Making Little Manila: Memory, Practice, and the Social Production of Filipino Space in Woodside, Queens

Little Manila in Woodside did not emerge all at once. It was not founded through a single business opening, a single migration wave, or a single act of official recognition. Rather, it developed gradually through overlapping histories of migration, labor, housing, entrepreneurship, church life, and repeated return. By the time Woodside was publicly recognized by the New York City Council through the co-naming of 70th Street and Roosevelt Avenue as Little Manila Avenue, Filipino migrants and Filipino Americans had already built a neighborhood infrastructure that made the area widely legible from within the community.^¹ Before it had been rendered symbolically recognizable to city governance, it was already a place to rent, work, shop, worship, send goods home, eat, and encounter other Filipinos in everyday life.

For the Filipino community of the greater New York City area, Little Manila has long functioned as a home away from home. It is not simply a commercial strip, but a dynamic portal through which community members sustain relationships with loved ones locally and internationally. That character did not emerge from sentiment alone. It was built through the convergence of migration, professional recruitment, neighborhood settlement, commercial clustering, and repeated use. The significance of Woodside lies in the fact that Filipino life became visible there through demographic presence and everyday public activity. In Little Manila, Woodside, members of the diaspora can hear Filipino languages (including endangered ones), find familiar food, attend church, send cargo, visit doctors, meet friends, and move through a streetscape where Filipino presence is normalized rather than marginal.^¹

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The formation of Little Manila in Woodside must begin by situating us in the broader history of Filipino migration to the United States. While Filipino migration to New York was shaped by post-1965 immigration reform, like many other AAPI communities’ migration arcs, it was also shaped by the longer colonial relationship between the Philippines and the United States since 1898. American colonial rule institutionalized English-language education, restructured professional training, and embedded the Philippines within U.S.-oriented labor systems. By the time immigration law changed in 1965, Filipinos were already positioned in ways that made them especially legible to American institutions, particularly in professions such as nursing.^¹

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was especially consequential because it dismantled the national-origins quota system and expanded immigration pathways for people from outside Western Europe, including skilled workers from Asia.^¹ For Filipinos, this shift had a particularly strong impact on health care migration. Reporting surrounding the 2021 Little Manila Avenue co-naming notes that many Filipino migrants began settling in Queens in the 1970s after being recruited to work in New York hospitals during a nursing shortage. Several were recruited to Elmhurst Hospital and settled in nearby neighborhoods such as Woodside, where a Filipino community steadily took root. The same reporting, citing figures released by the New York City Council, states that by the 1990s, 72 percent of Filipino immigrants in New York were registered nurses.^¹ These figures help explain why Filipino migration to Queens was so closely tied to hospitals, care work, and a relatively professionalized migration stream.

The significance of nursing in this migration history also appears repeatedly in the interviews. Lifelong Woodside resident Xenia Diente’s testimony is especially important because it places her family directly within this trajectory. Xenia says,

“She came here on the ‘Nursing Exchange Act.’ Which is described in that book, Empire of Care. And she, for two years, I guess, was an intern or whatever it’s called, that apprentice through that in the Mayo Clinic. And so she was in different hospitals in the Mayo Clinic, some hospitals in Detroit, in that region of the Great Lakes.” 

Later in her interview, she also describes the Nursing Exchange Act as “a Cold War program to expose third world countries to democracy.” Xenia’s account shows that, at least in New York-based diasporic memory, Filipino migration into existing U.S. care institutions is not solely understood as a private matter of individual advancement. It is also remembered as something facilitated by longstanding programs and policies tied to geopolitics, labor recruitment, and the longer imperial relationship between metropole and informal colony.^¹

As Xenia recalls, this imperially entwined nursing history was central to the story of Woodside itself, showing how professional migration, settlement, and institution-building unfolded together:

“My mom moved here the same year Phil-Am Food Mart opened. And so they were all the nurses that started to move here, including my Tita Amy and Ned, all friends with Tito and Zenaida, Ida. So yeah, they were all of similar age and stuff.” 

As Xenia’s interview suggests, Filipino migrants entered hospitals, rented housing, saved money, moved into Queens, and helped build the groceries, churches, freight channels, and restaurants that would sustain a broader community in the process.^¹ Thus, the emergence of the opening generation of Filipino nurses and professionals emerged simultaneously with the opening generation of Filipino businesses in Woodside, both parts emerging simultaneously as parts of the same Filipino social world.

