Like a real-life Indiana Jones, Antonio “Tony” Somera made an unexpected find behind a false wall.
Inside a building long considered the heart of Stockton’s historic Little Manila district, Somera uncovered some two dozen steamer trunks weathered by dust and water leaks.
He opened just a few, at first. From three-piece suits to handwritten letters bound for the Philippines, Somera gradually realized what each trunk held: The final belongings of Stockton’s first generation Filipino laborers.
Thousands of miles from Stockton, three trunks and their contents are now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. On view through November 2027, “How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories” is a result of more than two decades of work by south Stockton advocates and educators.
“It is the story of Little Manila,” said Dillon Delvo, who helped develop the exhibit as executive director of Little Manila Rising, a nonprofit focused on Filipino American advocacy and preservation. “This is the story of first-generation immigrants and their struggle.”
Discovering historical treasure in downtown Stockton
Starting in the early 20th century, thousands of mostly young and single Filipino migrants had made their way to the San Joaquin Valley, seeking work in the region’s growing agriculture sector
Most were sakadas, mostly male laborers who migrated from the Philippines for seasonal contract work, first on Hawaii sugar plantations to then looking for that work in the U.S. mainland. Seen as temporary labor, the Filipino men were recruited because of their unmarried status and age, most anticipating a return home to the Philippines once they had saved enough money. By the decade’s end, the men would become the primary laborers in the San Joaquin Valley, long days spent in asparagus fields and fruit orchards.
Some of those sakadas settled in Stockton, their presence seeding what would become the neighborhood known as Little Manila.
The inside of the Rizal Social Club n Stockton’s Little Manila neighborhood during the early 20th century. Filipino jazz clubs would often play inside the halls. (Photo courtesy of Filipino American National Historical Society and Little Manila Rising)
Once the largest hub for Filipinos in the United States, Little Manila stretched for several city blocks, including a four-block area from south of Main Street to the corner of Lafayette and El Dorado streets in downtown Stockton. And at its center, surrounded by Filipino businesses and organizations, stood the historic Dahugoy Lodge.
Most who frequented the Dahugoy were members of the Legionario de Trabajos, a fraternal and religious order originally started in the Philippines that provided social benefits like mutual aid and lodging for its members. Establishing its roots in the U.S. first in San Francisco in 1924, the order would eventually grow to own 43 boarding houses, including Stockton’s Dahugoy Lodge, by 1991, historical records compiled by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and South County Historical Society show.
But as Filipino communities flourished, they were met with growing racial discrimination.
In Stockton, Filipinos could only live south of Main Street, historian Dawn Mabalon documented in her book, “Little Manila Is in the Heart.” Beyond being segregated from spaces outside of Little Manila, alien land laws restricted Filipino residents from property ownership. Places like the Daguhoy — purchased through a legal exception that allowed organizations like the Legionario de Trabajos to own real estate — was one of the few ways Filipinos could collectively acquire and manage property. Anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited interracial marriages deepened this isolation, making it difficult for the largely male Filipino population to start families in the U.S.
Anti-Filipino hostility also manifested through violence. On New Year’s Eve in 1926, Stockton would document the country’s first anti-Filipino attack, where white men stabbed and beat Filipinos at hotels and pool halls, Mabalon detailed in her book. Four years later a white mob bombed a building owned by another Filipino organization. The attack came after days of riots in Watsonville, where hundreds of white residents attacked Filipinos inside dance halls and in their homes, killing one, Fermin Tobera.
While framed as a step toward Philippine independence, the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act would end Filipinos’ status as U.S. nationals. As anti-Filipino sentiment intensified, the law also sharply restricted migration from the Philippines, blocking the possibility of laborers one day bringing their families to the U.S. or returning to their loved ones overseas.
Disconnected from their families and far from their homeland, Stockton’s Filipino laborers would turn to the Dahugoy, its halls a place they could claim as their own.
When Somera had moved his martial arts academy into the lodge in 2005, most of the Filipino migrants who had once filled the Daguhoy had moved away or died. Somera, a member of the Legionarios, had grown up in the city, his father having migrated from the Philippines in his teens.
