Our Living Legends series honors the pioneers and the barrier breakers in our community. They were the first Fil-Ams in their fields, each of them recognized for their outstanding work. They paved (or are paving) the way for those who came later. Through their achievements and with their guidance, the Filipino American community claims its place in American society.

HISTORIANS AND ARCHIVISTS

Dorothy Cordova

At 89 years old, Cordova continues to be the “keeper of Filipino stories,” working five days a week from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

In the 1950s, Dorothy and her husband, Fred, began promoting Filipino American identity at Seattle University where they both studied. They formed the Filipino Youth Activities (FYA) that provided wholesome youth activities ranging from soccer to folk dancing and parade marching. The group later on started organizing demonstrations in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Cordova also served as director for the Demonstration Project for Asian Americans (DPAA), which conducted a wide variety of studies on the problems Asian Americans faced in the 1970s. Through the DPAA, she collected research and oral histories. After the DPAA closed in the early 1980s, the Cordovas moved their work to a new organization that they created called the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), where Dorothy is Founder and Executive Director. Fred Cordova, the author of Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, served as Founding President Emeritus and Archivist of FANHS. The organization now has more than 35 chapters around the United States. In Seattle, it houses the National Pinoy Archives, which is one of the largest collections on Filipino American history anywhere. It includes thousands of materials on individuals and organizations throughout the United States.

Dorothy’s husband, Fred, started the national effort to make October Filipino American History Month. The House of the 111th Congress introduced a House Resolution 155 to officially recognize this month for Filipinos. In October 2009, the Senate of the 111th Congress passed a resolution recognizing Filipino American History Month. In November 2009, Congress passed the resolution officially recognizing October as Filipino American History Month.

In passing the legislation, the U.S. Congress noted that, “the writings and teachings of American history have often overlooked the role of people of color, among them the history of Filipino Americans, whose heritage spans a colonial, political, economic, and cultural relationship with the United States.”

“Even though there’s an interesting history of us in the United States, we’re often overlooked,” remarked Cordova, in an interview with GoodNewsPilipinas.com. “Everybody looks at it like we’re recent immigrants. We’ve been here longer than a lot of people…..The term we use is ‘forgotten Asian Americans,’ which we are,” says Cordova. “There was very little written about us.”

Marina Espina

Espina arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana from the Philippines in 1967 when her husband, a consul, was assigned to the Philippine Consulate in Louisiana. Before moving, she was a librarian at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Manila. She was hired as head of the Biology Department in the library of the University of New Orleans (UNO). She worked there for 27 and a half years until her retirement in 1996.

Espina is best known for documenting and recording the history of Filipinos in Louisiana. As a faculty member of the university, she was able to access scholarships and grants to do research on the Galleon Trade. And since her husband worked at the Philippine Consulate, Espina had access to Filipinos living in the bayous. She considered herself as the “link” between the old and the new Filipino communities. She also said she coined the name Manilamen.

For years, Espina went up and down the bayous and deltas of Louisiana, using word-of-mouth referrals to track down descendants of the Manilamen. She coaxed people into sharing family photos, birth certificates, documents, and stories of their elders. All the while, she was making copies of whatever she could to piece together the broader history. Espina also traveled to Mexico and the Philippines. She received a Fulbright scholarship in 1983 and has taken two sabbaticals from UNO; but by and large she has financed her work on her own. Along the way, she has presented her findings to university audiences and has had her work profiled in metropolitan newspapers and by the BBC.

An unnamed hurricane in 1915 erased Saint Malo where Filipinos first settled. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy destroyed Manila Village. And then in 2005 Katrina wiped out most of Espina’s records. “Every 50 years, nature seems to diminish the Filipino history here,” she says. Many scholars fear that the history of Filipino Americans in Louisiana may be gone for good. Many college faculty members cite Espina’s 1988 book, Filipinos in Louisiana, in their Asian American studies and history courses. Without Espina’s research, far less would be known about the Filipinos who settled in the Louisiana marshlands in the 1760s. The “Manilamen” are believed to be among the earliest Asian immigrants in this country. The Manilamen escaped by jumping ship (the galleons) in New Orleans and in Acapulco, Mexico. Dr. Rick Bonus, an associate professor in the University of Washington’s Ethnic Studies Department who has used Espina’s book commented, “As sad as (Hurricane) Katrina was, we should pay attention to how these people find new ways of going on with life. Whenever Filipinos have migrated, whether because of natural disaster or other reasons, their stories are of tenacity and resilience.”

