The Alaskeros: How Filipinos Built the Pacific Northwest — and Paid for It in Blood
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UGAT CLOTHING · HISTORY · Filipino American History Month Series
Post 8 · The Alaskeros: How Filipinos Built the Pacific Northwest — and Paid for It in Blood
They arrived in Seattle with nothing. They canned the salmon that fed a nation, picked the apples and hops of the Yakima Valley, wrote the defining novel of the immigrant experience, organized the first Filipino-led union in American history — and two of their leaders were assassinated in broad daylight on orders from a dictator 7,000 miles away. This is the story of Filipinos in the Pacific Northwest, and it is one of the most extraordinary untold chapters in American history.
There is a hotel in Seattle's International District called the Eastern Hotel. For decades, it was home to Filipino men waiting to go north — waiting for the salmon season in Alaska, waiting for work to come back after a hard winter, waiting for the next contract to pull them out of the city and back into the rhythms of labor that defined their lives. Carlos Bulosan, the most important Filipino American writer of the 20th century, is believed to have stayed there. Gene Viernes, a labor organizer who would be murdered at age 29 for his union work, grew up in the orbit of men like the ones who lived in that hotel. His father had been one of them.
The Eastern Hotel still stands. A mural now marks it as a site of Filipino American history. But the story it represents — of the Alaskeros, the men who shuttled between Seattle and the Alaskan canneries and the farm fields of Washington and Oregon — is still not widely known outside the communities who lived it.
That ends here.
The Circuit: Seattle, Alaska, and the Fields of Washington
When Filipinos began arriving in the Pacific Northwest in significant numbers after 1900 — drawn by the same combination of U.S. colonial recruitment, economic desperation, and the promise of a better life that drove all Filipino migration — they entered a labor system built around a single word: seasonal.
There was no single job. There was a circuit. A cycle that repeated year after year and shaped every aspect of Filipino life in the Northwest.
🗺 The Alaskero Circuit
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Seattle — International District (year-round base): The hub. The hotels and boardinghouses of what is now the International District housed hundreds of Filipino men during the off-season. They shared rooms to save money. They gambled, socialized, organized, and waited. The Seattle Filipino community was the largest on the mainland West Coast by the 1920s.
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Alaska — Salmon canneries (late spring to late summer): Every year, contractors assembled crews and shipped them north to canneries in Bristol Bay, Kodiak, Ketchikan, and dozens of other Alaskan sites. The work: gutting, cleaning, cutting, packing salmon on conveyor lines for 10 to 12 hours a day. The pay: modest. The conditions: overcrowded ships, segregated bunkhouses inferior to those provided to white workers, food deducted from wages at company prices.
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Eastern Washington — Yakima Valley farms (fall harvest): After the Alaska season, many Alaskeros headed east to the Yakima Valley and other agricultural areas of Washington and Oregon — picking apples, hops, berries, asparagus. The same circuit of seasonal labor that their counterparts in California worked in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys.
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Back to Seattle (winter): When the harvest was over, back to the International District. Back to the hotels. Back to waiting for spring and the next Alaska season. Some of these men made this circuit for decades.
This was the Alaskero life. It was not glamorous. The men who lived it were young — many were students or recent arrivals who had come hoping to attend the University of Washington. Some enrolled. Most did not, caught in the economic gravity of the labor circuit. They were paid wages that were extraordinary by Philippine standards and exploitative by American ones. They were excluded from land ownership after Washington's Alien Land Law of 1921 — and the few who challenged it, like Pio de Cano, had to do so in court.
And they were, by the mid-1930s, the dominant workforce in the Alaska salmon canning industry — the invisible labor force that put canned salmon on American dinner tables across the country.
Carry the Story
The Alaskeros built an industry with their hands and built a community from almost nothing. At UGAT, we design for the communities who did the work history forgot to credit. Wear it, share it, keep it moving.
What They Faced: Discrimination, Violence, and the Contractor System
Filipino workers in the Pacific Northwest occupied a peculiar legal and social position. Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory, Filipinos were American nationals — not citizens, but not foreigners subject to the same exclusion laws that barred Chinese and Japanese immigration. This gave them the right to travel freely to the mainland. It did not give them equality.
In practice, Filipino workers in Washington, Oregon, and California faced:
The contractor system. Workers were not hired directly by the canneries or farms — they were hired through labor contractors, typically Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino men who acted as intermediaries. The contractor assembled a crew, negotiated their wages collectively, and took a cut. This system created layers of exploitation: the contractor could deduct food, lodging, transportation, and "finder's fees" from workers' pay, leaving men who had worked an entire Alaskan summer with almost nothing. Some contractors disappeared entirely at the end of the season, wages unpaid and no recourse available.
