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Photo by National Register of HIstorical Places
The International Hotel was home for Filipino and Chinese elderly. |
ON THIS DATE, 50 years ago, Nov. 27, 1968 - 150 elderly Filipino and Chinese tenants from the Manilatown neighborhood of San Francisco began a nine-year-long, anti-eviction campaign against Financial District encroachment after receiving an eviction notice.
Widespread student and community grass-roots support imprinted this event as a milestone in Asian American and housing advocacy history.
The campaign culminated in the deployment of over 400 riot police, mounted patrols, anti-sniper units and fire ladder trucks in a 3 a.m. eviction raid on August 4, 1977. A 3,000-person human barricade was brutally cleared away by authorities before tenants were physically removed from the premises.
The three-storey brick structure was demolished in 1077 leaving an empty hole in what was Manilatown and a gaping wound in the heart and soul of the Asian American community.
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The developers eventually sold the empty lot on Kearney Street to the San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese. With the input of housing activists, former tenants and city planners, over 104 affordable senior housing units and community space were built on that site and opened up in 2005.
I covered this story as a fledgling reporter for the Philippine News. It was my first taste of journalism and ever since then it awakened an awareness in me that impacted my life in so many ways.
The battle for the International Hotel will go down in the annals of Asian American history as a watershed event. It galvanized the fledgling Asian American student movement on the college campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, united generations of the elderly and the youth seeking a cause and gave birth to a consciousness that Asian Americans matter, that their history matters, and sparked a legacy of activism that was launched with the 1965 Grape Strike that continues to this day. Asian Americans would no longer be the quiet subservient people living forever on the margins of society.
i made it to manilatown.
the people here can name every fish back home.
they sang songs at night.
waiting so long for the International Hotel.
i dreamt of a place to gather with them.
Al Robles
Excerpt from Wandering Manong
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