Retired from UNO since 1996, Espina says it’s impossible to re-create the historical records she lost in Katrina. For one thing, she doesn’t know the current whereabouts of most of the people she had interviewed over the years. Nonetheless, she still patiently fields queries from scholars.

“The story of the Manilamen and their descendants has almost become my entire life,” she says.

Alex Sandoval Fabros, Jr.

Alex Fabros is a third-generation immigrant to America. He was born in upper Cagayan Valley, Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines. He immigrated with his family to the United States in August 1948. His father was a career-serviceman and veteran of the 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment and a long-time journalist with Philippines Mail in the 1930s.

Fabros had heard the stories on anti-Filipino riots and labor strikes from his father’s friends while growing up. He dropped out of college in the early 1960s and became a migrant farm worker following the seasonal rotation of California’s salad bowl crops. He participated in several California labor strikes, including the 1965 asparagus strike in Gonzales and the grape strike in Delano.

Alex enlisted into the U.S. Marine Corps, serving from September 1965 to May 1971. During his service in the Marines, he trained at the Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, where he studied Chinese Mandarin. Alex later attended in-country schools to study Vietnamese and later in Japan for Japanese. He also became a specialist in East Asian studies through the U.S. Army's school at Fort Holabird, Maryland. He trained again at DLI in Korean and received refresher training in Vietnamese and Japanese as well. He had additional training in Psychological Operations and as an Automations Systems Officer.

In 1990, after his mother passed away and after spending time with his father, Fabros began training in Filipino American history through his father and uncles. He began the Filipino American Experience Research Project (FAXRP) while still on active duty. His automation training enabled him to assemble facts into a database from different sources. He added relevant newspaper clippings to his database. This enabled him to sort information to create different reports of specific incidents. In October 1992, after meeting Dan Gonzales, a professor at the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State, FAXRP was incorporated into the Filipino American Studies Program. The primary product of this research project was the transcription of 90% of the available Filipino American newspapers published in the United States from 1903 through 1953. It is through this research that Alex then wrote several articles for Filipinas Magazine from 1994-2006. Many articles inspired documentaries such as "Unsung Heroes," Untold Triumph," "The Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers," and "The Celine Archives." He was recently featured in episode four of the award-winning PBS documentary, "Asian Americans." His latest project is a short film in collaboration with Georgina Tolentino, "NO DOGS."

Despite not finishing college, Fabros earned an M.A. in Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University where he was recognized in 1998 as the Distinguished Graduate Student. He received a fully-funded five-year fellowship to the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed his studies in 2003. Fabros is recognized as the leading historian of the anti-Filipino race riots of the 1930s.

He currently resides in California's Great Central Valley, enjoying his retirement by continuing his research of the history of Filipinos in America.

Oscar Peñaranda

Oscar Peñaranda was born in Barugo, Leyte and left for Manila at the age of five. When he turned 12, he left Manila for Vancouver, Canada and then at 17 moved on to San Francisco California where he has more or less stayed for the last 55 years.

His stories and poems and essays have been anthologized both in the U.S. and internationally. In 1980, his plays, Followers of the Seasons (depicting the Alaskan Salmon Fishing experience) and The Truant were performed by the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. He is the author of Full Deck, Jokers Playing, a collection of poems (T’boli Press, San Francisco, 2004) and Seasons by the Bay (T’boli, 2004). a novel in stories that won the best fiction for 2004 for the Global Filipino Literary Award, an organization based in Singapore, Paris, and Washington, D.C. It also won an award for best fiction from PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists) for 2005 and Full Deck won the Poetry category. His work focuses on the Filipino experience, the Filipino American experience, the U.S. experience, and the global experience.

