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.

Lanai Tabura, Comedian, Host, and Chef

Hailing from the tiny island of Lanai, Hawaii, and a graduate of Lanai High School, Tabura is a DJ, comedian, TV host and actor. Currently he hosts Cooking Hawaiian Style in its 6th season, a tv show that airs in seven countries on the Lifestyle Network, Direct TV, and Time Warner Cable. In the ‘90s, he was part of Hoku-nominated comedy trio “The 3 Local Boys.” With four albums under his belt, he is remembered for such hits as “Rice Rice Baby,” “I’m a Filipino,” and “Me So Hungry.” He toured the mainland doing stand-up comedy openings for Henry Kapono, Andy Bumatai, Augie Tulba, Wayne Brady, and Damon Wayans to name a few. As a 25- year- radio veteran, Tabura co-created the Island 98.5 radio station, and currently is on air in Tokyo and Fukuoka Japan. Tabura also makes his own wine called “Look Me in the Eye” and has developed a smart phone app, Pidgin 101, which lists and defines more than 125 different commonly used words and phrases. He now dedicates himself to one of his earliest passions – cooking – to share aloha across the globe through food. He travels around the country doing pop-up dinners, enlightening diners with Hawaii’s immigrant history and culture through his dishes. He has appeared in international and local TV shows such as Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race, co-hosted with Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, Jake and the Fat Man, Da Braddah’s, Baywatch Hawaii, and commercials such as Meadow Gold, Zippys, Hawaiian Tel Federal Credit Union, and more. He played Jake in season six of Hawaii 5-0.

Elaine Serina, Ph.D., Engineer

Serina is the principal and co-founder of Talas Engineering, a company that provides engineering and technical services in the areas of accident reconstruction, biomechanics, design analysis, material science, and failure analysis. The company uses science, specifically physics and engineering, to figure out how unfortunate incidents happen. She received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. all in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Influenced by her father, Dr. Eliseo Serina, a physician and mother, Norma, a nurse, Serina pursued biomechanics and engineering. She said, “I applied physics and engineering to study how the body works or breaks, and how to fix it.” She founded Pinay Aspirations in 2006, an organization that focuses on girls, challenges that they’ve overcome, and their potential to succeed. She has been an active member of the community, having served as President-Elect of the Filipina Women's Network, as Vice-President of the UC Berkeley Engineering Alumni Association, and as a member of the Advisory Council of the Daly City Youth Health Center. She co-founded the first Filipino graduate student organization at Cal. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit, Philippine International Aid.

Sammay, Artivist

Sammay (Source: UCSB Multicultural Center)

Samantha Penaflor Dizon, aka SAMMAY, is a healer, interdisciplinary artist, singer-songwriter, cultural producer, and educator of Kapampangan, Ilokano, and Bikol in San Francisco. She has been featured by dance Mission Theater, Red Poppy Art House, Eastside Arts Alliance, among others and has worked with The Medea Project, Kularts, and Dancing Earth. Her choreographic and directorial works include Spirits of the Streets (2015), Malice in Tenderland (2017), H.O.L.Y. CITY (Hate Often Loves You) (2018) and Daluyan (2019). She has had multidisciplinary artistic training with several prestigious organizations in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, New Orleans, Louisiana, Havana, Cuba, Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Francisco, California and Manila, Philippines. In 2017, Dizon debuted as Charm in Flip the Record, a coming of age story highlighting the contributions of Filipino Americans in the Bay Area turntablism scene. In 2018, she was selected as an ArtShare residency Partner through American Conservatory Theater. She is a three-time recipient of the Presented by APICC Artist Award. She holds a B.A. in Media Studies and Sociology and minors in Dance & Performance Studies and Global Poverty & Practice from U.C. Berkeley.

