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Well-loved Ridgway, PA Mayor Guillermo Udarbe, 81
Doctor Guillermo Udarbe, who was mayor of Ridgway, Pennsylvania for 12 years, died unexpectedly on November 11, according to an obituary announcement. He was 81. He is survived by his wife Gloria Aragones Udarbe of Ridgway, daughters Cherry Pie Udarbe Clark of Fairview, PA and Charina Udarbe Felix of Lutherville, Maryland; five grandchildren Isabella Udarbe […]
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Watsonville riots film provokes difficult questions about race then and today: director
By Cristina DC Pastor Somewhere in California in the 1930s, they had the Watsonville riots. Framed within the current wave of anti-Asian violence, this aggression against Filipino farm workers has been a long-forgotten episode of our painful past in this country. Filmmaker Randal Kamradt, a Filipino American who teaches video production in Fillmore High School […]
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On Global Filipinos: Lee Kiefer: The 1st American to win Olympic Gold in fencing
By Loida Nicolas Lewis When TOFA 2021 (The Outstanding Filipinos in America) introduced Lee Kiefer as the Tokyo Olympic Gold Winner in the esoteric event Individual Foil Fencing — defeating reigning Olympic Champion Russian Inna Deriglazova — the audience of mostly Filipino ancestry at Weill Carnegie Hall gave her the loudest applause. So the question I asked Lee in […]
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Leylah Fernandez: A fresh prodigy in women’s tennis
By D. De La Rosa The cheers for Leylah Annie Fernandez swept the Arthur Ashe Stadium of the U.S. Open tennis tournament near the end of the summer in New York City. It paid tribute to a left-handed, 5-foot 6-inch, 19-year-old phenom who had defeated three top-5 women’s tennis players on her way to the […]
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Jobs all around, but no takers
By Cristina DC Pastor The country is experiencing a historic shortage of labor across the board. Filipino Americans who work in schools and the restaurant industry are seeing a workforce crisis, seemingly another downside to the never-ending pandemic. When businesses closed at the height of the coronavirus outbreak, many workers lost their jobs as businesses shut […]
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Celebrating Thanksgiving amid 1M COVID deaths looming
The FilAm Editorial By the end of 2020, some 340,000 Americans were dead from COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. That was the winter from hell. Scores perished because of the dithering and neglect by the then federal administration, which caused an unmitigated catastrophe. A mutated variant and vaccine resistance stoked by […]
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Despite stellar casting, ‘Eternals’ is unfocused, unexciting
By Wendell Gaa As happy as I was for Chloe Zhao becoming the first Asian woman to win an Oscar for Best Director for this year’s Best Pic “Nomadland,” I personally was not a fan of that film given how sublimely morose and downbeat it was. Nonetheless I had high hopes that with her helming […]
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Imani Oakley runs, vows to represent FilAm neighborhoods in Congress
Imani Oakley is a progressive candidate running for Congress in New Jersey’s 10th Congressional district which is home to a growing Filipino American community as well as the Five Corners Little Manila neighborhood in Jersey City. Born in New Brunswick and raised in Montclair, Imani has lived on the same street her entire life, despite […]
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Making a martyr of Maria Ressa
By Cristina DC Pastor To understand Nobel Prize Laureate Maria Ressa and her tense conflict with Rodrigo Duterte, let’s go back 35 years when the Philippines ousted the Marcoses by People Power in 1986. Maria – born in the Philippines and raised in Tom’s River, New Jersey by her mother and stepfather — returned home […]