He has been an educator for 40 years and has taught in universities and colleges for 15 years, in middle School for 10 years, and high School for 15 years. He has taught, influenced, and inspired several generations of Filipinos, Filipino Americans, as well as non-Filipinos, students, educators, and the general public. He has advocated for Philippine and Philippine American Studies all throughout the United States and Canada. He has given lectures presentations and workshops all over the U.S. from Stanford to Harvard and many others. In 2012, he was a recipient of the most prestigious award Gawad ng Alagad ni Balagtas by the Writers Guild of the Philippines (Unyon ng Mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas, UMPIL) for his lifetime achievements in promoting and pioneering the institutionalization of Philippine Studies, Philippine-American Studies, and Philippine Languages Studies in the United States, becoming perhaps the first person not residing in the Philippines to be given such an honor. He was also a Trustee of the Filipino American National Historical Society, being a founder and first president of the San Francisco chapter. He remains active in the cultural, literary, and educational promotions and exchanges of Philippine and Philippine American events.

He earned his B.A. degree in Literature and his M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University where he became part of the struggle to establish Ethnic Studies in the schools. In the summers, he held many odd jobs including hotel help in Las Vegas and picking all sorts of fruit in California’s fields. He also worked in Alaskan fishing canneries for 15 consecutive summers, (vowing each year never to return).

He visits the Philippines as much as time and money can let him, his stay becoming longer and longer each time. He taught a Memoir Writing Class for Seniors, given talks and workshops at the Silliman University, and initiated a Writing-n-Waray program in Tacloban. He hopes to contribute more and more of his time and talents to the Philippines, coming full circle to the place where he was born and nurtured as a child, glad and grateful for now having the time to give back to the people and the place that gave him so much.

ACADEME

Dr. Belinda Aquino

Aquino is best known for having founded the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the only center offering academic degree programs on the study of the Philippines and Filipinos overseas. She is considered one of the United States’ most prominent experts in Philippine politics, power, and culture. While she was earning her Ph.D. in Political Science at Cornell University, she became an outspoken advocate for women’s empowerment, which included promoting the use of birth control and encouraging women to find employment instead of being housewives. She was also a staunch critic of the human rights abuses of the Marcos dictatorship. This caused her to be on the dictator’s watchlist, making her unable to go back to the Philippines. Instead, she began teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

She has written books on the ill-gotten wealth of Marcos: Politics of Plunder: The Philippines Under Marcos (1987) and The Transnational Dynamics of the Marcos Plunder (1999). Many more of her publications and columns have appeared in Philippine Daily Inquirer, Far Eastern Economic Review, Asian Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Newsday and the Honolulu papers.

She established the Belinda A. Aquino International Philippine Studies Endowment at the University of Hawaii in 2012 “to promote and enhance academic and professional studies on the Philippines and Filipinos from an international, comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspective. It will encourage and support the study of diasporic and global issues affecting Philippine society and culture, and Filipino communities overseas.”

Aquino is the first-ever awardee of the prestigious Dr. Jose Rizal Award for Peace. She retired in 2010 but continues to help new immigrants ease into life in America. “My overriding hope is for the Philippines and Filipinos to reach a level of political and social stability, economic security and peace, where the fundamental problems of poverty, illiteracy, inequality, corruption, lack of education, and related situations can be overcome,” she said in an interview with PositivelyFilipino.com.

Dr. A. Gabriel Esteban

Dr. Esteban is the 12th president of DePaul University, the nation’s largest Catholic university. He assumed presidency on July 1, 2017 becoming the first lay leader in the school’s history, and the first Filipino American to assume such a position in a major university. He holds a doctorate in business administration from the Graduate School of Management of the University of California, Irvine and a master’s in Japanese business studies from Chaminade University in Honolulu. He earned his MBA and bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of the Philippines.