If migration history helps explain why Filipinos came to New York, it does not by itself explain why Woodside became such an important site of Filipino settlement and clustering. The answer lies in a combination of housing opportunity, neighborhood succession, proximity to work, and transit accessibility. Woodside became significant as a particularly Filipino hub because it was a place where Filipino migrants could settle, build, and repeatedly return.

Xenia Diente’s interview offers one of the clearest explanations of this process:

“I was born in Manhattan and my parents moved here to Queens in 1970... they saved up money and moved from Astoria or Long Island City to Woodside in December of 1976, when I was three months old.” 

In the interview, she also reflects on the softening of the housing market, New York City’s fiscal crisis, and the demographic transition of the neighborhood. Most importantly, she connects Filipino settlement to neighborhood succession. She notes that in her older sister’s school photographs, her sister appeared as “the only Filipino in a sea of Irish, Italian,” which, for her, captured “the shifting of Queens from white flight to more everybody else.” This memory places Filipino Woodside within the broader restructuring of western Queens in the late 20th century.

The significance of white ethnic decline and outward movement also appears in the broader historical frame of the neighborhood: Woodside did not become Filipino in a vacuum, nor is it an exclusively Filipino enclave in its current state. The neighborhood began to change at a moment when older Irish, Italian, and other white ethnic communities were moving out of Queens, while immigrant families were finding new openings in the housing market.^¹ In other words, Filipino settlement in Woodside was not a process of simply and entirely replacing one migrant group with another in a neat sequence. Housing became available at a moment when Filipino migrants, many of them professionals or dual-earner households, were looking for places where they could save, stabilize, and build community with each other and with other ethnic communities. That convergence made Woodside particularly plausible.

For newly arrived Filipinos settling in New York, transit access was also an important consideration. Alongside its relative housing accessibility, Woodside’s accessibility to and from other cultural hubs across New York City also made it a valuable prospect for Filipino migrants seeking sustainable community, even if they didn’t immediately live in Woodside. Long-time Astoria resident Juliet Payabyab’s testimony makes this point especially clear. As Juliet recalls:

In Woodside, we can gather for meetings and it’s very convenient. Transportation is right here. Wherever you’re coming from, it’s at the center, whether you come by train, by car, or by bus. So this is the center of meeting places because of easy transportation.

By this account, Woodside mattered in Filipino social and cultural life beyond the immediate residential block. It was not only a place where Filipinos lived, but a place where Filipinos could reach.

The relationship between transit and clustering also appears in Juliet’s recollection of everyday access:

It’s very close to Astoria. My first stop was Astoria, and of course the only place where we could buy Filipino foods, veggies, and canned goods was here in Woodside.

This passage is especially useful because it shows that Woodside became central as a place for diasporic Filipinos to convene and sustain themselves, as it offered goods and infrastructure that were otherwise difficult to find elsewhere in the city. Once enough institutions clustered there, repeated return deepened its centrality to diasporic Filipino life in New York City.

As the interviews and secondary source material in this section suggest, before it was publicly branded as such, Little Manila’s earliest formation can be understood as institutional. The grocery store, the church, the cargo service, and family homes – critical formal and informal institutions often extending beyond the main demarcated corridor – have all historically made Woodside a place where Filipino routines could be lived. This practical density, encompassing and sustaining physical, social, and spiritual life, is what allowed the neighborhood to function as a Filipino world long before the language of “Little Manila” was formalized by city governance.

Phil-Am Food Mart

Among the earliest and most enduring institutions in the making of Little Manila was Phil-Am Food Mart. Opened by the Castillo family in 1976, Phil-Am appears consistently across the interviews and secondary sources as one of the foundational anchors of Filipino Woodside.^¹ Phil-Am Food Mart has practical and material significance as a grocery store, as well as symbolic significance access to everyday continuity. Familiar food, goods, and routines could be found there in ways that helped make New York feel livable.

