Smithsonian Opens Long-Running Exhibit on Filipino American History Ahead of U.S. 250th

A stitched question at the center of the gallery

The embroidered script is neat and looping, the kind of cursive practiced on lined paper and pillowcases. “How Can You Forget Me,” it reads, stitched in red thread across a small white case now resting under glass on the third floor of the National Museum of American History.

Around it, in the Nicholas F. and Eugenia Taubman Gallery, suit jackets, Stetson hats, work shirts and dog-eared photographs spill from old steamer trunks. The objects once sat for decades in a basement in Stockton, California. Now they anchor a new Smithsonian exhibition that asks a pointed question at a milestone moment: Who gets remembered when a nation writes its history?

A new Smithsonian exhibition, timed to a national anniversary

“How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories,” produced by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in collaboration with the National Museum of American History, opened Dec. 23. It is scheduled to run through Nov. 28, 2027, giving millions of visitors to the National Mall an encounter with a chapter of U.S. history that has rarely held the spotlight.

Museum officials describe the show as the Asian Pacific American Center’s first exhibition at the American history museum and a signature project for the Smithsonian’s “Our Shared Future: 250” initiative, which is preparing for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

The trunks found in a Stockton basement

At the center of the exhibition is a story that begins far from Washington.

In 2005, members of the Legionarios del Trabajo, a Filipino fraternal organization in Stockton, were cleaning out the basement of their Daguhoy Lodge, a social and mutual-aid hall founded in the 1920s near what was once known as Little Manila. There, stacked and covered in dust, they found 26 steamer trunks that had belonged to elderly members who had died without family nearby.

Inside were traces of lives spent in motion: formal three-piece suits, union cards, agricultural tools, photographs in studio backdrops, lodge regalia, letters in English and Philippine languages. The pillowcase with the embroidered plea came from one of those trunks.

Local historians and community organizers, including the late scholar Dawn Bohulano Mabalon and the nonprofit Little Manila Rising, treated the trunks as fragile archives of the “manong” generation — the mostly single Filipino men who began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the early 20th century to work in Hawaii’s sugar plantations and, later, in California’s fields.

After years of community stewardship, one of the trunks was donated to the Smithsonian in 2022. The rest went to a county historical museum, in consultation with national museum staff. Those donations, and the archival materials they sparked, now form the backbone of “How Can You Forget Me.”

“These 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, the museum’s curator of Asian Pacific American history, in materials released by the institution. “They are about everyday people and about experiences we have all shared.”

A manong’s life, preserved in clothing and paper

One of the trunks on view belonged to Anastacio Atig Omandam. Born in 1890 in Negros Oriental in the central Philippines, he was recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association and sailed to Hawaii in 1916. Within a year he moved on to California, joining thousands of other Filipino laborers who followed agricultural work across the West Coast and into the San Joaquin Valley.

He joined the Legionarios del Trabajo in Stockton, finding in the lodge a place to sleep, socialize and pool resources for medical bills and burials. His trunk held both work clothes and sharp formal wear — evidence, curators say, of how Filipino workers crafted public identities that challenged stereotypes of them as anonymous “stoop labor.”

“Three-piece suits, bow ties and wide-brimmed hats show that these men were presenting themselves with pride and style,” said Ethan P. Johanson, a curatorial assistant with the Asian Pacific American Center who has studied the fashion in the trunks. “It complicates the usual image of the farmworker.”

From empire to labor markets

The exhibition uses Omandam’s story and those of other manongs to trace a path from U.S. empire to domestic labor markets. After the United States defeated Spain in 1898, it took control of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico and moved to annex Hawaii. Filipinos were classified as “U.S. nationals,” a category that allowed them to travel more freely within American jurisdictions than other Asian migrants barred by exclusion laws, but without full citizenship rights.

Panels in the gallery explain how U.S. sugar companies and agricultural interests actively recruited Filipino labor under that legal status. Many arrived first in Hawaii and then moved on to the mainland, following crop seasons and living in segregated labor camps and rooming houses.

