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.

Ditas Katague, Associate Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Ditas Katague (Source: USC Soi Price School of Public Policy)

In April 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau announced the appointment of Filipino American Ditas Katague, who grew up in Kansas City, as associate director of communications, responsible for leading internal and external communications activities of the nation’s largest statistical agency. This includes oversight of marketing, public affairs, congressional and intergovernmental affairs, partner engagement and media relations. Prior to joining the Census Bureau, Katague was director of the California Complete Count – Census 2020 Office, the outreach and communications campaign that worked to ensure a complete population count of historically undercounted Californians. This built on her experience leading the state’s decennial census outreach efforts in 2000 and 2010. In 2000, as chief deputy campaign director for the Governor’s 2000 Census California Complete Count campaign, she led a groundbreaking multilingual, multimedia outreach effort that resulted in a mail-in response return rate that outpaced the national rate. From 2012 to 2018, she served on the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Race, Ethnicities and Other Populations, including three years as its chair. An expert in multiethnic outreach and civic engagement, Katague also served as chief of staff to the California Public Utilities Commission, where she improved public participation and access to the energy and telecommunications utility rate and regulation process.

Gini Cruz Santos, Animator

Gini Cruz Santos (Source: OPPA Foundation)

Santos works at the Pixar studios based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She worked on numerous Pixar animation films including Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, A Bug's Life, The Incredibles,[8] Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, Up, Lifted and Brave She was nominated in 2004 for an Annie award for her detailed lifelike animation on Finding Nemo, and was nominated by the Visual Effects Society for an award for this project as well. Santos worked as an art director at an advertising agency. In 1996, she was hired by Pixar after submitting her short feature reel entitled The Eclipse without submitting her resume. Her reel focused on human relationships. Her animation of Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, on the film Finding Nemo was praised for integrating "fish movement, human movement, and facial expressions to make them look and feel like real characters.” She was the supervising animator on the Pixar short film entitled Lifted and she was lauded for her work in Brave. She is sometimes described as a Pixnoy: a Filipino American or FilAm artist working at Pixar. Santos was born in Pasay City in the Philippines. She moved to Guam after age three but returned to study in the Philippines. She studied Fine Arts at the University of Santo Tomas with a major in advertising. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Ben Olivas, International Tax Lawyer

Olivas has been a Partner at DLA Piper in Silicon Valley since 2008. He works with U.S. companies expanding outside the U.S., as well as foreign companies that seek to increase their operation in the U.S. Olivas focuses on international tax structuring and planning, cross-border mergers & acquisitions (including post-acquisitions integration), transfer pricing planning and compliance, and tax controversy assistance. Prior to joining DLA Piper, Olivas worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers LLP in Silicon Valley from 1993 to 2008, including as a partner with the international tax group from 2001 to 2008. Olivas has a master’s in Taxation (LLM) and a masters in Corporate Law (LLM) both from New York University. He also has a B.A. in Law (LLB) and a Bachelor in Science (BS) in Legal Management from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He has been a Board Member of NVC Foundation-USA since 2011, an organization that helps underprivileged children in Negros Island fight hunger and poverty through nutrition, education, and sustainable livelihood programs for the parents, and Philippine International Aid, an organization based in San Francisco that sends disadvantaged children to school in the Philippines.

Ron Harper, Jr., Professional Basketball Player

Ron Harper, Jr. (Source: Twitter/Raptors)

Son of former NBA player, Ron Harper, Harper Jr. is a professional basketball player for the Toronto Raptors of the NBA. He played college basketball for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights of the Big Ten Conference. His mother, Maria Pizarro, is from Bataan, Philippines and played college basketball for New Orleans before becoming a coach. His maternal grandfather represented the Philippines in jai alai at the 1968 Summer Olympics. In 2021-22, Harper reaped the following accolades: Honorable Mention All-American (Associated Press), Second All-Big Ten Selection (coaches and media), First Team ALL-ECAC, and NABC Second Team All-District. “You know, I always thought me and my dad were completely different players, just because he’s a point guard and I’m a wing player. But playing the game for a long time and being where I am today, I realize that we do a lot of things the same. Especially on the defensive end, that’s where I see the biggest replica of him. He was a guy that could guard multiple positions, so being able to be a guy who can do that too is a great trait to have in the NBA,” Harper said in an interview with Yahoo!

James Zarsadiaz, Associate Professor and Author

Zarsadiaz is an Associate Professor of History and serves as Director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. His research and teaching interests include urban and suburban studies, California and the U.S. West, Asian American history, and the twentieth-century United States. He was a fellow at both the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and Asian Pacific American Center. His first book, Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. comes out in fall 2022. His first research article, "Design Assimilation in Suburbia: Asian Americans, Built Landscapes, and Suburban Advantage in Los Angeles's San Gabriel Valley since 1970," (co-authored with Becky Nicolaides) was published in the Journal of Urban History (2015) and won the Urban History Association's Arnold Hirsch Award and the Vernacular Architecture Forum's Catherine W. Bishir Prize. Zarsadiaz's second article, "Raising Hell in the Heartland: Filipino Chicago and the Anti-Martial Law Movement, 1972- 1986," was published in American Studies (2017) and received an Honorable Mention from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies. His third peer-reviewed article, "Methodists against Martial Law: Filipino Chicagoans and the Church's Role in a Global Crusade" was published in Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies (2021). He has also published work in Amerasia Journal, International Migration Review, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Social History, New Jersey Studies, and Pacific Historical Review. Zarsadiaz has written articles and op-eds for City Lab, National Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post. He earned his degree in history, American studies and political science from George Washington University, his master’s in History and Ph.D. candidacy in history from Northwestern University.