Maria Torres-Springer, Vice President of Ford Foundation

Maria Torres-Springer (Source: Crain’s New York Business)

Torres-Springer oversees he foundation’s domestic programming for Civic Engagement and Government, Creativity and Free Expression, Just Cities and Regions, Technology and Society, Future of Work(ers), and Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice. Previously, she spent almost 15 years in public service with the City of New York. She served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the nation's largest municipal housing agency. As the first woman to serve as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, she led the implementation of the new city-wide ferry service. As commissioner of the New York City Department of Small Business Services, she prioritized efforts to raise wages and support women- and immigrant-owned businesses. She also launched Women Entrepreneurs NYC and, with the innovative Tech Talent Pipeline program, worked to prepare New Yorkers for 21st-century jobs. Torres-Springer earned her bachelor's degree in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University and a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is on the boards of the Association for a Better New York Foundation, Living Cities, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP). She serves as co-chair of the GoVoteNYC Fund and is a member of New York Women’s Forum as well as the Visiting Committee of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Paolo Montalban, Actor

Paolo Montalban (Photo by Robert Vivancos Studio)

Montalban was born in Manila shortly before his family immigrated to New York. The family lived in Manhattan’s West Side and later moved to New Jersey where he grew up in a neighborhood surrounded mostly by Filipinos. The psychology graduate of Rutgers University grew up in a musical family: his father played the piano; two aunts studied the violin and piano; and his mother was involved in the theater in Manila. Montalban also learned to play the piano, violin, and saxophone. He portrayed Prince Charming (the first Filipino to do so) in Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s Cinderella in 1997, which is famous for its color-blind casting that resulted in a predominantly colored cast playing roles typically reserved for white people. Montalban beat out over 800 other actors for the role. In February 2021, Disney Plus launched the movie in its streaming service. Other appearances on screen include American Adobo, The Great Raid, Just Wright and Two Weeks, and on television include Mortal Kombat, Law & Order, City of Dreams, Madam Secretary, Nurse Jackie and The Blacklist. On stage, his credits include The King and I and The Romance of Magno Rubio. His latest movie, The Girl Who Left Home, centers on a Filipino American family and making choices between the family and pursuing dreams.

Odette Alcazaren Keeley, Media Practitioner

Keeley has a 20-year career in communications and journalism. She currently serves as the director of the Maynard 200 Journalism Fellowship Program of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. She is president and founder of Global MediaX, a multicultural international media consultancy group based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Previous jobs included national media director at New America Media (NAM), where she also hosted, produced and anchored NAM’s TV news magazine. She was also news executive director of ABS-CBN’s The Filipino Channel’s Balitang America, where she started as a news reporter in the Philippines. Keeley received her B.A. in Mass communication and minor in Broadcast Journalism degree from the University of the Philippines, cum laude.

Josie Harrison, Mother of Jo Koy

A retired banker at Wells Fargo, Harrison is famous for being the mother of comedian Jo Koy. She has four children and is happily married to a postal service worker who was formerly a soldier. She was previously married to Jo Koy’s father, Jack Herbert, a retired U.S. Air Force officer. Herbert met Harrison in Vietnam, where she was working as an office manager for a Filipino band and Herbert was stationed there. After their divorce in 1984, Harrison raised the four children. “I went to school on my own. I started from the bottom up. I worked two jobs to provide for the needs of my four children. A banker during the day for Wells Fargo and a cashier/hostess at Denny’s restaurant at night. I did everything on my own,” she said in an interview. Harrison was born in Quezon City, Philippines and now lives in Las Vegas.

AJ Rafael, Singer and Songwriter

Arthur Joseph Rafael, aka AJ Rafael, was born in Moreno Valley, California and graduated from the Berklee College of Music. His parents, Arturo, a pianist and choir director, and Shirley, a nurse, are from Tondo, Manila. AJ’s father died when he was only 10 years old, and AJ started playing the piano for their church. On YouTube, AJ uploaded covers of existing songs and his own compositions, and in 2008, he became a YouTube partner, which allowed him to receive a portion of the advertising income when people watched his videos. By 2010, he had uploaded over 150 videos with 18,117 subscribers, making him among the “50 Most Subscribed Music Channels.” He also performed in various venues in the U.S. and the Philippines. In 2014, despite having over a half a million YouTube subscribers and 113 million video views, AJ announced he would be pausing indefinitely from performing at live shows due to the difficulty of attracting audiences to in-person events. Influenced by the film, Crazy Rich Asians, AJ started Crazy Talented Asians, a live variety show showcasing Asians in the performing arts community. In 2020, after surpassing one million subscribers, AJ received a Gold Creator Award from YouTube. At the time, he had already 567 videos on his channel. He was one of the leaders of the “#WashTheHate” social media campaign to bring attention to the racism against Asian Americans related to the pandemic. He created online posters with the message “FILIPINOS FOR BLACK LIVES’’ and said, “Filipinos need to confront the colorism in our own community since it leads to anti-blackness then turns to racism.”

