The intersection of Roscoe Boulevard and Woodman Avenue in the San Fernando Valley has dense traffic, two strip malls, a hospital and a gas station. But it’s much more than that to people who know what this area looked like a century ago: large swaths of citrus trees and wheat fields on farms that needed people to work the land.

“By the [1920s and 1930s] Filipinos started to come because a lot of agricultural interests wanted cheaper labor… and the 1924 Immigration Act just closed the borders for a lot of immigrants,” said historian Joseph Bernardo, author of the new book Filipinos in the San Fernando Valley.

But the act didn't apply to Filipinos because the Philippines was a U.S. colony. So many came to find work.

“There was a small community [of Filipinos] that settled in the Pacoima

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