Ernesto Mangaoang (19021968) was a Filipino American labor organizer. A communist and longtime leader of immigrant Filipino laborers, Mangaoang was closely associated with Chris Mensalvas, and was a personal friend of the famous Filipino American intellectual and activist Carlos Bulosan. Biography Born in 1902 in the Philippines, then a colonial possession of the United States, Mangaoang came to the United States in the 1920s, permanently settling in 1926 and finding work among the Filipino cannery workers in the Pacific Northwest. Dissatisfied with working conditions among the migrant and immigrant Filipino workersa largely migrant workforce working in the isolated salmon canneries in Alaska in the winter and toiling in the fields of California during the summer monthsMangaoang would rise to become a leader within Filipino American workers' movement from the beginning of the 1930s. The fuller trajectory of Mangaoang's work as a labor activist was compelled not merely by his awareness of the poor working conditions of the Filipino longshoremen and cannery workers, but also by an early consciousness of racial divisions among the working class responsible for debilitating the workers' movement: as white laborers occupied the top rung of the labor hierarchy, minority workers systematically endured the harshest of obstacles in seeking work during the 1930s Great Depression unemployment wave. Meanwhile, black workers were employed as strike-breakers when white workers protested dissatisfaction with their own conditions, thereby devaluing the gravity of white workers' own demands for progressive change. Terminated from work at the beginning of the Depression years, Mangaoang wrote a letter to the Oregonian in response to a report on the layoff of 60 Filipino hopyard workers: noting the systematic racism in the state's employment practices, Mangaoang concluded with a call for Filipino self-determination, linking the struggle for Filipino independence to the fight against racism in the U.S. Northwest. Mangaoang served as President of Local 266 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) that represented Alaska cannery workers dispatched from Portland. In 1944, Local 266 was absorbed by UCAPAWA Local 7, based in Seattle, and Mangaoang became Local 7's Business Agent. The former Business Agent of Local 266, Chris Mensalvas, would go on to become Local 7 President in 1949, continuing in the position when Local 7 became Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union The organization is recognized as "the country's first Filipino-led union." Filipino American organizer and labor leader Philip