The few migrants who remained continued to maintain the lodge as they lived in the space. And despite Somera’s attempts to pay rent, they refused to take his money. At one point, Somera would regularly swipe the lodge’s PG&E bills, determined to find some way to compensate them. Eventually, the elders of the lodge relented, asking Somera to clean the basement as a form of payment, where he’d soon make his historic discovery.
The trunks Somera found belonged to the sakadas, all members of the Legionarios, said Sam Vong, the curator of the Smithsonian exhibit. Three have made their way to Washington D.C., showcased in the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s temporary exhibition highlighting Filipino-American history.
One, belonging to Anastacio Atig Omandam, will become part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection, while the two others will eventually return to Stockton. One is on loan from Little Manila Rising, according to the Smithsonian’s factsheet of items in the exhibit. The other will return to the San Joaquin County Historical Museum in Lodi, where the rest of the trunks are currently kept.
The trunks were large, wooden and meant to open upright where one side is fitted to hang clothing, like pressed suits. Canvas-covered drawers on the other side, as seen in the Smithsonian’s archived images of Omandam’s trunk, made room for documents and personal belongings of the laborers as they moved from farm jobs.
“The exhibition really is this literal and figurative unpacking of all the objects from the steamer trunks,” Vong said. “It’s the arc of their migration, but also the different dimensions of their lives that tells us a more complex, full human story, and not just a slice of their lives.”
‘A time and a life of a man’
It’d be roughly a year after finding the trunks before Somera revealed his discovery to the rest of Little Manila Rising, where he served as one of its chairs until he died in 2013.
“I’ll never forget, (Dawn Mabalon) and I were just stunned,” said Delvo, who recounted the experience to Stocktonia during a phone call.
Delvo and Mabalon had co-founded Little Manila Rising to preserve what remained of the city’s historic Little Manila, a neighborhood that became a hub for Filipino migrants from the 1920s through the 1960s. Both, like Somera, had grown up in south Stockton, their lineage tied to Little Manila.
Most notably, the nonprofit in the early 2000s organized to stop redevelopment plans that threatened the historic neighborhood’s last surviving buildings. A freeway off-ramp built in the 1970s, followed by a McDonald’s and a gas station decades later, had already wiped out most of Little Manila. Twenty years after the trunks were found, the lodge would become vacant, first foreclosed and then damaged in a fire last year.
For the pair of Little Manila Rising’s founders — and even Somera — what shocked them the most was the vibrant clothing found in the trunks.
A cache of loud neckties were found in Omandam’s trunk. Like his fellow lodge goers, Vong said Omandam likely wore his ties and suits on his days off, looking to impress at church or while in taxi dance halls.
“I was always used to seeing them in the old, black and white pictures,” said Somera during a tour of the basement years ago, now captured in a video produced by the Smithsonian. “They were very colorful back in those days.”
Omandam was born on April 19, 1890, in Negros Oriental in the Phillipines, according to the Smithsonian’s exhibition, which included records showing he boarded a steamship to Honolulu. He had been recruited at about the age of 26 along with six of his male family members to work at a sugar plantation in Hawaii.
By 1917, Omandam had arrived in California, with census records from 1920 and 1940 listing his occupation as a farm worker in Stockton, where he worked approximately 50 hours a week.
Omandam’s story reflects the path of other sakadas, such as Erwin Mina’s parents, who first arrived in San Francisco before traveling south to Delano, in what his father described as replacing skyscrapers with grapevines. Mina, board president of the Filipino American National Historical Society Museum, reminisced to Stocktonia about his father’s steamer trunk, which bore stickers from places he had visited, such as Hong Kong and Yokohama.
“It’s basically a time capsule,” Mina said. “A time and a life of a man.”
But why were the steam trucks being kept in the Dahugoy Lodge’s basement all those years?
The trunks Somera found were left behind by migrant workers living at the lodge. “Some of them had lived and died in that basement,” Vong said.
Lodge elders didn’t have the heart to throw away the belongings of those they considered brothers, so their possessions were packed away, eventually making their way to the Daguhoy basement for safekeeping.
