Most evenings, Stockton’s Little Manila bustled. Dance halls hopped. Barbershops buzzed with the banter of young Filipino men, the picture of prosperity in suits and fedoras.Pool halls crackled with excitement. Card rooms packed them in. Hotels filled with men seeking respite from the crowded barracks in the farm camps and asparagus fields outside town.

Little Manila was roaring.

“There was a pool hall on every block, a barbershop at every corner,” said Albert Juanitas, 77, whose father was among the first Filipinos to settle the Central Valley. “There were lots of people hanging out in the street. They’d come dancing. They used to gamble in the basements.”

For four decades, beginning in the late 1920s, Little Manila was the center of Filipino life in the Central Valley, its hub at the intersection of El Dorado and Lafayette streets, now on the southern fringe of downtown Stockton.

In May, a 30-minute documentary on KVIE-TV — “Little Manila: Filipinos in California’s Heartland” — pays homage to Little Manila and the life that was for the manongs — the term of endearment used by Filipino Americans to describe the forebears who began arriving from across the Pacific a century ago to work in the plantations and canneries of Hawaii, then later to the fields and orchards of California.

Their stories — of perseverance, ambition, racism and triumphs — shouldn’t be forgotten, said Marissa Aroy, a U.S.-born Filipina from Bakersfield who produced the program.

“No one’s telling their story,” she said. “They’re the ones who sacrificed, who left their families behind” for work in America.

“All these men went to Little Manila just to have fun, to forget about their hardships and their loneliness,” said Aroy.

These days, few of the old buildings remain. Some made way for a handful of new businesses. The McArthur Hotel was razed for a fast-food restaurant.

Over the years, others were declared as blight, then demolished. Many parcels remain vacant because of redevelopment battles and unfulfilled ambitions.

Disappearing history

Little Manila’s struggles, perhaps, are emblematic of the greater challenges facing the Filipino American community.

Despite being the country’s second-largest Asian group, the Filipino community has largely remained invisible, its history at risk of being forgotten, said Dillon Delvo, a filmmaker and director of the Little Manila Foundation. The group hopes to preserve the district’s few remaining historical buildings.

“It’s one thing to read about history. But it’s something else to feel it, to touch it, to have a direct connection to it,” said Delvo.

The city designated four blocks as a historic district in 2000, but with no promises of protection. Still, it was hailed by Delvo as important recognition for the preservation movement.

For some communities, it’s too late. San Francisco’s Manilatown vanished, its 10-block expanse alongside Chinatown fading into the shadows of the financial district’s skyscrapers and downtown redevelopment. The Kearny Street corridor had been home to thousands of Filipinos.

In Stockton, the Little Manila Foundation wants to save three buildings in the core of the neighborhood. The foundation bought the Mariposa Hotel, where Filipino farmworkers mapped strategy for some of the state’s earliest labor strikes. The foundation has plans for restoring the hotel — perhaps transforming it into a cultural center — but has struggled to obtain financial backing.

A vestige of the Rizal Social Club remains, its dance floor empty, its windows boarded, its stuccoed facade wrinkled by peeling paint. The hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas, which counts a Filipino American among its members, used the dance hall as the setting for a video in 2006 to spotlight Little Manila’s plight.

The Filipino American National Historical Society, which has a branch in Stockton, wants to establish a museum in one of the historic buildings.

Much of the district is already lost. The Crosstown Freeway, linking Interstate 5 and Highway 99, cut a swath through the district — uprooting families and adding to the Filipino diaspora.

In 2005, there were 2.3 million Filipinos in the United States, according to Census estimates.

The first large-scale migration out of Stockton began in the 1960s, as many Filipino Americans moved to the capital region.

Of the 100,000 counted in the 1930 census, a third lived in California, and a large portion in Stockton, said James Sobredo, an ethnic studies professor at California State University, Sacramento, who has studied Filipino immigration.

In 1898, the Spanish American War handed control of the Philippines to the United States. Soon afterward, the first wave of Filipinos crossed the Pacific. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1902 tightened the labor supply, prompting plantation owners to seek cheap labor in such places as the Philippines.

In December, Filipino Americans in Hawaii celebrated the centennial of the arrival of the state’s first sakadas, migrant farmworkers recruited to work in the sugar plantations. After their contracts expired, some looked for work in California. Two-thirds of the Filipinos who came in the 1920s came by way of Hawaii, said Sobredo.

Destination, Stockton

For most, all roads led to Stockton. “Whether you arrived in Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles, your path eventually ended up in Stockton one way or another,” Sobredo said.

Preserving the few remaining buildings is “absolutely important because it preserves the legacy of the first and largest Filipino American community,” Sobredo said. “There was no community that came close.”

Over the years, developers sought to demolish the last remnants of Little Manila — enveloping it within a massive strip development that they promised would have a sheen of Asian culture. But critics, such as Delvo, said the proposal lacked the authenticity and patina of heritage.

In a twist, it has been the community’s young who are leading the fight to save Little Manila.

“We had to leave Stockton to learn about Stockton,” said Delvo, 33. “In college, when people talked about Filipino American history, they talked about Stockton and Little Manila. Here we were, these kids from Stockton, and we didn’t seem to know anything about Stockton.”

Delvo’s father, who died in 1997, was 18 when he arrived in Stockton in 1928 from Cebu. His father’s story added to the thousands more now intertwined with the history of Little Manila.

Albert Juanitas recalls stories told by his own father — of how in 1916 he jumped ship in San Francisco to look for work, first in Salinas, then Stockton.

At a vacant lot along El Dorado Street, Albert Juanitas scraped away a patch of grass creeping onto the sidewalk, the tip of his pocket knife tracing scrawls embedded decades ago in the freshly poured concrete.

The small grocery that bore the family name once stood here, he said. Juanitas gazed into the slab of concrete and marveled at the writing that, until then, had gone unnoticed in the sidewalk. Now it added to the written record of his family’s history:

Juanitas Market. June

C.Y. Juanitas.

The year? He could only guess.

The name on the sidewalk, he was certain, was his father’s: Cirilo Yongque Juanitas, among the first Filipino settlers and entrepreneurs who brought the neighborhood to life.

Cirilo Juanitas married an immigrant from Spain, Albert Juanitas’ mother, a white woman, who made it possible for him to buy a 16-acre farm under her name. Filipinos were banned from owning property in that era.

He returned home to the Philippines to remarry after his first wife died during childbirth.

His father’s life is pieced together from documents and from stories handed down. When there wasn’t work in Stockton, he ventured to faraway fields, sometimes as far as Idaho. Still, “I should have asked a lot more questions,” Albert Juanitas said.

Lorenzo Romano Sr., now 92, arrived via Seattle in 1931. He was 17 when he left a sister and six brothers in the province of Pangasinan in Northern Luzon.

He left a hard life in the Philippines, he said, “to find a good way to make a living.” He used earnings from harvesting asparagus and picking fruit to put three brothers through school.

For a while, he rented an apartment in Little Manila. In his younger days, he made weekly trips to the dance halls, dressed in a suit, hair combed back, just to watch or merely tap his feet. “I couldn’t dance,” he said.

Had he not ventured across the ocean, he said, “I would have been very poor. I probably would have already been dead.”

In his living room, in a son’s plush new home, his suitcases are packed. Boxes are sealed. He knows time is short, he said, his eyes wistful, but enough for one last trip to the home country.