Born on February 22, 1902, in Aringay, La Union, Ilocos Region,
Philippines, then a
colonial possession of the
United States, as the second born of seven children to Santiago Medina Mangaoang (1870-1958) and Juana Benavides Arcebal (1866-1953). Mangaoang’s mother was a native of
Cabugao, Ilocos Sur, where her parents, Vicente Arcebal and Juana Benavides, were also born, she was one of seven children. Mangaoang came to the United States in the 1920s, permanently settling in 1926 and finding work among the Filipino cannery workers in the
Pacific Northwest. Dissatisfied with working conditions among the migrant and immigrant Filipino workersa largely migrant workforce working in the isolated salmon canneries in Alaska in the winter and toiling in the fields of California during the summer monthsMangaoang would rise to become a leader within Filipino American workers' movement from the beginning of the 1930s. The full trajectory of Mangaoang's work as a labor activist was compelled not merely by his awareness of the poor working conditions of the Filipino longshoremen and cannery workers, but also by an early consciousness of racial divisions among the working class responsible for debilitating the workers' movement: as white laborers occupied the top rung of the labor hierarchy, minority workers systematically endured the harshest of obstacles in seeking work during the 1930s
Great Depression unemployment wave. Meanwhile, black workers were employed as
strike-breakers when white workers protested dissatisfaction with their own conditions, thereby devaluing the gravity of white workers' own demands for progressive change. Terminated from work at the beginning of the Depression years, Mangaoang wrote a letter to the
Oregonian in response to a report on the
layoff of 60 Filipino hopyard workers: noting the systematic racism in the state's employment practices, Mangaoang concluded with a call for Filipino
self-determination, linking the struggle for Filipino independence to the fight against racism in the U.S. Northwest. The organization is recognized as "the country's first Filipino-led union." Filipino American organizer and labor leader
Philip Vera Cruz, at the time also active in organizing the Filipino farmworkers across the West Coast region, would later recall that Seeking to implement concretethough nonetheless radicalchanges to the largely immigrant workers' conditions, the union elected a course of putting pressure on the business owners to win better pay, demand decent housing, and doing away with a system of "hold back" policy under which capitalist growers kept half of a worker's pay until the end of the growing season. The ILWU workers' union adopted a resolution condemning the prosecution of the labor activists, stating that It noted that even as Mensalvas was released under a writ of
habeas corpus, Mangaoang was held for 70 days before winning the right to release on bail. The attempted deportation of Mangaoang and Mensalvas was successfully fended off by lawyers from the Communist Party USAthen itself facing McCarthyite repression and charged with violating the later-repealed sections of the
1940 Smith Act. Not wanting to bring further harassment on the ILWU and in disagreement over union activities with other members of the ILWU 37's leadership, Mangaoang resigned from the union ranks. Spending the remainder of his life working various jobs across the Northwest. Aged 66, he died on March 28, 1968, and was cremated, his ashes were poured into the lotic waters of the southern bank of Aringay river, 100 meters west of Aringay bridge, where his father used to fish and tend his flock of ducks. ==References==