Pablo Manlapit

Filipino-born activist, labor leader, lawyer

• Pronunciation: mahn-LAH-peet
• Born: January 17, 1891
• Birthplace: Lipa, Batangas, Philippines
• Died: April 15, 1969
• Place of death: Philippines

Born into a working-class Filipino family, Pablo Manlapit was a labor activist at an early age. After moving to Hawaii, he became a lawyer and, despite constant harassment from powerful and wealthy sugar-plantation owners, served tirelessly as an advocate for oppressed Filipino workers who toiled in cane fields and sugar mills.

Areas of achievement: Activism, social issues, law

Early Life

Pablo Manlapit was born into a working-class Filipino family and grew up with three brothers and a sister. Manlapit attended local schools through junior high before dropping out, moving to Manila, and working as a railroad company messenger. He later clerked at the Bureau of Civil Service and at the Bureau of Forestry. Still in his teens, he became a timekeeper for a US-run construction project on the island of Corregidor, but he was fired for being a labor union agitator.

In 1910, Manlapit left the Philippines and joined the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) because of its promise of wages and free passage to Hawaii. After arriving in Honolulu, he worked at mills and sugar plantations on Hawaii and Oahu. Manlapit soon discovered Hawaii was no paradise for Filipino laborers. Living conditions were appalling: cane cutters and mill workers were crowded into sweltering barracks and barely survived on their low wages.

Manlapit moved to Hilo, where he ran a pool hall. In 1912, he married Anne Kasby, a German American from Hawaii. They started a family, eventually bringing up four children together, and moved to Honolulu in 1915. Manlapit held a variety of occupations while studying law at night school. In 1919, he earned a license to practice law, becoming Hawaii’s first Filipino lawyer.

Life’s Work

As a newly minted lawyer, Manlapit quickly became a spokesperson for the plight of Filipino sugar workers. A charismatic speaker fluent in English, Spanish, and Tagalog, Manlapit rallied leaders among the workers to form the Filipino Labor Union. In early 1920, he called for a strike against HSPA, demanding higher wages and eight-hour work shifts. Higher-paid Japanese sugar workers were persuaded to join the strike, which lasted two months before HSPA broke the strike by hiring local Hawaiians, Portuguese, Chinese, and newly arrived Filipinos to work the cane fields and sugar mills.

Because of his labor activities, Manlapit became a marked man. Company spies followed him everywhere, and rumors were placed in company-friendly newspapers. The HSPA lobbied for new territorial laws intended to control union activists. Despite such intimidation, Manlapit continued to advocate for what became known as the Higher Wages Movement. In 1924, he called for another sugar workers’ strike. The six-month-long work stoppage ended in tragedy when twenty people died in a confrontation between laborers and company-hired policemen. In the aftermath, Manlapit was tried for conspiracy, convicted, and sentenced to hard labor at Oahu Prison in 1925. He was disbarred in 1926. In the wake of his imprisonment, Anne Manlapit suffered a breakdown, and her four children were placed in an orphanage until she recovered enough to work as a launderer to support her family.

In 1927, Manlapit was pardoned on the condition that he leave Hawaii. He spent five years exiled in California, working in Los Angeles and elsewhere with the Filipino Federation of America and with other groups interested in starting a field workers’ labor union. In 1932, Manlapit returned to Hawaii and again took up the cause of Filipino workers. Once again, HSPA vigorously opposed him. In 1934, he was arrested on trumped-up charges. After being convicted, he was ordered to leave Hawaii or face imprisonment. Manlapit subsequently returned to the Philippines. His family stayed behind in Hawaii; his wife eventually divorced him and remarried.

In the Philippines, Manlapit also remarried, wedding Ponciana Calderon and fathering a son, Romeo (born 1937). In the late 1930s, he was associated with the National Civics Union labor organization. During World War II, Manlapit was a member of the Labor Advisory Board in Manila. Following the war, he worked as an adviser for the administrations of several Philippine presidents, including Sergio Osmena, Manuel Roxas, and Elpidio Quirino.

Manlapit briefly visited his former wife and grown children in Hawaii in 1949. A longshoreman’s strike was in progress at the time, and Manlapit was banned from participating in the work stoppage. Back in the Philippines the following year, he became president of the National Civic and Patriotic League, an anticommunist organization. In 1952, Hawaiian governor Oren Long pardoned Manlapit with the proviso that he never again live in Hawaii. Manlapit never did; for the last twenty years of his life, he remained in the Philippines, dying there in obscurity at seventy-eight years of age.

Significance

Manlapit sacrificed everything—his family, his law license, and his freedom—in his efforts to improve working conditions for fellow Filipinos in Hawaii. During an intensive, decade-long campaign spanning the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s, he seldom rested in his drive to achieve equality for the most recent and least respected migrant arrivals to the islands. Manlapit made numerous inspirational speeches at workers’ meetings and rallies, represented the less fortunate in lawsuits, and defied plantation owners by organizing laborers and instigating strikes. Ultimately, he went to prison and twice suffered deportation from his adopted homeland for his beliefs. It was only long after the civil-rights era, the easing of immigration laws, and his death that Manlapit’s many contributions supporting the full integration of Filipino culture into Hawaiian—and American—society were recognized.

Bibliography

Baldoz, Rick. The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print. Documents the arrival and treatment of immigrant workers from Asia in Hawaii and the mainland United States.

Duus, Masayo. The Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Sugar Strike of 1920. Trans. Beth Cary. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print. An examination of the Japanese sugar workers’ role in supporting Filipinos in the first major strike against HSPA, also noting the far-reaching consequences of the strike.

Jung, Moon-Kie. Reworking Race: The Making of Hawaii’s Interracial Labor Movement. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. Print. Details how immigrant groups of various ethnicities in the sugar, pineapple, and shipping industries organized to overcome racism and achieve a better position in the Hawaiian labor force.

Kerkvliet, Melinda Tria. Unbending Cane: Pablo Manlapit, a Filipino Labor Leader in Hawaii. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2002. Print. An illustrated biography of Manlapit that utilizes all available data—photographs, documents, and contemporary articles—to present as complete a portrait as possible of the activist.