The Filipina Activist So Unstoppable, Her Nickname Was ‘Bullet’

In January 1970, Violeta ‘Bullet’ Marasigan’s husband implored her to not “bring any more work home.”

Quoted in a San Francisco Examiner profile, Pete Marasigan was, the newspaper reported, only half-joking. Because when Violeta Marasigan brought the office home with her, it wasn’t stacks of papers and files. More often than not, it was human beings that needed food or a bed for the night.

Marasigan had been in nonstop action since 1968, when she was hired by San Francisco’s United Filipino Association (UFA) as a social worker. Born in the Philippines in 1939, Marasigan had moved to California to study at San Francisco State College. Shortly after graduation, the UFA brought her on to assist the elders — or manongs — of Manilatown, a 10-block stretch of Filipino businesses, restaurants and social hubs centered around Kearny and Jackson Streets in San Francisco. She was perfect for the position.

“I’m very optimistic,” she later explained. “I think a lot of things can be done if we really put ourselves in it — [and] not half-heartedly.”

There was nothing half-hearted about Marasigan. She spent her entire life fighting for Filipinos, both in the Bay and abroad. Her nickname “Bullet” was coined while still in her teens; “Bolet” is a Tagalog version of the name Violeta, but Marasigan’s moniker morphed into “Bullet” once her friends realized how impossible it was to stand in her way. That much became clear to San Francisco as soon as Marasigan joined forces with the UFA.

“When I started working with the old men,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 1970, “I saw that they were discriminated against in terms of their access to social services. A lot of them had been here for over 30 years, but they could still barely speak English or write. These manongs were mostly single retired farmworkers and seamen living on social security retirement benefits.”

Marasigan quickly deduced that most of these men — frequently World War II veterans — were not receiving all of the SSI benefits they were entitled to. (Some were receiving less than half of the appropriate amount.) Marasigan took it upon herself to bring these men into the Social Security office and advocate for each of them, one by one, until they each received what they were owed. And they were owed a lot.

After the U.S. colonized the Philippines in 1898, Filipino men became a cheap labor source for American companies, particularly in agriculture, canneries and the merchant navy. In the 1920s, 100,000 workers arrived from the Philippines to the U.S. to work. But not only were these men barred from bringing their families with them, by 1933 in California, they had also been prohibited from marrying outside of their race. (That year, the California senate saw fit to add “Malay” to the state’s interracial marriage ban, thereby preventing Filipino men from marrying most of the women in their vicinity.)

With so many barriers to building a traditional family structure, it became essential for this first wave of manongs to form their own communities. Manilatown was central to that, and central to Manilatown was the International Hotel (often called the “I-Hotel”). The three-story structure at 838 Kearny Street housed 200 residents — mostly elderly and impoverished Filipino and Chinese men. The UFA’s headquarters, appropriately enough, was situated directly next door.

In Autumn of 1968, Marasigan and the UFA faced their biggest challenge yet. Residents at the I-Hotel began receiving eviction notices. (The business that owned the property, Milton Meyer and Company, wanted to turn the hotel into a multi-level parking lot.) Residents, students and other civil rights groups banded together to keep the I-Hotel open; Marasigan was a key player in negotiating the hotel a new three-year lease in 1969.

Marasigan couldn’t have known that just four years later, the hotel would be sold to a developer. Then, on Aug. 7, 1977, 400 police officers forced their way through a human chain around the I-Hotel and forcibly dragged out its residents, bringing an end to the hotel — and Manilatown itself — for good.

Marasigan was not there to see the end of the hotel she fought so hard to save. She had returned to Manila in 1971, quickly joining the resistance against Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator that placed the Philippines under martial law, put an end to the free press and began violently oppressing civilians. Marasigan proved herself once more to be an outspoken activist, visiting and raising money for political prisoners. For her trouble, Marasigan was arrested in 1982 on explosives charges.

Marasigan spent a year incarcerated at the infamous Camp Crame before being fully exonerated. During her time as a political prisoner, Marasigan helped organize inmates, held political discussions and even conducted a 22-day hunger strike. In 1995, looking back on the turbulent time, she told the Examiner, “The only thing explosive about me was my mouth and my farts.”

She expanded: “Filipinos laugh a lot. We laugh at our mistakes. It’s one of the strengths we have. We can also fight.”

And fight she did. Undeterred by her time in Camp Crame, in 1984, she co-founded Gabriela Women’s Party — an organization formed after 10,000 women marched against Marcos, defying a ban on protests. That same year, Maragisan also helped found Selda, an advocacy organization by and for political prisoners. As part of her work with Gabriela and the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), Maragisan had a hand in opening two safe havens for women: the Buklod Center in Olongapo City, geared towards sex workers, and the Batis Center for Women in Quezon City, which focused on female migrant workers.

Marasigan finally came back to the Bay in 1988 and, though there was no Manilatown to return to, went straight back to work for Filipino immigrants. She worked as a social worker at West Bay Filipino Multi-Services, Asian American Recovery Services and the Veterans Equity Center (now known as the Bayanihan Equity Center).

Throughout the 1990s, while based in Daly City, Marasigan remained focused on seniors and veterans, setting up food and clothing banks at two separate Mission Street locations. In 1993, she co-founded the Friends of Filipino American Veterans to conduct “direct action, legal aid, advocacy and outreach programs for the veterans.” In 1994, she was president of the Filipino American Human Rights Advocates. Around this time, the editor in chief of Filipinas magazine Rene Ciria-Cruz called Marasigan “old reliable,” and noted: “She’s a symbol of activism. When she’s there it lends a validity to the cause being taken up.”

Marasigan broadened her focus even further in the ’90s, working more with children and teens — a natural progression, after she’d raised four daughters and a son of her own.

In 1995, Marasigan volunteered with the Bilingual Advisory Council of Balboa Park’s James Denman Middle School, was a member of the School Advisory Council and actively worked with teens on AIDS prevention. An article in the San Francisco Examiner that year reported that she was prone to bluntly asking the teens at the West Bay Filipino Center on Mission St. if they were sexually active.

“If they cannot say ‘no’ right away,” she explained, “I grab their hand and say ‘Talk to me.’ I’m straight with them. I answer their questions and I don’t get embarrassed.”

Marasigan wasn’t afraid to enter a classroom and tell kids something they’d never heard before — be it about safe sex or their own history.

“In the curriculum,” she said at the time, “there is no cultural empowerment of other groups. Last week, we had a support group at Balboa, and we showed them Filipino history in America, and they were so surprised … How could our children have self-esteem in school when they don’t see they are part of the history of America?”

Sadly, Marasigan’s life of service was suddenly cut short by an accident in April 2000. She had just gotten out of her parked car when it rolled down the street, knocking her to the ground. She was 61.

At a packed memorial service for her at San Francisco’s City Hall, tributes poured in from Mayor Willie Brown, several supervisors (including Tom Ammiano and Mabel Teng) and a plethora of friends and associates. Supervisor Leland Yee didn’t mince words.

“Anyone with the name ‘Bullet,’ you don’t want to mess around with,” Yee said. “When you lose someone like that, you lose part of your soul.”

One of Marasigan’s final triumphs in life was successfully fighting to re-open the Filipino Education Center — a bilingual school and daycare for immigrant children. She believed this was an essential grounding place that would enable future generations of Filipinos to thrive in the Bay.

“When we’re gone,” she explained in 1995, “the work will continue.”

To learn about other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, visit the Rebel Girls homepage.