Remembering Dawn Mabalon
Asian Journal: Fil-Am Community Mourns The Death Of Historian And Author, Dawn Mabalon
In 2018, we lost a shero. Dawn Mabalon was a visionary Filipinx leader who loved her hometown and used her creative brilliance to amplify and memorialize the stories of Filipino Americans. Below, an excerpt from an article in Asian Journal. Read the full article here.
The Filipino-American community across the United States is mourning the death of Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, a community leader, professor, author, historian and mentor. Mabalon, 46, died on Friday, August 10 while on a family vacation in Kauai, Hawaii. She was an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University, specializing in Philippine and Filipino-American history, as well as race and ethnicity and food cultures.
A third-generation Pinay, Mabalon was born and raised in Stockton, where her grandfathers settled in the 1920s. Stockton was home to the largest population of Filipinos outside of the Philippines from the 1920s to 1960s.
She graduated from Edison High School and San Joaquin Delta College. Fresh out of college in 1999, she, along with Dillon Delvo, co-founded Little Manila Foundation to help save the last remaining buildings and residents of Stockton’s Little Manila.
Mabalon went on to receive a master’s degree in Asian American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. Following her childhood aspirations to become a writer, she authored two books about Filipino-American history: “Filipinos in Stockton” (2008) and “Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California” (2013), which was born from her doctoral thesis at Stanford.
Her writings were based on oral histories, archives, as well as stories from the generation of her father, Ernest Tirona Mabalon, who passed away at 79 while she was writing the book. Her paternal grandfather, Pablo “Ambo” Mablaon, ran a popular Fil-Am diner, the Lafayette Lunch Counter, in the heart of Little Manila. In the introduction of her book, Dawn Mabalon wrote how she read “America Is in the Heart” in college and soon found out that the author Carlos Bulosan used her grandfather’s diner as his permanent address in Stockton. The diner was later demolished in 1999, prompting Mabalon to explore the community’s history. Her maternal grandmother, Concepcion Moreno Bohulano, who was the country’s first Filipina school teacher also served as a source.
“They always said I was the little girl who wanted to be a writer. It took a lot of twists and turns and it wasn’t exactly the way I wanted it. I hope it honors them,” Mabalon said in an interview with The Record in 2013. “Their sacrifices made it possible that their children and grandchildren could do whatever they wanted to do. Their sacrifices meant I could create a life to read, teach and write.”
In an interview with the Asian Journal in 2013, she shared that it was her hope to reach out to other Filipinas/os around the world to tell their stories.
“…Whether you arrived in 2010 or your great-grandparents came as sugar workers to Hawaii in 1907, we are part of a long and proud history of Filipinas/os in America who have built this country with our sweat and our hard work and our brains. We are building Little Manilas all around the world just like the Manongs and Manangs did in the 1920s, and it is all part of this long and proud history of struggle and hope,” she told the Asian Journal. “Whether you’re in Daly City or Queens, Dubai, Rome, or Stockton, it’s important to learn where we all came from and the communities that pioneers built before us, and learn how they faced challenges, to learn how to solve the problems that our communities are facing today. (AJPress)
Read the full article on Asian Journal here.
