awards and has been listed in the annual “Best Doctors in America” since 2001. Francisco is the doctor of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who suffered from brain injury after an assassination attempt.

Ayesha Vera Yu, Social Entrepreneur and Founder of RuralKids.org.

Vera Yu is the CEO and Co-Founder of Advancement for Rural Kids (ARK) which co-invests with rural communities in the developing world on securing food, health, kids' schooling and their self-sustaining future. ARK's Feed Back, a fresh vegetable basket exchange, secures food for farming communities plagued with hunger seasons in just five weeks and gets fishing communities to create gardens that secure their food and income. ARK's award winning five-cent school lunch is the only school lunch in the world that parents contribute to day one and fully fund after three years. Prior to ARK, Ayesha was Director at BNP Paribas where for 11 years she was involved in leverage finance, acquisition finance, and loan syndications. She also restructured a farm in the Philippines, making it the first one in the province to be organic, and to offer fair employment, revenue share, healthcare, and continuing education to farmers/employees. She said she loved Noli Me Tangere so much that she stole the book from her high school and later replaced it with a newer copy. Vera Yu lived in the Philippines until age13 and then immigrated to the U.S. with her family. During a trip back to the Philippines in 2008, she saw the sad school condition of the Sibariwan village in Capiz. “I saw three to four kids huddled around each textbook and learned that students barely come to school with food, much less supplies,” she said. But the root causes, she realized, were “hunger and malnutrition.” She added, “Every day, I choose to partner with the community, keep kids in school, and grow ARK on a volunteer basis.”

Bobby Rubio, Screenwriter and Director of Float

Rubio worked at Pixar for 12 years as a storyboard artist. One of his children, Alex, was diagnosed with autism and Rubio wanted to tell his story. He was able to do so with Pixar’s SparkShorts incubator program that allowed employees to develop their own projects with small budgets and more creative freedom. Rubio got to highlight parenting challenges in Float and his Filipino American heritage. But the movie is so much more: “As the father comes to terms with his son’s condition and lets him float around the playground joyfully, their growth will resonate with almost anyone who’s had to come to terms with what makes them different, and therefore, special.” Float was described as “a film about acceptance with a heartwarming story.” Rubio says, “I didn’t have to sugarcoat the story. I was allowed to tell the story I wanted to tell.”

Marlon James Sales, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow

Marlon James Sales (Source: lsa.umich.edu)

Sales is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He also holds a research affiliation with the Center for the Historiography of Linguistics of KU Leuven in Belgium where he previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher on a digital humanities project about the circulation of linguistic knowledge in the early modern period. Sales received his doctorate in Translation Studies at Monash University in Melbourne and his dissertation explored the intersections of translation, language, and memory in the oldest extant Spanish-language grammar of Tagalog. His fascination with translation began when he was studying mass communication in the Philippines. He chose to write his undergraduate thesis on translating soap operas. He has published numerous articles and papers in English and Spanish.

Ronnie del Carmen, Animator

Ronnie del Carmen (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Del Carmen co-directed the 2015 Pixar film, Inside Out, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He was also the story supervisor on Pixar’s tenth full-length computer-animated film, Up, and directed its accompanying short film, Dug’s Special Mission. Del Carmen was born in Cavite, Philippines. After high school, he worked as a painter on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, which was filming in the Philippines. He graduated from the University of Santo Tomas with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Advertising. He moved to the U.S. in 1989 to pursue a career in film. At Warner Bros, Dreamworks, and Pixar he worked as a storyboard artist and/or story supervisor on Batman: The Animated Series, The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and WALL-E, among others. He has written and illustrated several comic books. Del Carmen left Pixar in 2020 to join Netflix to direct animated features based on Philippine lore. In an interview with Rappler, Del Carmen says, “It is the threshold that we must meet as filmmakers to be as authentic to the culture that I'm hoping to represent as I can…I'm sure that there's not one story or not one filmmaker who's going to be able to honor everything about any culture. I'm always very terrified. I'm trying to do a good job with it, but I'm in the beginning of it. So I don't know yet how well I'm doing.”

Anna Gonzalez, Vice Chancellor, Washington University

Anna Gonzalez (Source: Washinton University)

Gonzalez is the current vice president for student affairs at Harvey Mudd College, but in July 2021, she will join Washington University as the next Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs. As an immigrant to the U.S. at the age of ten, and a first-generation college student, Gonzalez emphasized the importance of intentionally designing spaces that are welcoming towards students from all backgrounds. “I want to hear from the different populations, different clubs and organizations and different types of involvement, all the way from athletes to students who are concerned about their experiences as a first-generation student, for students who are in Greek Life, for students who are sixth generation college students trying to understand what this world is about,” Gonzalez said. Her working experience with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California Irvine prepared her well for the school size of Washington University. She is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University with a degree in International Business and a master’s and doctoral degrees, both in education, from Claremont Graduate University.

