Smithsonian Opens Exhibit Built From Forgotten Trunks of Filipino American Workers

The trunks sat for decades in the dark, stacked shoulder to shoulder in the basement of a Filipino fraternal lodge in Stockton, California. Dust sealed their brass fittings; no one alive could say exactly who had packed them.

When community volunteers finally pried the steamer trunks open in 2005, they found three-piece suits pressed beneath moth-eaten blankets, studio portraits in cracked frames, union cards, rosaries and an embroidered pillowcase that posed a blunt question in looping script: “How Can You Forget Me.”

Two decades later, three of those trunks sit more than 2,700 miles away in a climate-controlled gallery on the National Mall.

A Smithsonian exhibition built from 26 trunks

They are the centerpiece of “How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that opened Dec. 23. Developed by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in collaboration with the museum, the show traces Filipino migration, labor and community life from the early 20th century through the 1970s, using the contents of 26 long-forgotten trunks to reconstruct lives that rarely appear in textbooks.

The exhibition is scheduled to run through Nov. 28, 2027, in the Nicholas F. and Eugenia Taubman Gallery on the museum’s second floor. Admission is free.

Museum officials describe it as the Asian Pacific American Center’s first full exhibition housed at the National Museum of American History and a signature project for the Smithsonian’s multiyear “Our Shared Future: 250” initiative leading up to the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026.

“The trunks tell an American story of immigrants fighting to preserve their history, of families struggling not to forget and not to be forgotten,” said curator Sam Vong, who oversees Asian Pacific American history at the museum. “They are about everyday people and about experiences we have all shared.”

The manong generation and Stockton’s Little Manila

The people behind the trunks were part of what is often called the manong generation — mostly single Filipino men who arrived in the United States in the first half of the 20th century to work in sugar plantations, canneries and California’s farms. One trunk now in the Smithsonian’s collection belonged to Anastacio Atig Omandam, born in 1890 in Negros Oriental in the central Philippines.

Archival records show Omandam was recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association and sailed from Manila to Honolulu in 1916 aboard the Nippon Maru. Within a year he had moved again, to California, where he labored as a farmworker in the San Joaquin Valley and joined the Legionarios del Trabajo, a Filipino fraternal organization that ran the Daguhoy Lodge in Stockton.

It was in the lodge’s basement that volunteers from what is now the nonprofit Little Manila Rising discovered the 26 steamer trunks in 2005, all belonging to deceased members. For years, the community group displayed some items in a makeshift museum and pressed local officials to protect what remained of Stockton’s Little Manila, once the largest Filipino enclave outside the Philippines.

In 2022, Little Manila Rising donated one trunk and its contents to the National Museum of American History. The remaining 25 trunks went to the San Joaquin County Historical Museum. The Smithsonian later cataloged related photographs, letters and documents from the Daguhoy Lodge as the Filipino Agricultural Workers Collection in its Archives Center.

Those materials now anchor the Washington exhibition, which is organized around Stockton’s Little Manila from roughly the 1910s through the 1970s. Once a dense neighborhood of single-room hotels, cafes, pool halls and social clubs south of downtown, the district was largely demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Crosstown Freeway and urban renewal projects.

“Little Manila was home for migrants who were legally tied to the United States but never fully accepted as equals,” Vong said. “It’s a story about how people built community in the face of exclusion, and how that community was later physically erased.”

Empire, labor recruitment, and life on the margins

The exhibition places that neighborhood in a wider historical frame.

After the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines and Hawaiʻi, as well as Puerto Rico and Guam. Filipinos were classified as “U.S. nationals,” a status that allowed them to move more easily within U.S.-controlled territories than other Asian migrants barred by exclusion laws, but that still denied them full citizenship and the right to vote.

Exhibition panels outline how American sugar and agricultural interests used that status to recruit tens of thousands of Filipino laborers to Hawaiian plantations and, later, to farms and canneries along the West Coast. Archival photographs and work clothes in the gallery show Filipino men bent over asparagus fields in the San Joaquin Delta and lined up in bunkhouses, far from families they could rarely afford to bring with them.

The show also highlights the institutions migrants built for mutual aid and a sense of belonging. Alongside the trunks, visitors see ritual regalia and membership documents from the Legionarios del Trabajo, which offered sick pay, death benefits and social activities to members who often had no relatives nearby.