Little Manila—and its erasure

Stockton’s Little Manila — a dense cluster of hotels, cafes, pool halls and social clubs south of downtown — became one of the largest Filipino communities outside the Philippines by the 1930s. For unmarried men barred by anti-miscegenation laws from marrying white women and unable to bring wives from home because of immigration restrictions, fraternal orders like the Legionarios del Trabajo functioned as surrogate families.

The exhibition also documents how that neighborhood was largely erased. In the 1960s, urban renewal projects and the construction of the Crosstown Freeway cut through Stockton’s south side, demolishing blocks of Filipino-owned businesses and boarding houses.

“Little Manila was literally torn down to make way for a freeway,” Vong said. “The physical traces disappeared, but the stories did not.”

Photographs in the exhibition show the before-and-after: bustling streets lined with neon signs and then empty lots and concrete ramps. A section titled “Little Manila Rising” connects those images to present-day activism, highlighting the work of Little Manila Rising to preserve remaining buildings and address environmental and social inequalities in south Stockton.

The Delano grape strike and a coalition remembered

Another part of the gallery takes visitors into the fields of the San Joaquin Valley and the vineyards around Delano, California, where Filipino laborers helped spark one of the most significant labor movements in the late 20th century.

On Sept. 8, 1965, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, led largely by Filipino workers and organizer Larry Itliong, walked off the job to demand higher wages and better conditions from grape growers. Weeks later, the predominantly Mexican American National Farm Workers Association, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, joined the strike. The two organizations later merged to form the United Farm Workers.

Despite their early leadership, Filipino workers and Itliong have often been overshadowed in popular accounts of the farmworker movement.

“The story has been very simplified,” said filmmaker Marissa Aroy, whose 2014 documentary “Delano Manongs: Forgotten Heroes of the United Farm Workers” is being screened at the museum on Jan. 16 as a public program tied to the exhibition. “It’s frequently told as the story of one group, when in reality it was a coalition and Filipinos were central at the beginning.”

In an archival audio clip used in Aroy’s film and cited by the museum, Itliong complained that in news coverage of the strike, “nothing is being done by us,” saying that the lack of recognition caused Filipino workers to “drift away” from the movement.

To address that gap, the Smithsonian has placed Itliong’s worn jacket and passport in a case near the trunks, linking individual biographies to a broader struggle for labor rights.

A fuller national story as 2026 approaches

The exhibition arrives as the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions prepare for the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. The history museum has previously incorporated Asian and Pacific Islander stories into larger thematic shows and the Asian Pacific American Center has produced traveling exhibitions, including a 2013 banner show inspired by Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan. But “How Can You Forget Me” is one of the first long-running, object-centered exhibitions devoted specifically to Filipino American experiences in a main gallery on the National Mall.

Yao-Fen You, acting director of the Asian Pacific American Center, said the timing is intentional.

“As the United States approaches 250 years, it is crucial that we deepen our understanding of the American experience by highlighting stories of resilience, resourcefulness and community that have too often been overlooked,” she said in a statement.

Filipino Americans are one of the largest Asian-origin groups in the country, numbering about 4.5 million by recent estimates. They have long been prominent in sectors such as health care and the military, yet advocates and scholars have pointed to persistent underrepresentation in school curricula and public monuments.

The exhibition’s advisory committee includes Filipino American community leaders, historians of Asian American and Latino history, and policy and labor experts. Its funding comes from private foundations and internal Smithsonian initiative pools focused on Asian Pacific American and Latino histories.

Curators and community partners say the show is part of a broader effort to share curatorial authority and ensure that stories collected from neighborhoods like Stockton do not lose their local texture when they enter national museums.

The trunks, once anonymous luggage in a lodge basement, now sit under careful lighting on Constitution Avenue. The pillowcase with its red-stitched message is one of the smallest pieces in the room, but its words echo through the labels and stories around it.

For decades, the men who packed these trunks harvested crops, sent money home and joined picket lines, even as their names were largely absent from textbooks and museum walls. As visitors file past the cases in the months and years ahead, the question they see embroidered on cotton — “How Can You Forget Me” — is now being asked not from a basement, but from the heart of the nation’s history museum.