Juneteenth: Parallels in Filipino American History?

Juneteenth is now a Federal Holiday this year. Juneteenth is a celebration of black history and freedom, a holiday relatively few Americans had heard of until recently, if at all. 

Suddenly, Juneteenth is prominent on the nation’s calendar, propelled by wide protests against racial injustice. The holiday gets its name from June 19, 1865. That’s the day the Union army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that all African-American slaves in the state were free under President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The state was the last in the Confederacy to receive word that the Civil War was over and that slavery had been abolished and the last where the federal Army established its authority.

My comparative weaving timeline is farfetched perhaps, but that’s the way I see and write. A Filipino settlement in Saint-Malo in the early 1800s is documented by Lafcadio Hearn’s article in Harper’s Weekly. I bought all the surviving issues that I could find. Hearn was described as a macabre writer, and I will add that he, too, fought against early discrimination and inequality.

In the early 1780s, Jean (also known as Juan and his colony of runaway African slaves) invaded the dense swamps east of the city and across Lake Borgne. They obtained weapons from free blacks and fought for their freedom. Jean thrust an ax into a tree and declared, “Woe to the White who would pass this boundary.” The rebels escaped to Saint-Malo Bayou. The Spanish colonial authorities led a campaign to suppress slave revolts, capturing what will be known as Juan Saint-Malo and his 60 followers. He was condemned to death by hanging, on the charges of murder. The execution was carried out by the alcalde Mario de Reggio on June 19, 1784, in front of St. Louis Cathedral at the present-day Jackson Square in New Orleans. I always assumed that our Saint Malo was named for the France region during the French reign in the Mississippi River. New Orleans had another legendary Jean of Saint-Malo during the Jackson era of the War of Independence. Half pirate and trader, Jean Lafitte is rumored to be from Saint-Malo.

The greatest French explorer is Jacques Cartier born in 1491 in Saint-Malo, the port on the north-east coast of Brittany. Commissioned to “discover certain islands and lands where it is said that a great quantity of gold and other precious things are to be found”. But instead, he claimed Canada for the French king. One of the expeditions took off from Saint-Malo and a Canadian place got its name Saint-Malo. Failing to find the westward passage to the Orient, the explorers followed the great Mississippi ending to the Bayou du Saint-Malo.

On June 19, 1861, Dr. Jose Rizal was born in the Philippines and the beginning of the US Civil War. The Filipinos were mostly seafarers when they participated in the conflict. A few even served on the newest warships at the time, the Ironclads and the Union ship Monitor. Combined with its rotating turret, the world got a naval revolution in construction.

The Union victory brought us Juneteenth of June 19, 1865, but was never as prominent as the expected 2020 celebration as it gets a new meaning.

June 19, 2020, was Rizal’s 159th birthday celebration as we are still learning his words. Why independence? Of the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow. Interestingly even the US Navy named a warship USS Rizal in the 1920s. Maybe I could have found the meaning of Saint-Malo by having a sumptuous feast at Saint Malo restaurant in the nation’s capital, ordering from their fusion menu. The restaurant however is gone, a casualty of Covid19. It is not Saint Malo the bad saint as there was never one but my halo-halo Filipino American history continues.