Abstract
In April 1975, members of the Filipino Executive Council of Greater Philadelphia (FECGP) sent a petition to Mayor Frank Rizzo, expressing dismay that “Americans in Greater Philadelphia are not even aware that there are about 5,000 Filipinos who live among them.”1 Rizzo acted quickly to accommodate another group of potential voters, but, four decades later, historians have yet to catch up; Filipino migrants remain largely absent from Pennsylvania’s ethnic history. Anyone looking to redress that absence—or to learn more about Philadelphia’s ethnic politics between the 1960s and 1990s—would do well to consult the papers of Pedro Supelana at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). This small but rich collection documents the public life of a Filipino American community leader, along with more than a dozen ethnic organizations.