If work clothes and lodge banners document daily survival, other objects emphasize self-presentation and aspiration. Three-piece suits, polished shoes and fedora hats from the trunks are displayed next to formal studio portraits of Filipino men in their finest attire.

“Filipino workers styled themselves carefully for portraits they sent back home or displayed in boardinghouses,” said curatorial assistant Ethan P. Johanson, who researched clothing in the collection. “These images counter the stereotype of Filipino farmworkers as only stoop labor. They show men insisting on dignity in a society that saw them as disposable.”

Women appear more fleetingly, often through photographs and ephemera from Filipino community pageants held in the mid-20th century. Exhibition text notes that such contests reinforced narrow standards of beauty but also provided Filipina students and workers a public platform in communities where men greatly outnumbered women.

“How Can You Forget Me” — and what gets erased

The title phrase, “How Can You Forget Me,” comes from the embroidered pillowcase discovered in one of the trunks. Interpretive labels suggest it can be read as a message from a migrant to distant loved ones, and as a broader question posed to a country that has largely left Filipino Americans out of its official stories.

That tension between presence and erasure is most explicit in the section of the exhibition devoted to farm labor organizing.

In 1965, Filipino grape workers in Delano, California, led by labor organizer Larry Itliong, voted to strike for better pay and conditions. They later persuaded Mexican American workers led by Cesar Chavez to join them, and the effort eventually gave rise to the United Farm Workers union.

Yet in the decades since, Itliong and many Filipino organizers have faded from national memory. In the gallery, Itliong’s work jacket and passport are displayed near strike photographs and union flyers.

“Over the years a lot of the history has focused only on the Mexican side,” said filmmaker Marissa Aroy, whose documentary “Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers” profiles Itliong and other Filipino organizers. “It’s very simplified to tell the story as if it belonged to just one group.”

The museum will screen Aroy’s film Jan. 16 in its Warner Bros. Theater, followed by a panel discussion with Aroy, Vong and Little Manila Rising executive director Dillon Delvo. The event is billed as the exhibition’s first major public program.

In an archival recording featured in the film, Itliong reflects on how Filipinos saw their role vanish even as the farmworker movement gained national attention.

“When you see the newspaper, the TV,” he says, “nothing is being done by us.” He warns that Filipino workers, feeling invisible, were “drifting away.”

A national platform and a local legacy

The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, which calls itself a “migratory museum” because it does not have a dedicated building, has spent more than two decades trying to push such stories into national view through traveling shows and digital projects. Its earlier banner exhibition “I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story,” inspired by Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan, toured the country after debuting at the American history museum in 2013.

Yao-Fen You, acting director of the center, said the new show builds on that work while signaling a shift in scale.

“As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, it is critical that we deepen our understanding of the American experience by foregrounding stories of resilience, resourcefulness and community,” You said in a statement. “Filipino American histories are central to that story.”

The exhibition is funded in part by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and the Coby Foundation, as well as by internal Smithsonian funds dedicated to Asian Pacific American and Latino initiatives.

It arrives at a moment when Filipino American communities across the country are seeking greater visibility, from the designation of Filipino Towns and cultural districts in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle to the founding of local museums like the Filipino American National Historical Society Museum in Stockton.

For activists in Stockton who fought to preserve the remnants of Little Manila after freeway construction and redevelopment wiped out much of the district, seeing objects from the Daguhoy Lodge on display in Washington carries mixed emotions. Some of the artifacts that once filled a community-run exhibit now sit behind glass in the nation’s most-visited history museum, framed as part of a broader national narrative.

The Smithsonian has signaled that it intends to extend access beyond visitors who can reach the Mall. The Asian Pacific American Center plans to roll out a companion website with educational materials and a virtual gallery, and the museum has announced forthcoming visual descriptions of the exhibition for visitors who are blind or have low vision.

Inside the gallery, however, the trunks draw visitors back to the most intimate scale. Handwritten address labels still cling to their wooden sides. Initials are stamped into leather handles. In one case, a simple pillowcase, sewn and stitched decades ago, carries the question that gives the exhibition its name.

For years, those words lay folded in a basement, unseen. Now, in a building that bills itself as “the nation’s attic,” they confront hundreds of visitors a day.

How long that question lingers after they leave the gallery — and how far beyond it — may help determine whether the histories packed into those trunks remain recovered, or slip once again toward being forgotten.