Filipino American History Month: How Filipino farmworkers became style icons — and targets of anti-Filipino backlash

Filipino  American farmworkers didn't let their work in the fields define them.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This commentary draws on historical reporting by Ethan Johanson for the National Museum of American History, read his article here.

When we look back at the history of the early Filipino manongs — the first wave of agricultural laborers who arrived on the West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s — the conventional narrative usually focuses on backbreaking conditions. We picture men hunched over crops under a burning California sun, enduring low wages and racial slurs like "stoop labor."

But when the workday ended, these men completely transformed the narrative. They didn't just wash off the dirt; they stepped out into the streets of Stockton, San Francisco, and Watsonville dressed like Hollywood stars.

Through carefully tailored "McIntosh suits"—named after MacIntosh Studio Clothes, the San Francisco tailoring shop famous for dressing silver-screen icons—Filipino farmworkers became some of the most sharply dressed, fashion-conscious men in the country. Yet, as history shows, this undeniable charisma and sartorial elegance sparked a deep-seated panic among white establishment men, contributing to one of the darkest chapters of West Coast anti-Asian resentment.

The "McIntosh Suit" and the art of self-fashioning

As curator Ethan Johanson notes in his feature for the National Museum of American History, many Filipino farmworkers pooled their meager earnings to invest in high-end apparel. These weren't off-the-rack clothes; they were custom three-piece suits with sharp shoulders, wide lapels, high-waisted trousers, Stetson hats, and silk ties.

Influenced by Hollywood movies that had flooded the Philippines during the American colonial era, these young men brought a deep appreciation for glamour and consumer culture with them. Posing in studio portraits and taking photos beside late-1920s Ford Model A cars, they projected elegance, confidence, and cosmopolitan sophistication.

For men relegated to hard manual labor, high fashion was an act of quiet defiance. It was a refusal to be defined solely by work boots, dirt and stereotypes, asserting instead their right to leisure, self-expression, and status.

10-cents a dance 

This dedication to style naturally extended to their social lives. Excluded from many mainstream venues due to Jim Crow-style segregation laws, Filipino men gravitated toward taxi dance halls — venues where patrons paid 10-cents a dance with female dance partners, many of whom were white women.

In these dance halls, the McIntosh suit was essential attire. Filipino men were renowned for their slick dance moves, polished manners, and immaculate grooming. To many women of the era, these cologne-smelling, sharply dressed young men, represented style, vitality, and romance—a sharp contrast to the rugged, unpolished dress of many local working-class men.

However, this dynamic ignited severe racial hatred and sexual anxiety among white men on the West Coast.

View from the Edge: Zoot!

In the 1920s and 1930s, strict anti-miscegenation laws and restrictive immigration policies meant that the Filipino community was overwhelmingly male. As Filipino men formed relationships and socialized with white women at dance halls, racist fears of interracial intimacy boiled over.

The zoot suit was merely the
excuse for racist attacks.

White nativists and labor leaders frequently framed Filipino men not merely as economic competitors taking farm jobs, but as "threats" to white women and racial purity. The fact that these young immigrant men were visibly stylish, attractive, and popular in social spaces directly challenged the racial hierarchy that sought to keep them at the bottom.

This toxic mix of racial prejudice, sexual jealousy, and social anxiety culminated in violent anti-Filipino riots across California — most notably the Watsonville Riots of 1930, where mobs of white men targeted Filipino dance halls and living quarters resulting in beatings of the Filipinos and the fatal shooting of 22-year old Fermin Tobera, who was killed while sleeping in his bunkhouse.

No one was ever charged with Tobera's murder. Seven men were later convicted of rioting but received either probation or 30 days in jail.

Watsonville foreshadowed another attack on Filipino men because of their clothing. In the 1940s,the infamous Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 took place in Los Angeles. The history books describe the riots as patriots objecting to the excessive material used in the suits and pants during wartime.

The narrative is almost always framed exclusively around the clashes between white US servicemen and Mexican American pachucos. But if you look closer, you find a much broader, uglier campaign of white supremacist violence on the WWII home front. The mobs of soldiers, sailors, and off-duty police officers who tore through Los Angeles didn't just target Latino youth — they systematically hunted down Filipino and African American young adults wheter or not they were wearing a zoot suit.

The Zoot Suit Riots were fundamentally a racial witch-hunt disguised as wartime patriotism. By ignoring the Filipino and Black victims of June 1943, mainstream history sanitizes the event as an isolated "culture clash" rather than what it truly was: a coordinated, multi-ethnic assault on communities of color who dared to assert their dignity and space in wartime America.

In the 1930s and 40s, young Filipino men working grueling hours in agricultural fields and canneries used their hard-earned money to buy high-end, custom-fitted McIntosh suits. They were widely recognized as some of the sharpest-dressed men on the West Coast, frequently out-styling their white peers and commanding the dance floors of local taxi-dance halls.

Decades later, the discovery of 26 steamer trunks in the basement of Stockton's Daguhoy Lodge — including the trunk of farmworker Anastacio Atig Omandam —brought this history back into the light. Alongside work tools, Omandam’s trunk contained his monogrammed three-piece suits and ties, perfectly preserved.

As featured in the museum's exhibition How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories, these garments tell a complex story. The McIntosh suit wasn't just a fashion statement; it was a symbol of pride, desire, and resistance. By daring to look good and live fully, early Filipino Americans claimed space, defied stereotypes, and carved out an unforgettable legacy in American history.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. If you find this perspective interesting, feel free to repost.