Nicole Dungca, Investigative Reporter

Dungca is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. Her previous work experiences include being part of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team where she delved into topics such as racism in Boston, secret criminal hearings in Massachusetts, the state’s cannabis industry, and transportation. She has also written about education at the Oregonian, and for the Times-Picayune, and Providence Journal. In 2018, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for local Reporting and the Livingston Awards. In 2019, she received the Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award. Dungca received her BA in Literature and Cultures in English from Brown University. She first displayed her writing talent as an intern with Filipinas Magazine. Dungca is also currently the senior vice president of Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) where she oversees directors of platforms and affinity groups, ensures direct representation of members and identifies and pursues opportunities for chapter development. The senior vice president also serves as acting president in the event the president is unable to fulfill his or her duties.

Marily Mondejar, Community Activist

Mondejar is the founding president of the Filipina Women’s Network (FWN), a global organization for women of Philippine ancestry, which claims to have an e-list of 10,200 members. She is a feminist, community organizer, and an advocate against domestic violence and trafficking of Filipina women. She is passionate about women’s rights and ensures the representation of Filipina and Asian women’s voices in public and private sectors. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1981 from Leyte, Philippines. After her divorce, she returned to school and earned a bachelor’s and master’s in organization development and leadership from New College of California, graduate studies in public relations at Golden Gate University, and completed doctoral coursework in organizational psychology at Alliant International University. Mondejar sits on San Francisco’s Commission on Community Investment and Infrastructure.

Erwin Benedict Valencia, Well-Being Expert

Erwin Benedict Valencia (SOurce: University of Pennsylvania)

Valencia considers himself a polymath: part-high performance clinician; physical therapist; part coach; part change agent; speaker; social entrepreneur; mentor; educator; author well-being and life coach; and dance ninja. He combines sports science with clinical expertise, mindfulness, and positive psychology to the algorithm of athlete wellness and care. He is the first Filipino to be hired full-time on a medical staff of the MLB and NBA. For three seasons, he served as the NY Knicks’ Team Physical Therapist and Assistant Athletic Trainer. He is one of 500 Executive & Organizational Coaches worldwide certified by Columbia University. He is an alumnus of BJ Fogg’s Behavior Design Boot Camp at Stanford University. Valencia was born in New Jersey but grew up in Texas, California, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Diane Paragas, Filmmaker

Paragas is best known for writing, directing and producing the 2020 film Yellow Rose, her debut narrative feature. The film was selected as the Opening Night Film of the 2019 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (LAAPFF) where it won the Grand Jury Prize. At the Hawaii International Film Festival, the film won the Audience Award. Her 2011 documentary film Brooklyn Boheme was about the African Arts movement, documenting the careers of Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Branford Marsalis, and Rosie Perez, and more. It was the opening night film for the 2011 Urbanworld Film Festival and premiered on Showtime. The film won the Black Reel Outstanding TV Documentary Award. Paragas co-directed the film with Nelson George as well as serving as a producer, editor, and cinematographer. She is currently developing a feature documentary, The Three Lives of David Wong, which was selected for Sundance Creative Producing Lab and won the CAAM Documentary for Social Change grant. She was selected as a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee. In March of 2021, the Philippine Consulate General honored Diane Paragas with a Distinguished Filipino Women in New York award. She was born in Minneapolis but went back to the Philippines when she was a year old. She returned to the U.S. at age four and grew up in Lubbock, Texas where she studied painting, music, and film. She started her career in advertising and later joined MTV and Discovery Asia where she began to focus on documentary filmmaking.

Source: Google and Wikipedia

The Magazine

Fil-Ams Among The Remarkable And Famous, Part 27