MANILA, Philippines — A Filipino-American who migrated to the US when he was four years old is now deputy to the mayor of Los Angeles, bringing pride to the 500,000 Filipinos living in the city.
Miguel Sangalang, who serves as Mayor Eric Garcetti’s deputy for budget and innovation, recalled walking to SM North EDSA during his childhood in Quezon City where he and his family lived before migrating to the US.
“It’s kind of like an American story of looking for a land of opportunity,” Sangalang told The STAR on the sidelines of the Asia Society and Pumapodcast at the Manila House in Taguig on Monday night.
“My parents, we all lived in one house, and there’s one family to a room, very much humble beginnings,” he added.
His father worked in an IT company while his mother was a school teacher in Quezon province.
Sangalang visited the Philippines for his wedding in Bohol and took time to build linkages while in the country.
“Let’s create more connections between the Philippines – my homeland – and the places where we go. You can’t have collaborations without connections, and you can’t have connections without conversations,” he said.
Sangalang hoped that the ties between the Philippines and LA would not be affected despite President Duterte’s threat to ban American citizens following the passage of the United States’ 2020 budget, which included a provision that prohibits the entry of Filipinos involved in the detention of Sen. Leila de Lima.
He said Metro Manila should not emulate the increasing density and traffic in LA, which he called an “urban sprawl.”
“One of the things the Philippines should not pick up from LA is urban sprawl. That’s something we are grappling with which we are trying to solve with public transport technologies,” he said, noting that in Los Angeles, 10 major cities can fit inside its sprawling 1,200-square kilometer space.
He said housing remains a problem for LA residents, noting that perhaps what LA can pick up from the Philippine experience is the country’s culture of extended families and “multigenerational housing.”
A Filipino community was officially recognized in LA as Historic Filipinotown by city hall in 2002, Sangalang said.
His boss, Mayor Garcetti, drafted the resolution creating the Filipino district when he was a council member, paving the way for the creation of the US’s first historic Filipino town.
Prior to his appointment as LA deputy mayor, Sangalang was director of performance management for Garcetti’s predecessor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Sangalang also worked at the LA city hall on innovation, performance management and finance from 2011 to 2017.
He graduated from the University of California with a degree in Japanese, minor in public policy, before venturing into IT.
Sangalang said he takes pride in representing the Filipino community in LA. As senior advisor to the mayor, he is the highest ranking Filipino-American in the Los Angeles municipal government.
He said he once met a Filipino who was part of the Mexican-led Delano grape strike in the 1960s, which earned Filipino grape workers a place in history after the success of the strike led to the passage of the law that gave farmworkers collective bargaining power.
“Los Angeles has one of the largest populations of Filipino-Americans outside the Philippines,” he said.
“Representation matters. I think we are very humble as a people, but we should also be proud of what we do and need to do,” he added.