Racial wage hierarchies. Even when workers were paid fairly by the contractor, the canneries maintained explicit racial pay scales. White workers in "skilled" positions — supervisors, mechanics, canning machine operators — earned significantly more than Filipino and Native Alaskan workers in the "unskilled" jobs of cutting and packing, regardless of the workers' actual skill or experience. This hierarchy was enforced structurally, not just informally.
Anti-Filipino violence on the mainland. In the late 1920s and 1930s, anti-Filipino riots swept California, Washington, and Oregon. Filipino men were beaten, driven out of towns, and in some cases killed. They were barred from restaurants, hotels, and public places. Laws preventing Filipinos from marrying white women were on the books in multiple states. Carlos Bulosan documented encounters where he was pulled off the street by police, beaten, and robbed — simply for being Filipino.
Exclusion from advancement. No matter how long they worked the canneries, Filipino workers could not become contractors — those positions were held by Chinese and Japanese workers who had arrived before them and locked up the contracts. They could rise to foreman, and no further. The ceiling was low and reinforced by both industry practice and, after 1933, union politics.
The Conditions They Worked Under
🚢 Ships to Alaska: Workers were packed into vessels far beyond their intended capacity — over 200 workers into ships meant for 150. Provisions were minimal. Workers were not allowed to leave the ship at ports of call, forcing them to buy necessities from the contractor at inflated prices.
🏚 Bunkhouses: Segregated, inferior to those provided for white workers. Filipinos and Alaska Native workers shared the worst facilities on every cannery site.
💰 Wages: Low even by the standards of the era — and systematically lower than what Japanese or white workers earned for comparable work.
⚖️ Legal status: As U.S. nationals (not citizens), Filipino workers could not vote, could not own land under the Alien Land Law, and had limited access to legal recourse when exploited.
📋 The "company store" problem: Contractors sold workers their food, lodging, and supplies at prices set by the contractor. By the end of a season, the deductions often consumed most of what a worker had earned.
June 19, 1933: The First Filipino-Led Union in American History
By the early 1930s, the conditions in the canneries and the fields had become intolerable in a new way. The Great Depression had hit hard, wages had been cut further, and the contractor system was becoming more predatory, not less. Something had to change.
On June 19, 1933, a group of Filipino workers met in Seattle and founded the Cannery Workers' and Farm Laborers' Union, Local 18257 — the first Filipino-led labor union in American history. Its founding members were not professional organizers. Several of them were University of Washington students who worked the cannery circuit to pay their tuition. They were young, educated, angry, and organized.
The union's first president was Virgil Duyungan, a former agricultural contractor who had worked in the smelting, cooking, and farming industries across Washington state. Before becoming president, he had testified at the National Recovery Act hearings in San Francisco, documenting in detail the exploitation and corruption inside the Alaskan cannery system. He was a compelling speaker and an effective organizer. The union chartered with the American Federation of Labor and began signing up members across the cannery circuit — in Seattle, in Portland, in San Francisco.
Within three years, the union had built real power. The HSPA and the cannery companies were paying attention. And then, on December 1, 1936, an agent of a labor contractor walked into the union office and shot Virgil Duyungan and union secretary Aurelio Simon dead.
The murders were meant to destroy the union. Instead, they galvanized it.
Filipino workers rallied behind the union in numbers they hadn't before. The deaths of Duyungan and Simon transformed them from organizers into martyrs, and the anger their deaths provoked pushed the union into a period of sustained, effective growth. By 1937, the union had affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as Local 7, building alliances with longshoremen, cannery workers in Portland and San Francisco, and other labor organizations up and down the West Coast. The multiracial, multi-industry vision the union embodied — what historians have called "civil rights unionism" — was years ahead of its time.
The killings were meant to destroy the union. Filipino workers rallied behind it instead. Within a year, Local 7 was one of the most effective labor organizations on the West Coast.
— Drawn from the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington
Carlos Bulosan: The Man Who Wrote It All Down
While the Alaskeros were building their union, a young man from Pangasinan, Philippines was trying to survive in the same world — and writing about it.
Carlos Bulosan arrived in Seattle in 1930 at approximately age 18, with little English and no money. What followed was a decade of labor, illness, racism, and organizing that he eventually shaped into one of the most important American books of the 20th century.
📖 America Is in the Heart (1946) — Carlos Bulosan
Published in 1946 and semi-autobiographical in form, America Is in the Heart chronicles the experience of a young Filipino immigrant making his way through the West Coast labor circuit in the 1930s — from the salmon canneries of Alaska to the farm fields of California and Oregon, through union organizing, illness, poverty, violence, and the sustained, fragile hope that America's ideals might someday match its practice.
