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Reviews
| San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement. By Estella Habal. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. xix + 227 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $64.50 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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Estella Habal's highly personal and moving account of this flashpoint of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s is more than simply a story about the besieged Filipino and Chinese residents of a San Francisco hotel and their fight against eviction. This book is a social and political history of a community, a neighborhood, and a city in transition. Habal writes with the passion of an activist through the lens of an historian. She provides an intimate yet critical insider's view of the struggle for the "I-Hotel." Given the dearth of scholarship on the Asian American movements of the 1970s and post-1965 Filipino American history in general, Habal's book is a major contribution. |
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In the early twentieth century, immigrant Filipinos began moving into the area around Chinatown in San Francisco. By the 1950s they had developed a ten-block area called Manilatown, full of barbershops, pool halls, restaurants, and residential hotels including the International Hotel. In 1968 the hotel was sold, and its many elderly Filipino and Chinese residents faced eviction. At the same time, a new generation of Filipina/o American baby boomers—both American-born and new immigrants—was emerging. Together, the manongs (a term of respect for elder Filipino men) and younger generation created a movement that was "one of the most extensive grassroots movements in San Francisco's history and a major moment in the development of the Filipino American community" (p. vii). |
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