“This is what American History looks like.”
That would be my caption under a portrait of Dr. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, a tenured professor and scholar in U.S. History at San Francisco State University, specializing in Filipinos in the American Labor movement. Mabalon died when she suffered an asthma attack after snorkeling in Hawaii. And like that, the academy lost one of the brightest lights of a new generation. Skilled, intelligent, passionate, and most of all, diverse.
Mabalon wasn’t about ethnic studies. She was an expert on American history, but her focus was on something few historians ever bothered to look at: Filipinos in America. Mabalon was a bright, energetic ball of fire who took American Filipinos and U.S. history and fused it with an activist’s passion that empowered the ignored and enlightened the ignorant. If you didn’t know the story, you finally got it. If you were heretofore invisible, you were finally seen.
She didn’t bother with the veritable first draft of history, aka “the news.”
Mabalon, who originally set out to be a journalist, looked to make a lasting impact. She got her Ph.D at Stanford and scaled the high bar of the academy. She produced legit scholarship about Filipnos in the United States, as if they really mattered. Her 2013 book, Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipino/a American Community in Stockton, California, presented the forgotten Filipinos of America in an historical context that could not be shoved under any old rock.
It was there for all to see: A brilliant, personal, yet accessible scholarly work.
As I pondered what Dawn meant to Filipino Americans and the telling of the broader Asian American story, someone found a Facebook post of me and Dawn from her 2013 book launch. It was ten years after I first met her, when I worked the diversity beat in Stockton as a journalist. Along with Dillon Delvo, her Little Manila Foundation co-founder, Dawn was a key source as I wrote stories about their successful effort to preserve the blighted blocks of Stockton’s “Little Manila” into a historical district.