Bulosan worked as a dishwasher, a field hand, a cannery worker, a newspaper editor, and a union organizer. He joined labor movements. He was jailed. He contracted tuberculosis and spent years in a hospital. He wrote from a hospital bed, eventually.
In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned Bulosan to write one of the essays derived from the "Four Freedoms" — placing a Filipino cannery worker among the most prominent American writers of the war era. His 1946 book became a founding text of Asian American literature, was suppressed during the McCarthy era, revived by the University of Washington Press in 1973, and has remained in print ever since. It is required reading in Filipino American studies programs across the country.
Bulosan died in Seattle in 1956, buried in a simple grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery. In 1984, Filipino American activists raised money for a proper headstone. Someone left a note beside it, signing off as "Grandpa" — a common Filipino term of respect for elders. His grave is a pilgrimage site for Filipino Americans in the Northwest today.
What Bulosan did was something the labor movement and the community desperately needed: he turned the Alaskero experience into literature. He gave it language and narrative and moral weight. He made it impossible to dismiss as merely economic history. Every Filipino worker who was pulled from a restaurant by police, every man who worked an Alaskan summer and came back with almost nothing, every young man who dreamed of college and ended up on a cannery line — Bulosan wrote their story.
And he named what had been done to them. Not as accident, not as the natural order of things — but as deliberate exploitation, built on colonial foundations, sustained by racial hierarchy, and in contradiction with every democratic ideal America claimed to hold.
"I am an exile in America... but America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea-pickers."
— Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1946)
June 1, 1981: The Murders That Reached Across an Ocean
The union built by the Alaskeros continued through the decades — becoming Local 7, then Local 37 of the ILWU — fighting discrimination cases, weathering McCarthyism and government attempts to deport its leftist leaders in the 1950s, cycling through periods of corruption and reform. By the late 1970s, a new generation of Filipino Americans had entered the union — the children and grandchildren of the Alaskeros, raised in Seattle, educated at the University of Washington, politically radicalized by the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Marcos activism that was spreading through Filipino American communities nationwide.
Among them were Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes.
Gene Viernes had grown up in Yakima, the eldest of nine children whose father Felix had emigrated from the Philippines in the 1920s to pick fruit and work canneries — a first-generation Alaskero. Gene joined Local 37 at age 14, lying about his age to get his first cannery job, working summers in Alaska alongside his father and brothers. By the time he was in his twenties, he was one of the most effective labor reformers the union had ever seen.
Silme Domingo grew up in Seattle after his father — a Filipino immigrant who had served in the U.S. Army in World War II — brought the family there. He graduated with honors from the University of Washington. He was a founder of the Seattle chapter of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), which organized some of the first protests in Seattle against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.
Together, Domingo and Viernes led a reform campaign within Local 37, seeking to root out corruption and return the union to the principles its founders had died for. They were also openly and vocally anti-Marcos — and the Marcos regime in Manila was watching.
⚠️ June 1, 1981: Pioneer Square, Seattle
On the afternoon of June 1, 1981, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were shot in their union hall near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. Viernes died instantly. Domingo was shot four times in the abdomen. He managed to struggle to the street, where firefighters from a nearby station arrived within minutes. With his remaining strength, Domingo named his killers: "Guloy and Ramil." He died the following day at Harborview Medical Center. He was 29 years old.
Two Local 37 members with ties to the Filipino street gang Tulisan were convicted of the murders. A third man, the gang's leader, was convicted of ordering them. But the investigation did not stop there.
In 1989, a federal court found that the murders had been ordered by Ferdinand Marcos himself — the dictator of the Philippines — because of Domingo and Viernes's anti-Marcos activism. Local 37 president Tony Baruso, a Marcos supporter, was convicted in 1991 of planning the murder of Viernes and sentenced to life in prison.
The civil verdict against the Marcos estate — awarding Domingo's family $12.7 million and Viernes's family $2.25 million — was the largest personal injury verdict in Washington state history at the time and the only case in which a foreign head of state was held civilly liable for murders committed on U.S. soil.
Six days before they were killed, Rizal Park in Seattle — named for Philippine national hero José Rizal — had been dedicated. Domingo and Viernes had helped advocate for it. They never saw it officially open.
The murders of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes sent a shock through the Filipino American community that was felt for decades. They were the children of the Alaskeros — the second generation, the ones who had grown up in America, gone to university, and chosen to fight for the same causes their fathers had fought for, just in new forms. Their deaths made vivid what had always been true: that the Filipino American struggle for dignity and justice was not contained within America's borders. It was transnational. The same Marcos regime that was crushing dissent in the Philippines was reaching into Seattle to silence Filipino Americans who dared to speak.