Esteban had extensive experience in higher education and strategic planning prior to arriving at DePaul. He most recently served as the president of Seton Hall University, a Catholic institution in South Orange, New Jersey. After serving as interim president for six months, he became president in January 2011. He was Seton Hall’s first lay president in more than 25 years. During his tenure, Seton Hall announced the establishment of the only private medical school in New Jersey in partnership with Hackensack Meridian Health. Prior to Seton Hall, he served in senior-level leadership positions and on the faculty of higher education institutions in Arkansas, Texas and the Philippines.

At DePaul, Esteban oversees a $523 million budget, nearly 22,000 students on two major Chicago campuses, and about 3,300 full-time and part-time faculty and staff. During Esteban’s years as president, DePaul was a top producer of award recipients in the prestigious national Fulbright U.S. Student Program. For the first time, the Peace Corps ranked DePaul among its top volunteer-producing colleges and universities. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of 2020 graduates found jobs or were continuing their education within six months of graduation.

DePaul’s national ranking on advancing students’ social mobility was a standout among U.S News & World Report’s 2022 rankings, rising 35 positions into the Top 100. Its award-winning Discover and Explore Chicago programs appeared on the “Academic Programs to Look For – First-Year Experience.” Many academic programs have received Top 25 national rankings, including the School of Cinematic Arts, which the Hollywood Reporter and Variety both ranked on their lists of best film schools; as well as the College of Communication, which in 2019 was listed as a Top 5 graduate program for Public Relations and Advertising in PRWeek. Other highly ranked programs include DePaul’s digital marketing, MBA, acting, game design, animation, and entrepreneurship programs. These points of distinction led to the largest freshman class—2,774 students—in DePaul history in fall 2020.

A celebrated leader and advocate for minorities, Esteban has received multiple honors throughout his career. His alma mater, the University of California, Irvine, named him one of its Top 50 graduate and postdoctoral alumni. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recognized him as a “Great Immigrant” in 2015, and New Jersey’s leading business journal, NJBIZ, included him on its list of the 100 most powerful state leaders in 2016 for a second time. In 2014, the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem knighted him; and St. Paul’s Outreach—an organization inviting college students back to their Catholic faith—presented him with its Servant Leader Award. The Embassy of the Philippines awarded him a certificate of achievement in 2013.

Among Esteban's many accomplishments have been transformational additions to DePaul's academic programs. Graduate and undergraduate programs for students interested in health and science related careers significantly expanded. DePaul will welcome its first cohort of students to a new speech-language pathology program this upcoming fall and open a speech-language pathology clinic that will serve the Chicago community. A new bachelor of science in nursing program is expected to launch in fall 2022 along with other health-related programs. DePaul also has become the only university in the world to use a trans-professional model to teach diplomacy skills through the new Grace School for Applied Diplomacy, funded by an anonymous $20 million gift. Additionally, DePaul programs, including entrepreneurship, game design, animation and acting, consistently rank among the top in the nation.

Esteban launched initiatives to attract and retain diverse faculty through programs including the Presidential Faculty Fellows program and the Faculty Recruitment Incentive Program. He made it a priority to recruit a strong and accomplished senior leadership team that is among the most diverse in the country.

In four years, DePaul’s endowment has grown from $492 million to over $900 million, an increase of more than 80 percent. Additional strategic accomplishments include successfully navigating DePaul through the challenges of COVID-19. The university raised a record-breaking $90 million in a single year to address the needs of DePaul's students and programs during the pandemic. In a significant measure for DePaul's future, Esteban drove the effort to enroll the largest and most diverse freshman classes in the university’s history the last two years by increasing access.

Despite these successes, DePaul University announced that Esteban will step down from his position as president at the end of the next academic year on June 30, 2022. After five years of leading DePaul, he will take a one-year sabbatical and visit members of the Vincentian family around the world.

