by Jas Keimig
On Sunday night, the Filipino Community Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Way filled with Filipino community members eating food from Filipino-owned businesses, like Wild Cat Catering and Musang, listening to a reading from writer Angela Garbes, and dancing the night away to music by Drea & the Marilyns.
The occasion was the launch of FILIPINOTOWN Magazine, a new publication dedicated to highlighting the diversity and strength of the Filipino American community in Seattle. And for magazine founder Terrence Jeffrey Santos, it felt good to be back in a space that shaped so much of his life.
“It was a beautiful sight to see the room filled, packed pretty much to capacity, with community members who came out to support each other and to celebrate each other,” Santos, a regional Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and writer, said in a recent phone interview.
The digital 200-page issue of FILIPINOTOWN Magazine dropped on Oct. 15, and a physical issue will be shipped to subscribers later this year. The magazine archives the stories of around 70 Filipino community members in the city. The roots of the project go back to 2017, when Santos and his wife were operating a restaurant — Wow Wow Hawaiian Lemonade in Kirkland — and connected with other Filipino American restaurant owners. With his background in film production, Santos embarked on a (still ongoing) Filipino food documentary project, but when the pandemic hit and many Filipino elders were lost to COVID-19, he decided to shift focus.
“We all dealt with the pandemic and losing loved ones. It felt like a natural pivot for me to also start capturing stories from our general community and give them their flowers,” said Santos. “So many families were losing loved ones that I really wanted to create a platform to celebrate not only our food professionals who get a ton of it, and deservingly, but the many Filipinos who are found in just about any and every industry or life situation.”
As such, the magazine — designed, photographed, and edited by a Filipino American crew — opens with an article by public historian and advocate Devin Israel Cabanilla that discusses Seattle City Council’s controversial 2017 removal of the “historical Manilatown” designation in the Chinatown-International District and the subsequent creation of Filipinotown following community organizing and advocacy. “Filipinotown exists,” he wrote. “It is us where we may be a collective, or living a melody among others.”
The rest of the hard copy of the book is sort of like, Santos said, an “elevated yearbook,” where instead of articles, portraits of community members are coupled with a biography that details pronouns, job title, education, and where their family hails from in the Philippines, along with a QR code that leads to a video interview with that person.
There are individual portraits and interviews with people, like tattoo artist Raychelle Ordoñez Duazo, Massive Monkees co-founder Brysen Angeles, and Wing Luke Museum Executive Director Joël Barraquiel Tan. An entire section is called “Filipina Strong,” dedicated to the Filipina women in Seattle’s culinary scene, like Hood Famous’ Chera Amlag, Musang’s Jonnah Baladad Ayala, and Oriental Mart owner and cook Leila Apostol Rosas. Taken all together, FILIPINOTOWN Magazine is a vibrant ode to the Filipino American community in Seattle.
But our fair mossy city isn’t the end stop for FILIPINOTOWN Magazine. Santos is planning to release an issue every year in October for Filipino American History Month that will highlight another city’s Filipino American communities with some industry-specific issues, like health care, entertainment, athletics, and so on. While he’s focusing on the United States at the moment, his eye is also on different countries for the future. “Our diaspora is global,” he noted.
Having grown up on Beacon Hill, Santos and his family were deeply embedded in the Filipino American community in Seattle, spending time at the Filipino Community Center and going to his mom and uncles’ cover band performances as a kid. With FILIPINOTOWN Magazine, he’s invested in giving back to the community that gave him so much.
“We’re hoping to create an archive of stories that will allow the next generations to find inspiration and motivation to see how widespread Filipinos are and how embedded we are in the community and the fabric of America,” said Santos. “And to help them hopefully understand that they can choose their own path. They can fully thrive being their full selves in any path that they choose.”
You can subscribe to FILIPINOTOWN Magazine and gain digital access right now. The hard copies of the magazine will arrive in November and December.
This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, “Resilience Amidst Hate,” in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.
Jas Keimig is a writer and critic based in Seattle. They previously worked on staff at The Stranger, covering visual art, film, music, and stickers. Their work has also appeared in Crosscut, South Seattle Emerald, i-D, Netflix, and The Ticket. They also co-write Unstreamable for Scarecrow Video, a column and screening series highlighting films you can’t find on streaming services. They won a game show once.
📸 Featured Image: FILIPINOTOWN Magazine gathers the stories and portraits of nearly 70 Filipino community members for its inaugural issue. (Photo courtesy of Seattle Premium Headshots and Filipinotown Magazine.)
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