Filipinos have been in the United States since the 16th century, yet many of their stories remain untold. For the past year, 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.

Nani Coloretti, Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget

Born in Honolulu, Coloretti is currently the Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the highest ranking Filipino American in the Biden administration and the first Filipino American to serve in this role. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in economics and communications from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Before 2009, she served as Policy and Budget Director for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. From 2014-2017 during the Obama administration, she was United States Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Assistant Secretary for Management and Acting Chief Financial Officer of the Department of the Treasury and Acting Chief Operating Officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Before joining the government, Coloretti was senior vice president for financial and business strategy and treasurer at the Urban Institute. She currently serves as an independent director on the board of the Bank of the West and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Strategic Advisor to Government Executives with the Partnership for Public Services, and has been independently recognized for innovation and leadership, receiving the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy Special Award for Policy Innovation, the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) Alumni Achievement Award and the National Public Service award.

Tim Flores, Chef and Co-Owner of Kasama

Chef Tim Flores and Genie Kwon of Kasama Restaurant (Source: Chicago Magazine)

Kasama is the first Filipino restaurant in the U.S. to earn a Michelin star. It is based in Chicago and run by Chef Tim Flores with his Korean wife, Genie Kwon. “We named the restaurant Kasama because, apart from myself and my wife combining forces into running this restaurant, we also combined the concepts we wanted to do,” says Flores in an interview with Michelin Guide magazine. “We wanted to do Filipino food, and she wanted to do French pastries. And so Kasama, meaning 'together' in Tagalog, made sense for us. It was just fitting, and it made so much sense to use the word.” Flores, who grew up in Chicago with his mother who hails from Cavite and who is also an amazing cook, wanted to make Filipino food more accessible to people who had never had it. He explains to first time patrons that Filipino food is influenced by the Chinese and Spanish, but that they try to put a Filipino touch to everything like bagoong (shrimp paste) XO sauce which uses Serrano ham that is cooked down. The result is “a bursting blend of different umami flavors.” Kwon created a best-selling Basque cake filled with ube (purple yam) pastry cream and huckleberries, dusted with powdered sugar in the shape of the sun from the Philippine flag. Flores adds: “I want to push along with the other Filipino chefs around the country and in the world, as much as I want to push forward with Filipino cuisine. I want to change the stigma about Filipino food being cheap and a little overwhelming, while staying true to the culture. I also want to emphasize the togetherness that food brings, like family and giving back to people.”

Jonathan Corpus Ong, Professor and Research Fellow

Jonathan Corpus Ong (Source: NY Southeast Asian Network)

Ong has been named a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He was one of 28 scholars selected among 300 applicants nominated by their respective institutions and was awarded a $200,000 stipend. He is an associate professor at the Department of Communications of University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication in 2003 at Ateneo de Manila University, summa cum laude, and completed his Master of Science Degree in Politics and Communication at the London School of Economics and his Doctorate degree in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In 2020-2021, Ong worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, monitoring misinformation and fake news for the U.S. 2020 elections. He has been working with Legal Network for Truthful Elections (LENTE), a group of lawyers involved in voter education activities. “They have been trying to translate my work into a legal framework. Their advocacy is to try to create a code of ethics among advertising and PR professionals in the Philippines,” says Ong. To reach college listeners who are interested in news and features, Ong and journalist Kat Ventura recently launched a podcast on Spotify called “Catch Me if You Can.” The program digs into the world of troll farms and online black propaganda machinery in the Philippines. “It only takes minutes of scrolling through one’s Facebook or Tiktok feed to see that rampancy of disinformation in the Philippines has divided the electorate. Passions are running so high it’s scary,” Ong says. “We see the other camp as enemies to be defeated, to be obliterated, to be erased rather than people we disagree with…..This is the real impact of how six years of disinformation has thrived on multiple platforms. We have done well in targeting low-level influencers and fake account operators,” Ong adds. “But we haven’t held into account the political elites and the strategists supporting them, the ones who are running the campaign.” Ong hopes to come up with another academic research that may help the Philippines and the rest of the world curtail disinformation.