Jean Gavina, Nurse Practitioner

Jean Gavina (Source: Health and Medicine Policy Research Group)

Gavina is a Clinical Strategy Manager with a background in Health Administration and Nursing. Her experience is in strategy and operations, quality improvement, and relationship development. Jean’s expertise is the implementation of technology platforms and tools to support operations. She has worked in project management, program development, and launching new clinical programs. She was one of three recently selected for the distinguished Schweitzer Fellowship, a year-long service-learning program intended to address the unmet health needs of underserved communities in the Chicago area. Gavina’s project will concentrate on preventative health, wellness, and self-care sessions, as well as healthy lifestyle workshops in collaboration with L.E.S. Live Every Second and other community organizations in the Chicago area. She will empower community advocates by providing the tools and skills needed to advocate for healthier communities among Filipino Americans and other minority groups. “This is wonderful opportunity to grow, learn, connect and empower others and be able to give back to the community,” Gavina says. Other community work involves Gawad Kalinga and Midwest Pilipino American Coalition.

Michael Ordoña, Film Critic

Michael Ordoña (Source: *Los Angeles Times)*

Michael Ordoña has covered film and television for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle for more than a decade. He has also reviewed movies for Common Sense Media. He is an alumnus of both the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Berkeley High School, and freely admits to a blatant Bay Area bias in all sports.

((( O ))), Singer and Songwriter

June Marieezy or ((( O ))) (Source: facebook)

June Marieezy or ((( O ))) is a Filipino American singer and songwriter. The artistic moniker ((( O ))) is unpronounceable, and she chose this because she does not resonate with her birth name. The creative syntax symbolizes her energetic presence. Born in Dallas, Texas, Marieezy returned to the Philippines in 2008 and spent five years studying music in Manila and cultivating a local audience. She has performed in Hongkong, London, and Malaysia. In 2015, she met her future husband and fellow musician, French Kiwi Juice (aka FKJ), while performing on stage. In 2018, Marieezy announced she would be releasing new music every full moon for 12 years, known as moondrops. On July 30, 2021, she released the music video for “Bayou” announcing her pregnancy. The artist works alone from a solar-powered treehouse studio in a Philippine jungle where she has opened a community store, searches for ancient medicinal plants, and works under a spiritual mentor after leaving everything behind in America. “Using solar panels, I’m powered by the sun and don’t depend on anyone. Creating art without needing anyone’s approval is the most pure form of discovering yourself. I need to go back into society to spread these messages the best way I know how, which is through music,” she said in an interview with Crack Magazine.

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, Assistant Professor

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez (Source: Artfront)

Gutierrez is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, whose work centers on the connections between plant species, politics, and modern history with a focus on the Philippines and greater Southeast Asia. Her writing and research to date have contributed to the history of science in the Philippines, weaving and textile studies, and the environmental humanities. Her work has been published in the Asian Review of World Histories and the Philippine Journal of Systematic Biology, with forthcoming contributions to the edited volumes Empire and Environment: Confronting Ecological Ruination in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas and Women in the History of Science: A Liberating the Curriculum Sourcebook. She has been a visiting faculty member and researcher in the International Studies Department at De La Salle University, Manila and the Facultad de Informática at Complutense University in Madrid. In 2021-2022, she was a Humanities Mellon Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden, where she worked on a book manuscript drawn from her dissertation. Kathleen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies and a Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. While at Berkeley, she re-established and co-coordinated the Filipino and Philippine Studies Working Group, an intellectual hub for faculty and students that hosts events featuring emerging research in the fields.

Marvellous Undag, Nurse

Marvellous Undag (Source: Bay Path RVTHS Practical Nursing Academy)

Undag, who hails from San Carlos City, Negros Occidental, was recently inducted into the National Technical Honor Society (NTHS) where a minimum 3.0 grade point average, faculty recommendation, character leadership, and involvement in extracurricular activities are required. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physical Therapy from Davao Doctor’s College in the Philippines. Since 2016, Undag has been a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) at the Blaire House Long Term Care Facility of Worcester, Massachusetts where he focuses on dementia care. He is also certified for Mental Health First Aid after completing a course on domestic violence. In an interview with Inquirer.net, Undag stated why he wanted to be a nurse. “I’ve always found meaning in helping other people, especially the vulnerable and the sick. As an LPN, I would be in my element – personally attending to the needs of my patients, being empathetic to their struggles and pain. The work will provide me with the opportunity to come in and help in a truly consequential way. A nurse’s day can be both tedious and unpredictable. I imagine it will test my commitment to my ideals. But at the end of the day, being there for patients during the most difficult time in their lives, and knowing that I am truly making a difference, that’s the most rewarding vocation.”

Source: Google and Wikipedia

The Magazine

Fil-Ams Among The Remarkable And Famous, Part 38