“After much prayer and reflection, I have discerned that this is the time for me to shift my focus and energy to my personal and familial journey, and away from our shared institutional endeavors," Esteban said in a personal message shared with the university community. “It has been an honor to work with our outstanding faculty, dedicated staff, and our many alumni and friends to bring our Catholic, Vincentian and urban mission to life every day."

Amy Agbayani

Dr. Amefil Agbayani (Source: Hawaii Book and Music Fest)

Born in the Philippines to a school teacher and a diplomat, Dr. Amefil “Amy” Agbayani received a degree in political science from the University of the Philippines. She immigrated to Hawaii in 1964 to study at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center in the 1960s and earned her Ph.D. The antiwar protests of the era helped set the stage for her lifetime fight for civil rights and social justice.

She didn’t know much about Hawaii’s history when she arrived, or that there was a big and growing Filipino community. But she later realized her arrival coincided with a 1965 immigration law change that led to the influx of Filipino immigrants. She was working in Kalihi when she and her friends noticed Filipino kids were getting bullied and that many who didn’t speak English well weren’t getting a good education. “It never occurred to me to ever be a second-class citizen, but I was seeing Filipinos being treated as second-class citizens,” she said.

In 1972, she co-founded Operation Manong, a program for the university’s students to tutor Filipino and other immigrant students. She secured millions of dollars for scholarships and for student service programs. As Assistant Vice President Chancellor for Diversity, she established and directed the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity (SEED) program under the Office of Student Affairs. It became one of the most comprehensive student diversity programs in the nations. SEED later on expanded to serve Native Hawaiians, African Americans, Pacific islanders and other underrepresented groups such as women, the LGBTQ community, students with disabilities, senior citizens, parents, and pre-school children.

After 45 years, Agbayani retired from the University of Hawaii at Manoa on December 2016. “Manang Amy is our Rosa Parks,” a student told the Fil-Am Courier in an article honoring Agbayani’s retirement. Her retirement was so significant that it was the Filipino newspaper’s cover story in January 2017. Local organizations bought up multiple pages of advertisements praising Agbayani’s contributions. Agbayani’s biggest fans are the numerous students who felt supported by her over the decades. “If it wasn’t for Manang Amy I don’t know where I would be,” says Marie Guillermo, a second-generation Filipino immigrant.

Though retired, she continues to provide guidance and mentoring to the causes she believes in. The University of Hawaii has the Amy Agbayani Endowed Scholarship that will “provide educational opportunities for those working for a diverse, equitable and inclusive society.”

Dr. Estela Matriano

Dr. Estela C. Matriano co-founded and became the Executive Director of The Filipino School in San Diego, California. A respected Filipino educator, Dr. Matriano was recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential Filipino Women in the United States of America” at the 8th Filipina Leadership Summit in San Francisco in 2011. She was also the Executive Director and President of the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction (WCCI) for 40 years and a faculty emerita of the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati and Alliant University in San Diego. Her teaching focus included global education, multicultural education, peace education, women’s studies, and human rights. Her love for the environment led her to write a book on Planet Earth with Betty Reardon.

Other positions she held at the university and in the community included: International Multicultural Education Research Intervention and Teaching; Adviser, International Students Association Member; Adviser, International Students Association; Past President, Filipino American Development Initiatives (FADI); and Board Member, Council for Teaching Filipino Language and Culture (CTFLC).

While some schools in the U.S. offer Filipino language as a class, The Filipino School is the first in the country to teach Filipino culture and history in addition to language. The school's co-founder, Tony Olaes, told BuzzFeed Philippines that the school was created to "bridge Filipinos in the Philippines with those in the diaspora through education." Matriano added, "Our goal is to educate, awaken, and empower." The school is divided into four levels — elementary, middle school, high school, and college and up — with classes tailored to enlighten a sense of national identity. “Many Fil-Ams acknowledge the lack of awareness about their own language, culture, and history. But once they begin to fill in the missing blanks, they start to feel more self-confident and motivated to be active in the Filipino community.”

Matriano retired in 2020 at the age of 91 and now lives in Seattle with family members.