Every year since 1982, the organization LELO — Legacy of Leadership, Equality and Organizing — holds an annual event in Seattle honoring Domingo and Viernes. Their names are inscribed on the Bantayog ng mga Bayani memorial wall in the Philippines alongside other Marcos-era martyrs.
The Lawsuit, the Supreme Court, and the Fight That Never Really Ended
In 1982, a coalition of Filipino and Alaska Native cannery workers filed a landmark class-action lawsuit against Wards Cove Packing Company, which operated several Alaskan canneries. The suit documented what Filipino workers had known for decades: the company maintained explicitly segregated job categories, with Filipino and Native workers confined to low-paying "unskilled" positions while white workers monopolized the higher-paying "skilled" roles — regardless of actual skill or experience.
The case — Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio — reached the United States Supreme Court in 1989. The Court ruled against the workers, holding that statistical evidence of racial disparity in job assignments was insufficient to prove discrimination without additional proof of discriminatory intent. The decision was a significant setback for civil rights law generally, making it harder to prove employment discrimination across the country. Congress responded in 1991 with the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which partially restored the standards the Wards Cove ruling had gutted.
The Filipino workers in Alaska's canneries had, once again, changed American law — even in defeat.
What the Alaskeros Left Behind: Filipino Seattle Today
The Filipino community of the Pacific Northwest today is the direct descendant of the Alaskeros — of the men who worked the cannery circuit, built the union, wrote the books, and gave their lives fighting for justice in Seattle and in Manila.
Seattle's International District — once the home base of Filipino men waiting for their next Alaska contract — is now home to the Filipino Community Center, to the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), and to organizations like LELO that carry forward the labor and civil rights tradition the Alaskeros established. The Pista sa Nayon celebration draws thousands every year. In 1992, Velma Veloria became the first Filipina elected to a state legislature in the continental United States — representing the same Seattle community that the Alaskeros had built.
Filipino farms in Eastern Washington — bought by Alaskeros who saved enough over decades of seasonal labor to purchase land despite the legal obstacles placed in their way — are still operating. The children and grandchildren of men who picked apples in the Yakima Valley now own orchards.
And Carlos Bulosan's grave, in a Seattle cemetery, continues to receive visitors. Someone always brings flowers. The note left by a stranger years ago — signing off as "Grandpa" — is the most Filipino thing you can imagine: claiming kinship across time, across death, across the ocean that separated one life from another.
"We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat... We are all Americans who have struggled for peace and democracy."
— Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart
The Pacific Northwest Roots Run Deep
Long before Seattle was a tech hub, it was an Alaskero city. Long before Portland was a food destination, Filipino workers were canning the fish that fed the country. The roots of Filipino America in the Northwest go back over a century — and UGAT is here to make sure they're never forgotten.
The Eastern Hotel, Still Standing
The Eastern Hotel at 506 Maynard Avenue in Seattle's International District is still there. The men who waited in its rooms — for the salmon season, for the apple harvest, for the next contract, for something better — are mostly gone now. The last Alaskeros of their generation have passed. What they left behind is harder to point to than a building, harder to see than a mural.
They left behind the canned salmon that fed America through two world wars. They left behind the union — Local 7, Local 37, the ILWU — that transformed the rights of cannery workers and established the template for multi-ethnic labor organizing in the Northwest. They left behind Carlos Bulosan's book, which is still in print, still taught, still read by young Filipino Americans who see themselves in it. They left behind the Filipino community of Seattle and Portland and Yakima and Tacoma and the Alaskan cities where some of them settled permanently, becoming the first documented Filipinos to establish year-round residency in the 49th state.
They left behind Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo — not their deaths, but their example. The willingness to keep organizing even when the cost was mortal. The belief that the union was worth dying for, that justice was worth fighting for, that the work of the fathers was the inheritance of the sons.
Virgil Duyungan. Aurelio Simon. Carlos Bulosan. Gene Viernes. Silme Domingo. Pio de Cano. The unnamed men who packed into ships too small for their number and sailed north to cut fish in the Alaskan cold.
They were here. They built this. Their names belong on the walls of the Pacific Northwest's history — not as footnotes, but as the foundation.
💬 Join the Conversation
Is your family from the Pacific Northwest Filipino community? Do you have Alaskero ancestry — parents or grandparents who worked the cannery circuit? Have you read America Is in the Heart? Share your connection to this history in the comments. The more of us who know these names, the harder they are to erase.
📖 FAHM Series: "Mga Bayani ng Kasaysayan" — Post 8 of 8
This is part of UGAT's Filipino American History Month series covering over 400 years of Filipino presence in America.
Know Your Roots
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