Filipinos See Need to Boost Political Clout : Activism: Tony Grey’s defeat in Oxnard City Council race was a wake-up call for leaders to look beyond their insular, traditional community.

Surrounded by stacks of Filipino videos at his Oxnard grocery store, Sid Cabran recalled a rocky journey that started on a small farm in the Philippines and ended in Ventura County.

As a boy in the Mindoro province near the city of San Jose, Sid would start his farm work at 6 a.m. seven days a week, slaving in the fields with water buffalo to help him plow the land.

He left the fields for the city and finished high school and two years of college. But he saw little opportunity and few jobs in his own country, so he decided in 1966 to start a new life in the U.S. Navy.

That got him as far as San Diego, to Navy boot camp. He spent the next 13 years traveling the world, from Florida to Scotland, winding up at Port Hueneme in 1979 as a logistics manager.

After retiring from the Navy in 1987, Cabran started a video store with a partner and took a job as a property manager for Northrop Corp.’s Aircraft Division in Newbury Park. He took the video store’s profits and purchased the Oriental Mini Mart in Oxnard last year for $70,000.

He also did something that many of the 13,459 Filipinos and Filipino-Americans who reside in Ventura County have yet to do. He got involved in an effort to help the county’s growing Filipino community become more influential in local issues.

“I used to just go to work, come back home and eat dinner and then go to sleep,” said Cabran, who is chairman of the county’s Filipino-American Political Action Committee. “After I spent some time in the city and county, I felt I had to do something.”

Cabran is one of a growing number of Filipino-American leaders pushing vigorously for the Filipino community to become more politically active--beyond the boundaries of their traditional, tightly structured community.

Better representation of Filipino interests is a major goal for Cabran and others. More respect is another. Beyond that, there are simple business reasons. More political action, Filipino leaders believe, can open opportunities for business interests as well as political power in the county.

No Filipino-American has ever held elected office in any city in Ventura County, community leaders say. None sits on a major commission, although Tony Grey served five years on the Oxnard Planning Commission until he was ousted by the Oxnard City Council last year.

And too few Filipino-Americans in Ventura County belong to social circles outside their workplaces, community leaders say.

The Filipino-American community in the county got its political wake-up call last year when Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez refused to endorse its council candidate--Grey--months after Filipino votes helped Lopez win a razor-thin victory in November’s election.

Grey, a well-known leader in the Filipino community, was making his third run at the council since 1984, in a special election to fill the seat vacated when Lopez became mayor.

Soon after Grey was defeated by Councilman Tom Holden in a March special election, leaders of the Filipino community started to focus on new ways to seize a role for themselves in city and county politics.

“It made people realize that we need to show our political clout,” Grey said. “It woke everybody up. Now we know how they operate.”

But knowing that there should be more Filipino involvement in local politics is one thing, Grey and other community leaders say. Pushing people who learned to hate the chaotic politics of the Philippines into political activism here is no easy trick.

In the 7,000 islands and provinces of the Philippines, hundreds of people typically are killed during national elections. Not only has violence been a part of the political process, corruption has also been rampant.

Some Filipino immigrants have carried a distaste for politics with them to the United States, Cabran said. But that is a luxury the Filipino-American community cannot afford.

“We will remain at a disadvantage if we do not become more politically and socially involved,” Cabran said. “There’s still mixed feelings about working for a living and getting involved socially and in politics. Both need to work hand-in-hand.”

Cabran’s message is that Filipino-Americans can make a difference if they participate in the political process.

“We’ve always been inclined to let ourselves set aside political and social involvements,” Cabran said. “Most Filipinos go to work to make money, go home and cook for their kids and relax in front of the TV. We’ve got to explain to them that that’s not what we have to do all the time.”

But trying to persuade the mostly middle-class Filipino community to flex its political muscle may be an arduous task.

“We still haven’t made an impact,” said Grey, who is president of the Filipino-American Council, which oversees Filipino social groups in Ventura County. “Everyone is so busy trying to earn a living. It’s never been a part of their priority to participate politically and socially.”

Several of the Filipino community’s 22 social organizations, including the rejuvenated Filipino-American Political Action Committee, have begun work on voter-registration drives and getting more people to the polls.

Others are pushing for additional outside community involvement, like joining social clubs.

Filipino-Americans in Ventura County also have had difficulties uniting as a group because of the different dialects spoken within their community and the dozens of social groups that originated in the Philippines.

Some older Filipino-Americans also are afraid to communicate in English because they lack confidence in their pronunciation and diction, leaders said.