Vanessa Minnillo Lachey, Beauty Queen and Actor

Born in Angeles City, Philippines to an American father and Filipino mother, Lachey has lived in Washington, California, Nevada, Florida, Germany and Japan as a result of her father’s service in the Air Force. Her parents divorced in 1986 and Lachey and her brother, Vincent Jr., settled with their father in Charleston, South Carolina. She was crowned Miss South Carolina Teen USA and went on to win the title Miss Teen USA in 1998. She was a correspondent for Entertainment Weekly and hosted Total Request Live on MTV. She has starred in two network sitcoms and hosted through 2010s and 2020s various competition and reality shows. She is currently the lead role in the CBS spinoff NCIS: Hawaii which premiered in September 2021. The same year, she also launched her first book, Life from Scratch: Family Traditions That Start with You, that includes cooking recipes, parenting tips, birthday and date night ideas and personal stories. She is married to singer Nick Lachey and they have three children.

Howard Hoffman, Entrepreneur

Howard founded Personal Health Product Development in 2010 – the company behind the success of the leading brands: pHresh Products, Dream Nutrition, and the world’s first narrow range pH testing strip, a class one medical device. He is also the current CEO of the award-winning hemp brand that he co-founded in New York – Complete Hemp, founded back in 2018 – which has bagged the UNFI CBD Pitch Slam Award for developing the highest quality and most effective CBD brand within UNFI’s distribution. This makes him the first Filipino CEO of a Cannabis Company. The Philippine-born entrepreneur then ventured into the Adult Use Cannabis Industry in New York. All companies handled by Howard are in partnership with the Gift of Life International, Inc. – an organization dedicated to providing life-saving cardiac treatment to children in need from developing countries – which has now facilitated heart surgeries for 31 children. Because of the community services he spearheaded and for having established certified-minority owned businesses, the USPAACC (US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce) awarded Howard with the Asian American Leadership Award in 2019.

Sarah Lancaster, Teacher of the Year

Lancaster, one of 15 children of a Filipino immigrant mother and a much older American father, became the first educator of Asian/Pacific Islander heritage to be named the 58th recipient of the Minnesota Teacher of the Year Award. She was chosen out of an initial list of 77 candidates from around the state. Lancaster, a first-grade teacher, knew she wanted to return to teach in Onamia, the small town she grew up in central Minnesota with a majority Native American student body. As a teacher for nine years, she has coached volleyball, track and speech, and directed school musicals. She is active in her church and president of the local civic association, and volunteers with a local Girl Scout troop. “As a teacher, I get to show my students that they can reach beyond whatever barriers they encounter,” Lancaster said in a video she submitted to the award selection panel. “I get to show them that beyond these barriers is an amazing person, a scholar, an athlete, someone looking to connect with their culture and find their true identity. I can supply and awaken the language, strategies, enthusiasm and joy that very well may have been inside them all along.”

Kevin Michael Benedicto, San Francisco Police Commissioner

Kevin Michael Benedicto (Source: SF Examiner)

Commissioner Benedicto earned his Juris Doctor degree at the University of Virginia in 2015. He served as pro bono counsel for a panel created under then-San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón to weed out institutional bias in the San Francisco Police Department. He was also part of a team that revised San Francisco’s landmark use-of-force policy, which prevents police officers from shooting at moving vehicles and using the carotid restraint. For his work on police reform, as well as pro bono representation for low-income businesses in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, Benedicto received the 2021 Award of Merit from the Bar Association of San Francisco. The seven-person San Francisco Police Commission, where Benedicto will serve a four-year-term, is the official governing body of the San Francisco Police Department, tasked to set policy for the Department, and conduct disciplinary proceedings and hear appeals from police officers. “On behalf of the Filipino American Community in San Francisco, I wish to congratulate Atty. Kevin Benedicto for becoming San Francisco’s first Filipino American Police Commissioner. His appointment to the San Francisco Police Commission exemplifies yet again the significant contributions of Filipino Americans in the United States. It is my hope that he inspires more Fil-Ams to serve their communities through government service,” Consul General Neil Ferrer said.

