Filipino Houston History: From Rice’s First Class to the Medical Center

FILIPINO HOUSTON HISTORY: FROM RICE’S FIRST CLASS TO THE MEDICAL CENTER

When Rice Institute opened its doors in 1912, one member of its very first class had traveled farther than most. Rudolfo Hulen Fernandez was born in 1890 in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, and had come to Texas as a boy after a Texas army captain he met during the Spanish-American War asked to adopt him.

His story is one of the earliest threads in the history of Filipino Houston, a community that is young, still being pieced together by volunteer historians, and far larger today than its visibility suggests. This is how it came to be.

A Boy From Vigan

Fernandez was raised by his maternal grandmother after his parents died. During the Spanish-American War, he worked as an interpreter of local languages for Captain John Hulen of the 33rd U.S. Volunteer Infantry. The captain was so impressed that he asked to adopt the boy, and Fernandez arrived in Texas in 1901. He graduated from Houston High School in 1908 and entered Rice with its first class in 1912. Rice's own magazine calls him the school's first Asian graduate. After finishing in 1917, he enlisted and served in France as a liaison to his adoptive father, and was discharged in 1919.

An Exception, Not Yet a Community

Fernandez was not part of a wave. The authors of Filipinos in Houston, a local history from the Houston chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society, point to another fleeting early sign: a 1908 postcard showing Igorot people at No-Tsu-Oh, Houston's annual carnival. It was a glimpse, not a community. They also note that even in the 1920s and 1930s, when Filipinos could immigrate to the United States freely as residents of an American colony, there is little evidence of a Filipino presence in Houston.

A community had to wait for the law to change.

The Door Opens

In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act reclassified Filipinos from nationals to aliens and capped immigration at 50 people a year. Real growth in Houston came decades later, after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eased entry for skilled workers. One account of the law says it allowed the Philippines 20,000 visas a year.

Historians do not agree on a single starting line for Filipino Houston. The Houston-focused photo history treats 1965 as the beginning of the most significant wave, while an article in Houston History magazine says significant immigration from the Philippines picked up in the 1980s, with few arrivals before the 1960s. The most careful reading is that the community grew in stages: a trickle in the late 1960s, a steeper climb through the 1970s, and a sharp rise into the 1980s.

The Medical Center Connection

The Texas Medical Center is the thread that runs through most early Filipino Houston stories. In the 1960s, Methodist Hospital brought Filipino nurses to the city through an exchange program. Melody de Guzman Barsales arrived in 1962 at age 18, fresh from the University of the Philippines College of Nursing. She joined a heart transplant team at Methodist, and the 1965 immigration reforms allowed her to stay. She went on to become a registered nurse and an operating room supervisor.

Her path was one of thousands. According to research by historian Catherine Ceniza Choy, the number of foreign-trained nurses working in Texas climbed from 60 in 1970 to 1,752 in 1973. The road was not smooth: a Texas history exhibit describes how many Filipino nurses in the early 1970s struggled to pass Texas board exams because Philippine and American nursing curricula differed. Immigration authorities briefly stopped issuing work visas to foreign nurses in Texas before the Texas Hospital Association pushed back, warning of a catastrophe for the state's hospitals. Some established Filipino nurses went on to recruit others and welcomed newcomers into their own homes.

The Philippine Nurses Association of Metropolitan Houston was founded in 1980, giving the community a formal place to gather and be recognized.

Veterans Who Waited for Recognition

Another thread runs through military service. Filipino soldiers fought alongside Americans in World War II, yet in 1946 Congress passed the Rescission Act, which retroactively cancelled benefits that had been promised to Filipino veterans as American nationals.

A Houston native, Christy Panis Poisot, became a leading voice in the effort to change that. After her grandfather Francisco Panis died, she found his service papers and learned what he had endured as an officer in the United States Armed Forces in the Far East, including the Bataan Death March and a Japanese prison camp. After years of gathering evidence, she persuaded the U.S. military to award his long-overdue medals, which were presented to her family in 2012 at an event hosted by Rice University's Chao Center for Asian Studies.

She then joined the national campaign to honor Filipino veterans as a group. In December 2016, President Barack Obama signed the Filipino Veterans of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act, and on October 25, 2017, Congress presented the medal collectively to the more than 260,000 Filipino and Filipino-American veterans of the war.

Where Filipino Houston Lives

Filipino life in Houston spreads across the metro area. Houston History magazine notes that many Filipino restaurants and bakeries cluster in southwest Houston among the city's Asian businesses, with others in south-central Houston near the Medical Center, where so many Filipino health workers live and work. Houstonia magazine describes a strip on Main Street near NRG Stadium, lined with Filipino businesses, as Houston's own Little Manila. When the Filipino fast-food chain Jollibee made its Texas debut in Houston in 2013, both Houstonia and CultureMap date it to that year, and CultureMap reports that fans waited in line for more than an hour. A second Houston-area location followed in Missouri City in 2020, and in December 2023 the Filipino supermarket chain Seafood City opened in Sugar Land.

Several Houston chefs interviewed by Houstonia say Filipino food was still a question mark to many non-Filipino Houstonians as recently as a decade ago, and credit a younger generation of Filipino chefs, and social media, with changing that.

The suburbs tell their own story. Fort Bend County, which includes Sugar Land and Missouri City, had the highest proportion of Asian residents of any Texas county in the 2020 Census, at 22.2 percent. Rice University's Kinder Institute reports that the Asian population of the greater Houston area rose from 1.8 percent in 1980 to 9.9 percent in 2023. Those figures count all Asian residents together, not Filipinos alone, so they sketch the backdrop rather than the community itself.

That grouping hints at a quiet challenge. The author of the Houston History article observes that Filipino Americans in Houston tend to have higher education levels and incomes than the average Houstonian and have assimilated to a high degree, which can dampen their visibility in the wider community. A large community can still be easy to overlook.

Faith, Food, and Gathering Places

Centuries of Spanish and American rule left the Philippines with a layered culture, and that layering shows up in Houston. Catholicism, the predominant faith in the Philippines, has a strong presence in the city's parishes, where many Filipino clergy serve and Filipino families fill the pews. A significant minority of Filipinos are Protestant, with sizable Baptist and Methodist congregations in Houston, and some are Muslim.

Community events carry that culture into public view. The Houston Filipino Street Festival, organized each fall by the Filipino Young Professionals of Houston, grew out of a small 2014 thank-you gathering for volunteers and Filipino medical workers after outreach for Typhoon Haiyan survivors. Organizers now describe it as the largest Filipino celebration in Texas. Another nonprofit, Philippine Kalayaan Houston, formed in 2019 to organize the annual June 12 Philippine Independence Day celebration, working with the Philippine Consulate General in Houston to bring the area's Filipino organizations together.

A History Still Being Written

October is Filipino American History Month, and Houston offers a good reason to pay attention. The story here runs from a boy in Vigan who became one of Rice's first students, to nurses who crossed an ocean to staff a hospital, to veterans who waited decades for a medal, to families who built churches, businesses, and neighborhoods across the metro. Much of it is still unwritten. The Houston chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society continues to collect family stories, photographs, and records so that this history can be told in full.

Some of those stories are already preserved. The Houston Asian American Archive, managed by Rice University's Chao Center for Asian Studies and housed in Rice's Woodson Research Center, holds more than 300 oral history interviews, and Christy Panis Poisot has served as a liaison to the Houston Filipino community for that collection.

If you grew up in Houston's Filipino community, or arrived later and made it home, the best way to add to this record is the simplest one: ask the older people in your family how they got here, and write down what they say.

THE RICE FILES