Dolly Fernandez: Growing up in a love-filled, mixed-race family in the anti-miscegenation eraPosted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-11-26 16:32Z by Steven |
Dolly Fernandez: Growing up in a love-filled, mixed-race family in the anti-miscegenation era
The FilAm: A Magazine for Filipino Americans in New York
2015-11-20
Cristina DC Pastor, Founding Editor
“It was a scandal, but it was also a happy marriage. They just had so much fun together.”
Dolores ‘Dolly’ Fernandez, the daughter of a Filipino valet and a Norwegian hat check girl, traveled back in time and shared fond memories of her parents’ stirring romance amid anti-miscegenation laws which criminalized interracial marriages in the 1930s to the ‘60s.
The statute was applied mostly on ‘Negro-white’ marriages, but hanged over the heads of Filipino pioneers – or ‘manongs’ — in California, who worked in plantations farms. Some of them married outside the U.S. yet they could not be seen in public with their wives because of fear of the law – which was repealed in 1967– and fear of public humiliation. By that time, the seeds of racial prejudice had been planted on the Filipino consciousness.
Dolly recalled growing up in a mixed-race family in New York City during this era where the prevailing attitude around the country was to frown on any union of different races. Filipinos were referred to as Malays. Her father, Pio Fernandez of Baybay, Leyte, and mother, Agnes Olsen, got married, made a home in Astoria, Queens and filled it with love, music, and laughter…
Read the entire article here.