As I found across my oral history interviews, Phil-Am Food Mart is not just another storefront: it is one of the places that made and continue to make Filipino life in Woodside practical and sustainable. Juliet includes the grocery, the bank, and the courier as part of what made Woodside feel complete in her earliest years in New York. Erna Hernandez remembers Phil-Am as “the main grocery we would go to” during her childhood in the 1970s and early 1980s. And Xenia Diente names Phil-Am first when reflecting on the institutions most central to Filipino community life in Woodside. The repetition and reiteration of Phil-Am as a cultural and material hub matter, solidifying it as an institutional anchor with deep roots in the Filipino community.

Johnny Air Cargo

Johnny Air Cargo reveals another foundational dimension of Little Manila’s formation: its transnational infrastructure. Established in 1984 by Johnny Valdes, Johnny Air Cargo pioneered door-to-door parcel delivery between the United States and the Philippines for Filipino Americans.^¹ The company grew out of a distinctly diasporic need. While living in the United States and traveling frequently back to the Philippines, Valdes was repeatedly asked by fellow Filipinos to carry packages to relatives back home because the Philippine postal system was unreliable and slow. That recurring practice of padala eventually became a business. According to the company’s history, Johnny Air Cargo began out of Valdes’s residence in Queens with one full-time employee and a driver, and expanded quickly because a rapidly growing Filipino American community in the New York metropolitan area, including a sizable segment in the medical profession, needed dependable ways to send goods and maintain exchange across borders.

Johnny Air Cargo is especially significant because it shows that Woodside’s Filipino infrastructure was never only local. Before formalizing the courier business, Valdes had already been selling rice, vegetables, and food products to Filipino households and businesses in Queens and the wider metropolitan area. The Positively Filipino profile even notes that “everybody in Woodside, Queens, knew him,” and recalls his role as “Manong Johnny” to many Filipinos in the borough. In that sense, Johnny Air Cargo wasn’t simply another business in the Little Manila corridor. Instead, it served a critical role in institutionalizing the neighborhood’s role as a bridge between New York and the Philippines.^¹ If Phil-Am anchored everyday consumption and Saint Sebastian’s anchored religious life, Johnny Air Cargo anchored the movement of padala, pasalubong, and obligation across the diaspora.

Xenia Diente’s formulation is especially important because it places Phil-Am, Johnny Air Cargo, Saint Sebastian’s, and domestic life within the same neighborhood infrastructure. Xenia says:

All of those, like Phil-Am Food Mart. Johnny Air Cargo. Saint Sebastian’s. Also all my titas that are nurses that I thought were family. Actually most of them live along Roosevelt or in Woodside in general... the inside of their homes and living rooms for holidays and New Year’s and all those kinds of special events.

As this testimony shows, alongside public-facing institutions, homes, holiday gatherings, fictive kin networks, and domestic interiors have played a critical part of the Little Manila social infrastructure as well. Johnny Air Cargo fits squarely within the connective tissue of this infrastructure, because it materialized the ongoing material exchange between diaspora and homeland that so many Filipino households sustained, which, in turn, sustained Filipino households.

Saint Sebastian’s Church

Saint Sebastian’s Church was another major anchor, appearing repeatedly in resident interviews and secondary source literature as a site of Filipino Catholic gathering. A 2013 article in The Tablet reported that St. Sebastian’s hosted its twenty-third annual celebration of the Santo Niño of Cebu, indicating that Filipino devotional life had already developed a durable public rhythm in Woodside by the early 2010s.^¹ This matters because it shows that Filipino visibility in the neighborhood was as much commercial as it was religious, ceremonial, and recurring.

If Phil-Am, Johnny Air Cargo, and related institutions anchored the earliest infrastructure of Filipino Woodside, restaurants helped make that infrastructure increasingly visible. Filipino food businesses condensed migration, kinship, care work, entrepreneurship, and public gathering into some of the most recognizable spaces along Roosevelt Avenue. The rise of the food corridor was therefore central to the formation of Little Manila, but its origins – at times contested by resident interviews, but nonetheless deeply historicized – were tied to labor and household survival rather than to cultural branding alone.

Renee Dizon of Renee’s Kitchenette & Grill’s story is one of the clearest examples of this process. In her oral history interview, she ties the story of her business to the story of her migration, family survival, and inner-community connection:

Actually, this is where we started when we arrived from the Philippines. This is where we lived. I worked in offices, and then the companies that my husband and I worked for closed. So we decided to open a small store there on 69th Street. That is where we started. On weekends, I would make empanadas and siopao and bring them to Phil-Am to sell. It helped because at that time I had three children. I had four children in school. We needed to work to keep life going.