Jessica Sanchez, Singer

Sanchez was born in Chula Vista, California to Edita Bugay from Samal, Bataan, Philippines and Gilbert Sanchez, a Mexican American from Texas. She rose to fame on the 11th season of American Idol where she ended up as runner up. After that, she performed The Star Spangled Banner, God Bless America, and The Prayer at the PBS National Memorial Day Concert from the west lawn of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. in May 2012. She also performed You’re All I Need to Get By by Marvin Gaye and Tammii Terrell, where she was accompanied by God’s Appointed People Choir at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. She has been invited numerous times to sing the national anthem. She has held concerts in the Philippines, and guest appearances in Glee, Lights Out, and All or Nothing. Sanchez is expected to release her third extended play soon.

Diana Rose Ranoa, Ph.D., Molecular Biologist

Dr. Ranoa received her M.Sc. in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from the University of the Philippines–Diliman. In 2006, she moved to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. in Microbiology at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign under the direction of Dr. Richard I. Tapping (Dept. of Microbiology). Her graduate studies focused on understanding the mechanisms of microbial sensing and the dynamics of interaction among members of the Toll-like receptor 2 subfamily of innate immune receptors. In 2014, she joined Dr. Ralph R. Weichselbaum’s lab at the University of Chicago Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology to investigate the RNA- and DNA-mediated tumor cell intrinsic response to ionizing radiation, and to define the molecular mechanisms that promote tumor proliferation and metastasis. She joined Dr. Paul Hergenrother’s lab as a Cancer Center Illinois/IGB Fellow in November 2019. Ranoa was one of the researchers who developed the saliva-based molecular testing for SARS-CoV-2 to help control the COVID-19 pandemic that had been approved by the FDA for emergency purposes and is now being used by universities and the Philippine Red Cross.

Mary Joy Garcia-Dia, Ph.D., President, Philippine Nurses Association of America

Garcia-Dia is the president of the Philippine Nurses Association of America (PNAA), as well as the program director for Nursing Informatics in the Information Technology Department and the Center for Professional Nursing Practice at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She serves on the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee for the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a joint initiative of the AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For the last eight years, she has been an advisor to the PNAA Human Rights Committee on matters involving unfair labor practice. In her capacity as PNAA President, she sits as Board Member on the Alliance for International Ethical Recruitment Practices and provides recommendations on contracts and recruitment practices to the Philippine Overseas Labor Office, Philippine Consulate in Washington, D.C. She received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Saint La Salle College of Nursing and her master’s degree in nursing informatics from New York University. She completed the Minority Nurse Leadership Institute fellowship program at Rutgers University College of Nursing in 2006. In 2015, Mary Joy received her doctorate in nursing practice from Case Western Reserve University.

Dante Basco, Actor and Director

Born in Pittsburg, California, Basco has four siblings. He was part of the Street Freaks breakdancing crew. He attended Orange County High School of the Arts in the music and Theater Conservatory. He got into acting, taking on minor roles in television. Basco's breakout performance was when he appeared as the leader Rufio of the Lost Boys in Steven Spielberg’s 1991 film, Hook, with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman. Basco had guest roles on television shows of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Hangin' with Mr. Cooper and had a recurring role on Moesha. After portraying characters of various Asian ethnicities except his own, he portrayed a Filipino American alongside his three brothers and sister in the independent film, The Debut. He starred as a breakdancer in the 2006 film Take the Lead, alongside Antonio Banderas. The Fabulous Filipino Brothers will be Basco’s directorial debut, featuring his brothers and sister. “The stories come from bits of our real life,” said Basco. “We kind of embellished on some of those and then created these characters inspired by my brothers. From Deadline.com: “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers is a tapestry of four vignettes that travel from the Bay Area in Northern California to the Philippines. Each vignette focuses on one brother as they tell their own stories of love, family, culture and…erotic consumption of food. All lead to a wedding that some of their family might see as controversial, but in the end, it’s all about celebrating the Filipino culture and strengthening the bonds of brotherhood and family.” The movie premiered at SXSW Online last March 2021.

Lara Gregory, Lawyer

Immigrant rights advocate Gregory is among the creators of a know-your-rights immigration rights campaign in different languages, including Tagalog, through the non-profit the New York Center for Education and Legal Remedies of which she is the executive director. Prior to moving to New York, her extensive international legal experience includes being the private prosecutor of the Ongpin kidnapping case as well as being the legal counsel for the Philippine Stock Exchange. Gregory started her career in New York, representing individuals before immigration judges in their removal hearings, defending senior citizens in landlord and tenant cases, as well as defending domestic abuse survivors. She has further honed her skills in litigation in the Surrogate’s Court and the Supreme Court of New York. She and her husband (together with their dog) are longtime residents of Queens.

Claudia Conway, Teenage Daughter of George and Kellyanne Conway

Claudia is the daughter of Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to former President Trump, and Filipino American George Conway, a constitutional lawyer who criticized the former president and was a founder of The Lincoln Project. She has a twin brother and two younger sisters. She recently auditioned at American Idol, but was eliminated in the March 22 episode. She has been open about her liberal views on TikTok where she has 250,000 followers.

The Magazine

Fil-Ams Among The Remarkable And Famous, Part 18