A Clubhouse for Community: Filipino Seattleites Organize to Buy a Home Base
The University Filipino Club moves toward purchasing a lot and house, seeking a permanent space to solve 'serious problems' together—not to separate from the city but to meet it.
The University Filipino Club will soon have its clubhouse if present plans materialize. Already a lot and house have been considered with a view of final purchase. According to Mr. Navea, president of the club, the support of Filipino business men has been secured and only time is necessary to realize the fruition of the movement. Mr. P. Santos, Filipino cannery contractor, has been working with Navea recently in the purchase of a house. Mr. Navea has plans of registering the support of Filipino philanthropists in the Islands. Among them he has in mind Ex-Commissioner Teodoro Pangco and Senator Juan Alegre.
"We need a clubhouse," Navea told a Forum reporter, "not because we want to be segregated from the rest of the other nationalities in the city, but because thru a clubhouse, and thru it only, can we expect to come in contact oftener and thus solve with a concerted action the several problems—serious problems—which arise and confront us from time to time."
“We need a clubhouse, not because we want to be segregated from the rest of the other nationalities in the city, but because thru a clubhouse, and thru it only, can we expect to come in contact oftener and thus solve with a concerted action the several problems—serious problems—which arise and confront us from time to time.”
A century before Seattle's Filipino American community became one of the region's largest Asian populations, a student and business group was already trying to buy its own institutional foothold. The clubhouse was not a separatist project but a practical response to a city where minority communities often had to build their own meeting spaces. The same debate—whether ethnic institutions isolate or empower—still echoes in Seattle's community halls and cultural centers.
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