Her account is important because it grounds the growth of the restaurant corridor in family need, food labor, and immigrant improvisation. The neighborhood’s culinary visibility did not appear from nowhere. It emerged because families made work where they could. The Eater profile of Renee’s Kitchenette similarly situates this history within a broader arc of neighborhood development, presenting Renee’s as a long-standing neighborhood institution and one of the establishments that helped lay the groundwork for what would later be formally recognized as Little Manila.^¹ With that, Renee’s survival strategy comes into focus as both a familial and migratory survival strategy and a corridor-defining institution.

Renee’s own reflection on the growth of Filipino restaurants in Woodside clarifies that process further. As she shares:

Before, there were only a limited number of restaurants. I think there were only three of us then. As time went on, more and more places opened. But when it became Little Manila, there were really many more of us. It tripled or something like that.

Her recollection makes clear that the neighborhood’s recognizability deepened as the restaurant landscape thickened. Food became one of the most visible ways through which Filipino presence could be read, and eventually consumed, from the foot traffic on the street.

Erna Hernandez’s testimony pushes this restaurant history further back:

Well, my parents lived in Woodside from 1973 till about ’83... my parents owned a restaurant called Erna’s International Cuisine, and that was between 73rd Street and 74th Street on Roosevelt Avenue.

She also explains how the restaurant emerged out of neighborhood care work. Erna says, 

“My mom babysat... half the Filipino kids in the neighborhood came to our apartment... and that’s kind of how the restaurant grew out of that.” This is especially important because it shows that the food corridor grew out of informal childcare, social obligation, and domestic labor as much as out of conventional entrepreneurship.

Outside media coverage reinforces the importance of Filipino food in making Woodside publicly legible. A 2005 New York Times review of Krystal’s Café treated Filipino cuisine in Woodside as “comfort food,” locating the restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue at 69th Street.^¹ Four years later, the New York Times reported on the excitement surrounding Jollibee’s first East Coast opening, noting that Woodside’s Filipino community had eagerly awaited the chain’s arrival and that even surrounding Filipino business owners saw it as evidence of the community’s expansion.^¹ Obviously, these articles themselves did not create Little Manila, but they show a correlative trend in the restaurant development’s boom and public recognition of Little Manila as such. By the 2000s, Woodside had become recognizable to a wider public as a Filipino food destination due to its prominent, growing, and heavily trafficked restaurant corridor.

As Filipino institutions accumulated in Woodside, the neighborhood became more than a local settlement area. It became a regional Filipino hub, one that drew people from across Queens, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and beyond. This regional dimension is essential to understanding Little Manila’s durability. The neighborhood remained important to the Filipino diaspora of the New York metro area: because of the Filipino families who lived there, but also for the Filipino families who moved elsewhere but continued to return.

Tita Franco provides one of the clearest descriptions of this corridor-based movement:

Of course they always come to the old reliable Jollibee. They go to the supermarket and they go to Phil-Am. Now everything is extended to Ihawan and all of that. When you come from Connecticut, you have to go to 69, then walk down.

Her account is especially useful because it shows that Little Manila had, by this time, acquired recognizable routes and entry points. The neighborhood was a symbolic site of importance for diasporic Filipinos of New York, surely, but it was also a practiced geography that Filipinos knew how to navigate.

Tita Franco also emphasizes that the corridor had expanded beyond food into a broader Filipino service world. She describes it as “a one stop shop” where people could find lawyers, doctors, physicians, beauty salons, and other services in addition to groceries and restaurants. This matters because it shows that Little Manila did not form as a single-industry district. Its regional significance depended on the layering of multiple services that made Woodside useful in many domains of everyday life.

In this sense, Little Manila became a regional hub not because all Filipino life was contained within Woodside, but because Woodside became the place people kept returning to. That quality helps explain why the corridor could remain significant even as Filipino families dispersed across the metropolitan region. It was a center of circulation as much as a center of settlement.

