Woodside

I did not come to Woodside with stability. I came tired. I came uncertain. At different points, I was sleeping on couches and piecing together a life through work. Yet the neighborhood met me with something I had not expected. It met me with recognition.

I was born on the island of Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands to two Filipino migrant workers. Before I ever knew the language of migration, I knew its demands. I knew that work could carry a family far from home and still not promise rest. I knew that love, for people like us, was often measured in hours worked, in money sent back, in how much one could endure without complaint. My family’s story was not separate from the larger story of Filipinos in America. It belonged to that long current of departure and return, of labor and longing, of people crossing oceans because empire, poverty, and survival left them little choice. After most of my childhood in Saipan, my family moved to the Philippines, where I lived for four and a half years. At fourteen, I moved again, this time to Nassau County on Long Island, New York, without my parents, to live with relatives. By eighteen, I found myself in Woodside, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, an out-of-school youth trying to support myself and trying to decide what kind of life could still be made from so much interruption.

I did not come to Woodside with stability. I came tired. I came uncertain. At different points, I was sleeping on couches and piecing together a life through work. Yet the neighborhood met me with something I had not expected. It met me with recognition. On the streets I heard Tagalog and Cebuano. Along Roosevelt Avenue I saw Filipino businesses, Filipino workers, Filipino elders, Filipino families carrying on with the old stubborn dignity our people seem to know by instinct. Before I had the language of urban studies, before I knew words like diasporic space or placemaking, I knew this much: our life here was visible. It was not tucked away. It was out in the open, in the light, in the noise of the avenue, in the smell of food and the movement of people. Filipino life in Woodside had roots. It had made itself legible in the city.

One of the first places that taught me this was Jollibee, the first one on the East Coast. I worked there while trying to support myself, and from behind that counter and fryer I saw the neighborhood in motion. Families came in after Mass or after errands. Workers came in after long shifts. Elders ordered in Tagalog. Young people moved between English and Taglish without breaking stride. There was homesickness in that room, but there was also laughter, routine, appetite, and relief. Jollibee was not just a workplace and not just a fast-food chain. It was one of the institutions of the neighborhood, one of those places where memory and habit gathered under fluorescent light and made something larger than commerce. People came for the chicken, the spaghetti, the peach mango pie. They also came for something familiar, something that answered a loneliness they did not always name. Working there taught me that Little Manila was not built through marketing slogans or branding. It was built through repetition, through ordinary acts, through people returning to the same places until those places began to hold their lives.

That is how I understand Little Manila in Woodside. It is not simply a nickname, nor is it merely a row of businesses convenient for food bloggers and politicians to point at when they want to say diversity. It is a living social landscape shaped by migration, labor, faith, memory, and everyday practice. Long before social media discovered the neighborhood, Woodside had already become a point of return for Filipinos across Queens and the wider region. Places like Phil-Am Food Mart helped build that foundation in the 1970s, part of an earlier generation of businesses that made the area familiar to immigrants trying to make life in New York. Later, businesses like Renee’s, which opened in 1992, carried that presence forward and became part of the neighborhood’s continuing Filipino commercial and social life. After 1965, as new waves of Filipino migration reshaped the city, Woodside became one of the places where that history settled into urban form. People lived here, worked here, worshiped here, sent balikbayan boxes from here, bought groceries here, gathered after church here, and built institutions here. Over time, what emerged was more than a commercial strip. It was a corridor of memory and survival, a place where a scattered people could find one another again.

I have felt that most clearly in the institutions that anchor the neighborhood. At St. Sebastian’s Roman Catholic Church, a block from where I live, Filipino parishioners gather in a way that tells the story of migration without needing to announce it. During Santo Niño celebrations, you can feel the old country and the new one pressed together in a single public act of devotion. The church becomes not only a place of worship, but a vessel of continuity. The same is true in smaller ways in remittance centers, cargo stores, and on the basketball court at the park we call “5-2,” where different generations of Filipinos meet each other in argument, laughter, and competition. This is how the community reproduces itself; through repeated life of a neighborhood.

As my own life in Woodside deepened, so did my local political participation. In 2021, I was part of Steven Raga’s historic run for New York City Council. We lost, but the campaign changed me because it showed what Filipino political life could look like in public, not as a footnote, not as a private ethnic affair, but as a visible “claim” on the city. I later worked as a community organizer at Woodside on the Move, where I saw more clearly how housing and neighborhood change were bound together by collective power. In 2022, I worked on Steven Raga’s successful run for the New York State Assembly, when he became the first Filipino American elected to any elected office in New York State. Since that same year, I have had the honor of representing Woodside on Queens Community Board 2. Since then, working in Assemblymember Raga’s office has shown me even more clearly that communities do not survive on recognition alone. They need resources. They need policy. They need investment that reaches real, working people.

That is why Woodside means so much to me. It gave me community when my life felt unstable. It gave me work when I needed to survive. It gave me a political education rooted in the daily lives of working-class families and immigrant communities. It gave shape to my academic life too. I study Little Manila as a socially produced space made through institutions, memory, and everyday practice. But that understanding did not begin in the library. It began in the streets of Woodside, in Jollibee, in church, in community board meetings, in small business outreach, in the ordinary life of a neighborhood that taught me how people make place through labor and care. For me, Woodside is where Filipino New York becomes tangible. It is where migration becomes neighborhood life. It is where struggle turns into solidarity. It is where a people, through work, memory, and repeated acts of presence, make a place for themselves in the city and call it home.