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| Collecting Memories,Celebrating History |
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It all started with a young woman’s desire to better know her father, who died when she was too young to remember. Carina Monica Montoya was just six years old when her Filipino daddy, Tomas "Tommy" Montoya, died.
"I began research on the early Filipinos in America in general, and the Filipinos in Los Angeles in particular, all in an attempt to know and understand my father’s life during the early years," said Carina. The result of her research is the remarkable book which will be launched on April 4 at Historic Filipinotown -- Images of America Los Angeles’s Historic Filipinotown.
Carina Montoya was born and raised in Los Angeles and her personal interest in local history has led to an amazing book of images of the past. Her father, Tommy Montoya, was from General Trias, Cavite and was one of the first young Filipino men to arrive in the 1920s, live in Los Angeles’s Little Manila, and eventually settled in and around the Temple-Beverly corridor. She collected many of the vintage images from the early Filipino families who settled in and around the Temple-Beverly corridor, the Filipino community, and Los Angeles historical organizations. Her remarkable vintage photographs illustrate developments throughout the century that not only led the early Filipino families to an area in the city they could finally call home, but it created a cultural legacy that remains as the foundation of the town today.
"My father served in the US Navy, and as a result of his service was granted citizenship. He settled in Los Angeles and found work in Hollywood as a waiter at Don The Beachcomber, a popular Polynesian restaurant/bar that mostly catered to Hollywood film industry crowd. My father did not have any relatives in America when he immigrated. His friends became his family, living in groups, sharing food and money when times were bad, such as during the depression years. When he met and married my mother in the early 1940s, they lived in an apartment in Little Tokyo. They lived through the forced relocations due to urban developments. When I was an infant, he was diagnosed with having Multiple Sclerosis. He became paralyzed from the neck down and had to put in an iron lung at Rancho Los Amigos in Downey, CA." Carina recalled. "My father passed away before my seventh birthday and I have very vague memories of him. Through my books I’ve been able to see and understand my father’s life as an immigrant. A desire to know my father has been my inspiration. Many of the photographs and information that I obtained from individuals and families in and around the Temple-Beverly corridor helped put names to faces and faces to places and places that collectively comprised the Filipino community of Los Angeles. I wanted to start from where it all began for my father, in Little Manila, and where my young immigrant mother with two fatherless children sought security and familiarity among friends and family, in the Temple-Beverly corridor. In my hunt for photographs, I’ve retraced my father’s steps in and around downtown Los Angeles, Bunker Hill, and the Temple-Beverly corridor. Of course many, if not all, of the buildings that comprised Little Manila from the 1920s-1940s are no longer there, but echoes of the ghost pool halls, barber shops, diners and taxi dance halls breath life into my photographs that would have otherwise been left forgotten. Each photograph was a piece of the puzzle that in the end contained the big picture of what Historic Filipinotown today is all about. The challenge was finding the photographs, and the information to go with them," the young author said.
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