More contemporary histories of Little Manila shows that Filipino Woodside did not remain only a social and commercial formation. Over time, it also became a site of cultural organizing, civic recognition, anti-displacement advocacy, and formal political representation. This shift matters because it marks a transition from Filipino presence being visible mainly through stores, churches, and everyday routines, to Filipino presence being articulated more explicitly and critically in public culture and city politics.

An important part of that transition was the Little Manila Street Co-Naming Initiative, a collective of people from Philippine groups based in New York who sought to protect and preserve the Little Manila community in Woodside. In July 2020, the initiative launched a Change.org petition calling on the New York City Council and the mayor to install a “Little Manila Avenue” street sign on the southwest corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street.^¹ The petition framed Little Manila as a “home away from home” for the Filipino community of the greater New York City area and described the neighborhood as a dynamic portal through which community members maintained ties to loved ones locally and internationally. It also linked the case for co-naming to the longer history of Filipino nurse migration after 1965, the concentration of Filipinos in Queens, and the central role of the Filipino community in care work during the COVID-19 crisis. By the time the petition page was archived, it had gathered 3,178 verified signatures, demonstrating that the demand for recognition was rooted in organized community support.^¹

The petition is especially important because it articulated a political argument about place, insisting that Little Manila should be recognized not merely as an ethnic enclave that adds to the diversity of the borough, but also as the home of a community that has been integral to the care and flourishing of New Yorkers. In that sense, the co-naming campaign was about symbolic visibility as much as it was about claiming historical legitimacy, neighborhood belonging, and public acknowledgment for a Filipino community that had already shaped Woodside for decades.

This organizing effort unfolded alongside other forms of community cultural work, including the 2020 “Mabuhay” mural at 69th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, which honored Filipino health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important to acknowledge the role of Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts in helping organize that effort and build public visibility around Filipino presence in Woodside.^¹ Reporting on the co-naming campaign noted that advocacy for the street sign intensified after the unveiling of the mural, showing how public art and grassroots petitioning worked together to translate long-standing Filipino presence into a more formal civic claim.

This community-led effort culminated in the successful co-naming of the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 70th Street as Little Manila Avenue. Reporting on the legislation notes that the campaign had gathered more than 3,000 signatures and that local leaders framed the co-naming as a way to honor the Filipino and Filipino American community in Woodside and make visible its contributions to the neighborhood and the city. The co-naming therefore matters not simply as a symbolic act, but as the result of organized community advocacy that translated lived Filipino presence into formal municipal recognition.

At the same time, recognition did not erase vulnerability. A 2016 FilAm article on opposition to a proposed megachurch development in Woodside documented how tenants, homeowners, small businesses, and community organizations warned that the project would threaten the “cohesive and historic character of the neighborhood,” disrupt surrounding businesses, and intensify displacement pressure. The article specifically named Filipino businesses such as Phil-Am Food Mart, Promdi Kitchen & Bar, and Krystal’s Café as likely to be affected. It also showed that Filipino leaders and organizations were already mobilizing around the defense of Little Manila well before the co-naming was achieved.^¹

This history of organizing makes the later election of Assemblymember Steven Raga, another long-time Woodside resident, even more significant. In 2022, Raga became the first Filipino American ever elected to public office in the State of New York.^¹ In the context of Little Manila, that milestone represented more than an individual breakthrough. It marked the emergence of Filipino political representation from a neighborhood and community that had long been socially present, publicly visible, and civically organized, but not yet represented at that level of state power.

One of the most important findings across the interviews featured in this exhibit is that Little Manila existed as a lived social world before it existed as a widely circulated public label. This distinction is crucial because it prevents us from mistaking symbolic recognition and state legibility for actual historical origin. The neighborhood did not begin when it was named. It was named after it had already taken shape through decades of Filipino settlement, business-building, churchgoing, care work, and repeated return.

As interviewee Juliet attests:

When I got here, I feel like I’m in the Philippines. In the Little Manila area, that was before the Little Manila name, I found everything that I needed.

Erna Hernandez makes a similar point even more directly, affirming that before there was a formal name for the neighborhood, there was a commonplace understanding that it was a place where Filipino migrants could sustain their lives, both the ones they created in New York and the ones they stewarded transnationally through balikbayan:

We didn’t call it ‘Little Manila’ or anything. There was no term for it, I don’t think. We just took for granted that, oh yeah, this is just where all the Filipinos are.

