Imagine leaving your home in hopes for a better life and going to a country where you don’t know anyone. Imagine being promised an education and life full of prosperity, only to experience discrimination, mistreatment, and exploitation. This was the experience of many immigrants coming to the United States in the early nineteenth century. Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, and the growth of global capitalism disrupted local economics and politics worldwide. Capitalist countries like the US extracted resources from some countries, including cheap labor. This caused millions of people around the world to emigrate.

The early pioneers who left the Philippine Islands during the early twentieth century were lured by promises of better opportunities. Many were inspired by the pensionados—students who came to the United States from the Philippines on scholarships instituted by the Pensionado Act of 1903—and desired the opportunity to go to school in the US, but had to work as laborers to survive. ​More than 90 percent of those who left for the continental US and the Territory of Hawaiʻi were male, which meant that there were only a handful of Filipinas who came to the US mainland during the early twentieth century. Filipina/x/o people who arrived in the US from 1906–1934 number about 100,000 and constitute the first major wave of Filipina/x/o immigration to Hawaiʻi and the continental US.

In 1898, the Philippines had defeated Spain and won its independence from the Spanish, but the Spanish-American War led to the Philippines becoming a territory of the United States under the Treaty of Paris later that year. This ushered in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). The end of the war resulted in the Philippines remaining a US territory and the designation of Filipinos as non-citizen “US nationals.” This meant that Filipino immigrants could enter the country without restriction. During the twentieth century, their migration filled a labor vacuum on the West Coast brought about by the 1924 Immigration Act, which prohibited other Asian immigrants from entering the United States.

Most of these Filipina/x/o immigrants were young men under the age of 30. They settled in such West Coast cities as Stockton, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Salinas, Watsonville, and Seattle, creating vibrant Little Manilas, Manilatowns, and many Filipino American organizations. They also created highly organized labor unions in the agricultural fields of Stockton and Salinas, and in the Alaskan salmon canneries.