“These trunks weren’t meant for the public to see,” said Vong, explaining that the fraternal brothers had hoped family members would eventually reclaim the trunks.
No descendants of the trunks’ owners, according to Vong, have come forward to reclaim them.
Packing the trunks may have also become a way for the workers who remained to memorialize their former companions, Vong said.
“These men were perceived as disposable, anonymous farmworkers,” Vong said, emphasizing the time when the young Filipino laborers were treated as inferior and subjected to segregation laws. “But here, their fraternal brothers … knew that these were in many ways precious.”
Journey to the Smithsonian
Finding a home for the steamer trunks began on the night Somera died, when Delvo promised to take care of the artifacts.
For a time, an empty portable classroom at a school in South Stockton had housed the artifacts following the Daguhoy’s foreclosure, where high school-aged students in an afterschool program carried out tours in what Delvo described as a “living museum.” Later, when Little Manila Rising secured funding to establish its first office space downtown, the trunks were move there.
Delvo had hoped to find a space for the trunks that was “someplace local” for the community to view them, but said that not one historical institution in the city, including the Haggin Museum, had interest in taking up the collection.
“That was always the way things were in Stockton — diversity was never really cherished,” Delvo said. “That’s probably the biggest reason why it was a community collection.”
In a phone call with Stocktonia, Haggin CEO Susan Obert said she was not aware of any staff turning down the trunks during her more than 20 years at the museum. Decisions to accept new acquisitions, she said, “are not made by a single person on the staff” and typically go through the museum’s collections committee.
“The heritage is very important, both specifically to our community, but overall to our country,” Obert said of the Smithsonian exhibit, describing it as a “great homage” to Filipino American history. She added that the Haggin would be “very interested” in the trunks but did not say whether the museum would consider acquiring or exhibiting them.
Delvo, in an email to Stocktonia, clarified that Little Manila Rising never made a formal request to donate the trunks to the Haggin. According to Delvo, Somera had invited a Haggin staffer to view the trunks while they were stored in the Daguhoy basement but did not hear back. Delvo said he does not know which Haggin staffer Somera contacted.
Sometime in the mid-2010s during a historical preservation conference in Stockton surrounding Asian and Pacific Islander artifacts, Smithsonian curator Sojin Kim viewed the trunks as they sat at the entrance of Little Manila Rising’s downtown office. She was “the first person” outside of Stockton’s community to express to Delvo how “valuable” the collection was.
“It meant a lot because this fight for historic preservation … has always been a fight against erasure,” Delvo said.
Kim, and other museum professionals after her, like Anthea M. Hartig, would say the same.
When Mabalon died in 2018, Hartig, then CEO of the California Historical Society, approached Delvo at the funeral reception, hinting at Little Manila’s future collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Hartig had previously worked with Mabalon to designate the Little Manila neighborhood as an endangered historic site in 2003. Months later, she would be named the museum’s director and Vong’s regular visits to Stockton to explore the trunks would begin that same year.
In between Vong’s visits, Little Manila Rising approached the San Joaquin County Historical Museum in 2022 to find a long-term solution for preserving the rest of the Daguhoy trunks, the museum’s executive director, Phillip Merlo, recently told Stocktonia. The museum also contributed artifacts to the exhibit: identification tags issued by the Hawaiian plantation companies to Filipino workers, and Gantner-Wikies swim trunks.
The two organizations hope to one day create a permanent exhibit of the trunks locally, Delvo said.
But at one point, Delvo worried the Smithsonian exhibit could get pushed back.
Early in his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at reshaping how institutions like the Smithsonian told American history, arguing that some exhibits had become too focused on a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Critics, such as the Organization of American Historians, said the order aimed to “downplay” oppressive history like slavery and segregation, as well as suppress the stories of historically marginalized groups.
Seeing Trump’s executive order, Delvo said he thought they would have to wait out Trump’s presidential term.
But despite a slight delay — the exhibit was originally slated to open in October to kick off Filipino American History Month — “How Can You Forget Me” moved forward, opening just before the end of last year.
“For this to be happening at this time is kind of insane,” Delvo said. “But we’re doing it.”