Georgina Tolentino, Actor and Filmmaker

Tolentino is an actress and writer of Filipino European descent, based in Los Angeles working on various projects, including "Operation Blackbird" and a feature film called "Untitled Watsonville Project." Born and raised in San Francisco, where she attended New Conservatory Theater and later UC Santa Barbara. She worked for numerous production companies in Los Angeles before starting Urduja Films, which focuses on amplifying women's perspectives and intersectional storytelling. Recently she filmed a short film called "No Dogs" co-written with Alex Fabros about the Watsonville riots. The short is a work of fiction but explores two people on opposing sides hiding out in a diner after a taxi hall is bombed. The clubhouse taxi hall was known to have caused tension as many Filipino men had romantic relationships with white women which triggered the formation of a white-led hate group called “The Nightriders.” The film won the Audience Award and jury awarded the Petite Grand Prix at the Chelsea Film Festival. She will be starring as Victoria Manalo Draves in a feature-film biopic about the first woman to win two gold medals in Olympic diving at the 1948 London Games. Victoria Manalo Draves was half-Filipino and half-English American at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in the United States. Tolentino has been training for two years in diving, gymnastics, and movement to prepare for the role.

Ouida, Singer, Songwriter and Visual Storyteller

Samantha Ouida Hyland, better known as Ouida, grew up listening to jazz greats like Billie Holliday and Nina Simone. At 18, she moved to New York after being accepted into New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts, but financial costs prevented her from completing a degree. She considers herself hapa, or a person with mixed heritage – she has an Irish father and a Filipino mother. Racial identity plays a big role in Ouida’s artistry -- she has had to wrestle with the pressure of being boxed into certain demographics, the different parenting styles she was brought up with, and often feeling excluded in the neighborhood she lived in and schools she attended. When she was 18, the manager she had at the time even went as far as explicitly telling her to keep her Asian heritage to herself, because “Asians don’t sell.” “I wanted to dive deeper into understanding the experiences of feeling like our Filipinx identities were invisible in the context of the larger ‘Asian’ identity and in many biracial identities in the diaspora,” she said in an interview with CAAM.org. “ By centering my visual art around positive and empowered representation, I wanted to create a space of visibility and community to explore Filipinx identity in the diaspora and celebrate our love for the heritage that connects us.” During the first lockdown in Dublin, Ireland, she produced Coffee (Ride With You), a jazzy, soulful jam about vulnerability, confrontation, and breakthroughs in relationships. Directed by award-winning music video director David Dutton, the dreamy visual features a diverse all-Filipinx cast and Filipiniana fashion courtesy of brands like AMAMI and Vinta Gallery.

Steve McKay, Associate Professor

McKay is the Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Center for Labor Studies. His research has focused on labor, gender, racial formation and globalization. He is a published author in historical and multi-sited ethnographic research. A few titles of his books are Born to Sail? Race, Masculinity and the Making of Filipino Seafarers and So They Remember Me When I’m Gone: Remittances, Fatherhood and Gender Relations of Filipino Migrant Men. He also works locally on a series of community-initiated, student-engaged research projects focusing on low-wage work, wage theft, immigration, and affordable housing. McKay holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and a M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, as well as a B.A. in Political Economy of Industrial Societies, University of California – Berkeley. Together with grad students Christina Ayson Plank and Meleia Simon-Reynolds, McKay launched The Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) Digital Archives last April 9 at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) to preserve the histories and contributions of Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley.

Source: Google and Wikipedia

The Magazine

Fil-Ams Among The Remarkable And Famous, Part 32