Under the morning’s slow glow, Gloria Ragasa crossed through the heart of San Joaquin Delta College, following winding footpaths in search of the campus’s forum plaza.
Ragasa, accompanied by her husband, Eugenio, arrived just minutes before the start of last weekend’s portrait dedication – a ceremony honoring activist and Filipina American historian Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, who died in 2018 just before her 46th birthday.
Ragasa first knew Mabalon as her mathematics student at Edison High.
“It’s not only [because she was] my student,” said Ragasa of why she chose to attend. “It’s because I’m a Filipino.”
The Delta College’s Dawn Mabalon Forum, renamed in her honor after in 2022, welcomed more than a hundred Stocktonians to celebrate Mabalon’s portrait, commissioned by San Francisco based artist Mel Vera Cruz.
The portrait, slightly altered from a piece Vera Cruz previously displayed at the Yerba Buena Gardens and SOMA Pilipinas, shows the drawn Mabalon with South Stockton’s historic Little Manila Historic Site at her back, stars and multi-colored rays additionally etched behind her.
“She’s home,” said Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor who had previously taught with Mabalon at California State University and who shared memories of Mabalon, her “best friend,” at the event.
Mabalon – dressed in her Stanford University doctorate regalia and a Filipino graduation stole – also points to her heart, a reference to her award-winning book “Little Manila is in the Heart: The Making of the Stockton Filipino-American Community,” in which she documented the legacy of Stockton’s first generation of Filipino immigrants (known as the Manong/Manang generation) and advocated for the preservation of the historic neighborhood.
“[Mabalon’s] work revolved around telling the story of a whole generation that fought for social justice,” Dillon Delvo, executive director of Little Manilla Rising, told Stocktonia on Sunday. Delvo had co-founded the organization with Mabalon.
“Us remembering Dawn is really the reflection of her work of remembering that generation … the sacrifices of our ancestors,” Delvo added. In 1999, Delvo and Mabalon began their advocacy for the preservation of Stockton Filipino American history when they witnessed the demolition of Little Manila’s last remaining buildings to make way for a McDonald’s and gas station, which today stand at the corner of Center Street and Lafayette.
Prior to the 1999 destruction, the early 1970s Crosstown Freeway project had made away with much of the historic neighborhood, according to Little Manila Rising’s “More than History” page.
“It’s bittersweet,” said Delvo of the continued dedication of his co-founder in a call with Stocktonia on Sunday. “We’d trade it all for her to just be around today.”
The Friday before Mabalon’s death, according to Delvo, Mabalon was set to present in Washington, D.C. on the significance of the Filipino farm labor movement in the Central Valley. She was also working on her next book — a biography of Larry Itliong, one of three strike leaders who organized Stockton’s 1948 Asparagus Strike.
The strike, one of the United States’ first agricultural protests advocating for better working conditions and pay, drew crowds of 4,000 Filipino farmworkers, according to UCLA’s Multimedia Textbook on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
“That’s why there’s such an emotional connection to [Mabalon],” Delvo told Stocktonia. “If she didn’t do that work, we would have really lost that story.”
“She still had so much to do,” Delvo added.
Darlene Bohulano Mabalon, who said she felt “chills” at the sight of her older sister’s portrait on Saturday, said the piece will inspire generations “to go forward.”
“To think of all the students that are going to be there?” said Darlene, who remembered following her sister around Delta College — where Mabalon had once attended — during a call with Stocktonia.
“[The portrait] completes the space,” she said.