On July 4, as the Smithsonian marked the nation’s 250th anniversary with celebrations highlighting America’s diverse history and culture, the White House reiterated its criticism of the national museum’s choices for exhibits in a 162-page report. A footnote in the report directly mentions the “How Can You Forget Me” exhibit, which it described as an example of Smithsonian programming “dedicated to peoples and cultural traditions foreign to the United States.”
‘How can you forget me’
It was a chilly January day on the National Mall in Washington D.C. as visitors hailed rideshares following the exhibit’s opening reception. Mina said he was standing outside the Smithsonian waiting for his own ride home when an advertisement across the street caught his eye.
“How Can You Forget Me,” read the ad’s bold-faced lettering, the exhibit’s titular phrase taken from an embroidered pillowcase in Omandam’s trunk.
When he had toured the exhibit that day, Mina recalled being left speechless. Not because of the artifacts themselves, though the curved asparagus knives and battered steamer trunks did remind him of his youth growing up in a “Pinoy town,” slang referring to a labor camp for Filipino farmworkers.
A surprise for him on the tour was seeing the manongs, an Ilocano term of affection and respect that translates to “older brother,” preserved in the exhibit.
At the center of the exhibit, a map traces the movement of the generation now known as the “manongs” — the first wave of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. during the early 20th century that included sakadas. Postcards and vintage studio photographs that had yet to be mailed back to the laborers’ homeland are interspersed throughout the illustration.
Mina knew them as his “tatas” — the older uncles who raised him, his elders.
“I was scaffolded by this whole generation,” Mina said. “What (they) did was everything for this whole generation of people like myself.”
Where California is mapped in the exhibit, “Stockton” appears in large lettering. Maria Lauron-Ramos, once a staffer at Little Manila, who moved recently to New Jersey for a job at Princeton University, had snapped a photo standing next to the map, pointing to where her hometown is marked with a star.
“This is really for us,” Lauron-Ramo told Stocktonia via a video interview she remembered thinking. “Stockton is heard.”
At the January reception in Washington D.C., where dozens of Stockton residents attended, guests were decked in business casual or traditional Filipino dress. Lauron-Ramos wore a light shawl hand painted in the Philippines known as an alampay.
Surrounded by those she once worked with, Lauron-Ramos said it felt like a “reunion.”
“Being in that space reminded me that Little Manila … to me, will always be here,” said Lauron-Ramos, gesturing to her heart.
Before the opening reception, Lauron-Ramos and Little Manila’s deputy director, Elaine Labson, had walked through the collection, pointing out artifacts that until now they had only encountered in their own community spaces in Stockton.
“You could hear us literally going ‘wow’ the whole time,” she said with a laugh.
An hour into viewing, Lauron-Ramos found her way to an open book with a prompt: “What do you want to be remembered for?”
“Little Manila is in the heart. 209,” she wrote in the book, a nod to Stockton’s area code. She thought of family who came before her, including her great aunt, a member of the Legionarios and one of the few Filipinas who migrated to the United States. “South Side Stockton. Eighth Street. … A representation of my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
That feeling of family legacy also extends to Delvo. Next to a jacket worn by the Filipino American union organizer Larry Itiliong, a studio portrait of Delvo’s father, Cipriano “Rudy” Delvo, appears on a placard about Filipino labor leaders.
For Delvo, the preservation of these histories, while building on his and Mabalon’s work, is also about ensuring more stories from forgotten communities are told.
“One of the most beautiful things you can do in America is to be seen — as a person, as a human being,” Delvo said. “I think there’s so much joy in that, seeing other people being unerased, and seeing people be recognized for the beauty that they are.”
“For this exhibit, I feel like that’s what happened for our community, and it’s something that we hope can happen for all communities in America.”
Correction, July 31, 2026: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the remaining Daguhoy trunks were kept at the Filipino American National Historical Society Museum in Stockton. The remaining trunks are kept at the San Joaquin County Historical Museum in Lodi.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Little Manila Rising’s outreach to the Haggin Museum and to reflect the loans from the San Joaquin County Historical Museum.