These accounts matter because they show that Filipino Woodside had social coherence long before it had a formal civic label. City recognition did not create the neighborhood – it merely publicly acknowledged what community members had already been living for decades.

Aquino, Glenna. “How Johnny Became Johnny Air Cargo.” Positively Filipino, April 20, 2022. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/how-johnny-became-johnny-air-cargo. 

Brush, Barbara L. “The Potent Lever of Toil: Nursing Development and Exportation in the Postcolonial Philippines.” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 9 (2010): 1572-81. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.181222. 

Carp, Alex. “The World Capital of Endangered Languages.” The New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/22/magazine/endangered-languages-nyc.html. 

Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Foggin, Mark. “Fast Food for the Filipino Soul.” The New York Times, February 15, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/dining/reviews/11brief-002.html. 

Griffin, Allie, and Christian Murray. “Street Corner in Woodside to Be Co-Named ‘Little Manila Avenue’ in Celebration of Filipino Community.” QNS, December 14, 2021. https://qns.com/2021/12/street-corner-in-woodside-to-be-co-named-little-manila-avenue-in-celebration-of-filipino-community/. 

Johnny Air Cargo Padala. “Our History.” Johnny Air Cargo Padala. https://www.johnnyaircargopadala.com/our-history.html. 

Little Manila Street Co-Naming Initiative. “Install ‘Little Manila’ Street Sign in Woodside, Queens.” Change.org, July 21, 2020. https://www.change.org/p/new-york-city-council-install-little-manila-street-sign-in-woodside-queens?source_location=topic_page. 

“‘Mabuhay’ Mural Paying Tribute to Front Line Workers Unveiled in Queens’ Little Manila.” Asian Journal, June 18, 2020. https://asianjournal.com/usa/newyork-newjersey/mabuhay-mural-paying-tribute-to-front-line-workers-unveiled-in-queens-little-manila/. 

Mancari, Jim. “Filipino Celebration in Woodside.” The Tablet, January 30, 2013. https://thetablet.org/filipino-celebration-in-woodside/. 

Marzan, Lourdes. “The Filipino Community in New York City.” Asian/American Center, Queens College. https://www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/aac/the-filipino-community-in-new-york-city/. 

Meehan, Peter. “$25 and Under: Filipino Comfort Food in Woodside.” The New York Times, January 5, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/dining/filipino-comfort-food-in-woodside.html. 

Murray, Christian. “Petition Launched to Co-Name Woodside Street ‘Little Manila Avenue.’” QNS, July 27, 2020. https://qns.com/2020/07/petition-launched-to-co-name-woodside-street-little-manila-avenue/. 

New York City Council. “Int. No. 2477-2021: A Local Law to Amend the Administrative Code of the City of New York, in Relation to the Co-Naming of Thoroughfares and Public Places.” 2022. https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5360385&GUID=D967D2B7-C56E-4C1B-BD8E-9D3DC9F9EA0C&Options=ID|Text|&Search=Little+Manila+Avenue. 

Pastor, Cristina DC. “Threat of Gentrification Worries ‘Little Manila’ in Queens.” The FilAm, August 2020. https://thefilam.net/archives/22290. 

PBS. “Blackout Gallery.” American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/blackout-gallery/. 

Queens Memory Project. “Season 3, Episode 6.” Queens Memory Podcast. Queens Public Library, 2022. https://www.queensmemory.org/season3-episode6/. 

Shin, Caroline. “The Restaurant That Paved the Way for Little Manila.” Eater New York, April 7, 2023. https://ny.eater.com/2023/4/7/23674058/renees-kitchenette-woodside-restaurant. 

“Steven Raga Wins Assembly Seat, Becomes the First Filipino American in the New York State Legislature.” Asian Journal, November 10, 2022. https://asianjournal.com/usa/newyork-newjersey/steven-raga-wins-assembly-seat-becomes-the-first-filipino-american-in-the-new-york-state-legislature/. 

United States Congress. H.R. 2580, 89th Cong. (1965-1966): An Act to Amend the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for Other Purposes. Became law October 3, 1965. https://www.congress.gov/bill/89th-congress/house-bill/2580/text.