ARTS

Evelyn Mandac

Born in Malaybalay, Mindanao, Mandac is a soprano and voice teacher who now resides in New York City. She is the first Filipino to ever sing at the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera House. She later earned critical acclaim for her many portrayals of opera heroines in major opera houses and festivals worldwide including The Metropolitan Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Washington Opera Theater, Lyon Opera, Salzburg Music Festival and the Glyndebourne Music Festival.

Mandac’s father sang in the church choir and had a beautiful baritone voice but was dissuaded from pursuing a career in music in order to support a family. Mandac studied at the University of the Philippines where she began to hone her vocal prowess under the tutelage of Lourdes Corrales Razon, a gifted mezzo-soprano and famous radio personality in the 1940s. Before Razon’s death, she told Mandac to seek out Aurelio Estanislao, a renowned baritone singer and advocate for Filipino vocal music who had won many awards including the Premier Prix du Chant from the Conervatoire Nationale du Musique de Paris, the first Filipino to receive this award. Mandac became Estanislao’s pupil and continued to hone her talent.

One evening, Mandac was asked to perform at a party for U.S. Ambassador and Cultural Attache William Stevenson. Impressed with her talent, Stevenson helped her get a scholarship at Oberlin College where he served as president prior to his diplomatic work. She applied for a Fulbright scholarship to pay for her travel expenses and was accepted. She arrived in Oberlin, Ohio in February 1964. After Oberlin Conservatory, she applied to Indiana University and The Juilliard School in New York. She was accepted to both, but chose the prestigious Juilliard where she received a scholarship. In her second semester at Juilliard, she became fascinated with the opera, but was not accepted to the opera program. She tried again the next year, and this time, she was accepted. Mandac said, “And from then on, I sang the main roles for the opera.” She sang the soprano roles in The Magic Flute, La Boheme and Marriage of Figaro. She was soon traveling across the country for performances. In 1971, she made her television debut in an adaptation of Pyotr Iiyich Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades.

In the 1980s, Mandac decided to retire from performing. She now maintains a teaching studio in New York City where she passes on her extensive experience and wealth of knowledge to her students. “I feel like I'm a student forever,” Mandac says. “Even now, as a teacher now, I'm still learning. And that's the kind of habit that you develop. And I believed in it. Work is learning. Open to new things, open to old things, and then just integrating them all together. That's how I feel about life.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, and over Christmas 2020, Mandac volunteered her time to direct a virtual production of Handel’s Messiah, bringing together vocalists and musicians from across the globe for a livestreamed performance. The funds raised from this concert benefited out of work Filipinos so they could support their families.

Dan Inosanto

Inosanto is known for promoting Filipino martial arts. He is responsible for bringing several obscure forms of the Southeast Asian martial arts into the public eye, such as Silat, a hybrid combative form existing in such countries as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Inosanto, who grew up in Stockton, California, began training in martial arts at the age of 11, receiving instruction from his uncle who first taught him traditional Okinawan Karate and later also Judo and Jujutsu. He served as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division from 1959 to 1961. He was also a member of the Strategic Army Corps. At Fort Campbell he refined his skills in various martial arts.

Most known as Bruce Lee’s training partner, confidante, and the most highly ranked by Lee in his own personal art of Jeet Kune Do, Inosanto’s martial arts background spans years both before and after his time with the iconoclastic legend. He is one of three people appointed to teach at one of the three Jun Fan Gung Fu Institutes under Bruce Lee; Taky Kimura and James Yimm Lee are the other two. He studied with different martial arts masters elsewhere in the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe. After Bruce Lee's death, Inosanto became the principal spokesperson and historian for Jeet Kune Do. He has had minor roles in a number of films, including Bruce Lee's uncompleted last film, Game of Death (1972). He was commissioned in 1977 by the Dallas Cowboys to incorporate martial arts into the team’s training.