The first Filipino immigrants to Ventura County came in the late 1920s and early 1930s, recruited as farm workers by state officials.

A second wave came in the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by Filipino enlistment in the U.S. Navy. The Naval Construction Battalion Center at Port Hueneme became a county Mecca for Filipino immigrants.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a third wave brought Filipino professionals to the county, including doctors, nurses and engineers.

But many of the Filipino-American leaders here are retired Navy men who have dedicated time to activism.

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, 59% of the county’s Filipino population lives in Oxnard. At least 7,980 Filipinos and Filipino-Americans reside there. Nearly 1,000 live in Camarillo, followed by 900 in Port Hueneme and 493 in Ventura.

Oxnard’s Filipino-American community is predominantly located in such areas as College Estates, Lemonwood, Pleasant Valley and Seabreeze, which are quiet, middle-class communities.

Community leaders say Filipino-Americans have been successful in setting up a strong internal community structure but have generally been inactive in broader social activities.

Leaders have estimated that fewer than 100 Filipino-Americans are politically and socially active outside their own community.

Port Hueneme resident Kennedy Abanizo, who arrived from the Philippines in 1985, sees himself as part of the Filipino majority who are in no rush to become more involved in local politics.

Although he voted for President Clinton last year after becoming a U.S. citizen, the 30-year-old Abanizo said he isn’t interested in local politics because the system is too tough to figure out.

“In the Philippines, when politicians want to get elected to office they talk to you one by one,” Abanizo said. “Here, you don’t see them. I’m not gonna vote for someone that I just see on a flyer.”

The recent push by some in the Filipino community for greater involvement had its impetus in February, 1992, when the City Council declined to renew Grey’s five-year tenure on the Oxnard Planning Commission, almost a year before he sought election to the council.

At that point, several Filipino-American leaders huddled and asked themselves why Grey was not given a chance to serve another term. It was then, say community leaders, that they realized they no longer had a voice in local government.

A Filipino community newspaper called Kabitbahay, which means “Neighbor,” is one of the forces pushing for greater Filipino-American political unity.

“We do not have a say in government right now because we do not have any representation,” said Rudy Liporada, Kabitbahay’s editor. “There was like a wildfire of emotions among the Filipinos when they heard Tony was removed. It was like one of our own had been kicked out.”

Grey, who is a logistics specialist with the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Port Hueneme, has been the most vocal and visible figure in the Filipino community over the last several years. He is one of the nine directors of the Ventura County Fair and has been president of the Oxnard Lions Club and a board member of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

He makes many of his viewpoints known in a Kabitbahay column called the “Grey Spot,” encouraging Filipinos to be concerned about taxes, equal employment and affirmative action.

But Filipino community organizers had difficulty spreading the word to Filipino-American voters in Oxnard that Grey was running for office. In fact, they say, many Filipinos had no idea who Grey was or what he was running for.

One of their current goals is building coalitions among different social groups in the Filipino-American community.

“We are plagued with regional separation,” said Cmdr. Dante Honorico, the highest-ranking Asian-American in the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “In the social arena, we are almost there. In the political arena, we have a long way to go.

“I think we tend to be underestimated all the time because we are the silent minority,” he said. “Tony Grey’s candidacy united us more than we expected. By nature, we are not vocal and quick to complain.”

For the first time in the county, Filipino-Americans recently celebrated Philippine Independence Day in Oxnard by holding a 40-car motorcade and parade through the downtown area.

The Filipino Community of Ventura County Inc. sponsored a fund-raising drive for a Latino family who recently lost their home to a fire. The same group has worked with the city of Oxnard to paint over graffiti and has assisted blood drives in an effort to become more socially involved.

“It will still take a long time for us to become involved because we are not politically oriented,” said Bea Gan, who lives in Camarillo and heads the Filipino Nurses Assn. of Ventura County. “They really don’t think that they can make a difference.”

“The leaders have to come up and impress upon the community that politics can make a difference,” added Vic Mercado, a former president of the Filipino Community of Ventura County Inc. “We’ve got to have a strong leader to bring people together, not just Filipinos, but other groups as well.”

Leaders have estimated that it will be at least five to 10 years before a viable Filipino-American candidate will be elected to a city or county office, in part because the current leaders are getting too old to run.

But younger candidates are being groomed for leadership in the community, and they may someday run for office.

“We need to be part of the community as a whole,” Grey said. “We have no political authority that we could go to that would listen to us and feel what we go through.”