The film, “I Am Bruce Lee” provided Inosanto with an opportunity to reveal a little-known fact about the friendship the two men shared. Inosanto was teacher to Bruce Lee, introducing him to nunchaku. Inosanto explained that he introduced the weapon to Lee, taught him the basics and some exercises to get him started on his weapons training. The “Game of Death” movie, one of the most recognizable of the Bruce Lee films, showcases the use of the nunchaku by Lee and Inosanto.

He was featured as the Black Belt Magazine's 1996 "Man of the Year." Contributing editor Dr. Mark Cheng writes: “The Filipino system taught by Dan Inosanto is far more than just the sticks and knives that the casual observer sees. Including every possible weapon and range of combat, Inosanto's system is one of the most sought-after and imitated arts in the world when it comes to practical self-defense.

Inosanto is a four-time Black Belt Hall of Fame inductee, putting him in the same category as Chuck Norris, the only other martial artist who has been inducted four times. He has taught many famous students like Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker. He has also published several books on martial arts.

In an interview with Akido Journal, Inosanto said, “For me, martial arts is really about bringing people together. I learn the culture of a country through the martial arts. When I study a Korean art, I learn something about Korea. When I study a Japanese martial art, I’m learning about the history and culture of the Japanese. Learning about other people and other cultures brings people together and creates greater understanding among people.” He adds: Be kind, be courteous and respectful, and avoid negative people because they’re really not good for the soul. Eat as healthy as possible, take care of your body and mind, and learn to adapt. Find your place in this world and seek connection with your spirituality – whatever form that may take.

Sugar Pie DeSanto

Born Umpeylia Marsema Balinton in Brooklyn, Sugar Pie DeSanto was an R&B singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s. Her father was a Filipino seaman and her African American mother was a concert pianist. “That’s who taught me my music, my mama. She was a classical pianist, and she played ever since she was a very, very little young girl. She was a monster. She never read a note. Everything she played, she could hear it one time and play it all the way through without an error,” says DeSanto.

Johnny Otis discovered DeSanto and gave her the stage name of Sugar Pie. They toured together for the Johnny Otis Revue and the James Brown Revue. She was regarded as a “first class soul singer, a commanding jazz stylist, an uproarious comedienne, a show-stopping dancer, and an expert tunesmith.”

In 1960 her hit single, “I Want to Know,” which she recorded with her then husband, Pee Wee Kingsley, reached number four on Billboard’s Hot R&B chart. The song was inspired by “my everyday living of going through problems with men, and smoking weed and hanging out.” In 1962, she moved to Chicago and signed up with Chess Records as a recording artist and writer. During her tenure at Chess Records, she became the most prolific and highest paid writer in their employ. In 1965, under the name Peylia Parham, she began a writing collaboration with Shena DeMell and they produced “Do I Make Myself Clear,” a duet she recorded with Etta James which reached the top 10. “In the Basement” was her second duet with James. Her songbook contains more than 100 compositions, which have been recorded by various artists.

She made more than twenty appearances at the Apollo Theater and it was there that The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, spotted her and she became his opening act for the next two years.

Sugar Pie DeSanto’s husband, Jesse Davis, died in October 2006 while attempting to extinguish a fire that destroyed their apartment in Oakland, California. “Grieving” and “Deepest Hurt” are heartrending tributes to her late husband. “That’s some of my love life years ago. That’s the way I write,” says Sugar Pie. “All songs I write are true. A part of life that I have lived. Real life, not crap! That’s the way I write: the real me.”

A full-length recording of Classic Sugar Pie was released in 1997. In 1999 she was given a Bay Area Music Award for best female blues singer and in September 2008, she received the Pioneer Award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. In November 2009, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Goldie Awards. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed DeSanto among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. In 2020, DeSanto was the recipient of an award by the Arhoolie Foundation based in El Cerrito, a nonprofit that honors artists who preserve traditional music for future generations.

In 2018, DeSanto was battling cancer. A new album is scheduled to be released in 2021. She also plans to travel to Italy and London to perform live when the pandemic is over. She is 86 years old.

Source: Google and Wikipedia

The Magazine

Living Legends, Part 2