Thank you for having us!

Archipelago is so grateful to the Beacon Cinema for allowing us to help share the story of Filipino and Filipino American coffee. We could not have asked for a better venue or more intentional partners. We are so happy that you facilitated this vision, and we can’t wait to do something like this again soon.

To Paul Barreto and your visionary work illuminating the realities of coffee farming - the individuals, communities and processes, thank you. Without your care and creativity, the story of coffee from the Philippines would still be confined to archives.

And Mixt, its always an honor to collaborate with Kasey Acob and to see how you bring your own vision, life experience, and identity to your work. Thank you for sharing your craft and your vision for toasted rice coffee with all of us. The story of coffee cannot be separated from broader economic systems, and drinking sara-sara / kapeng bigas further helps make tangible the realities of farmers while also demonstrating - and driving us to question - what coffee is, and who innovates upon it.

Thank you Malaya Movement, and your incredible volunteers Kailee Go and Mico Astrid - who have provided such critical outreach and support from facilitating our partnerships with local coffee shops, to organizing our raffle and fundraising! We could not have done this without you.

An ever growing list of thank yous to the Foundation for Philippine Progress and our kuya Roger Rigor whose work continues to fight for genuine democracy in the Philippines. We appreciate your dedication and wisdom, and all that you’ve done to make all these moving parts fit together seamlessly.

Lastly, thank you to all of our cafes and individuals who sponsored this event!

 Our Research Processes

Trying to understand the history of coffee grown in the Philippines and Seattle is not easy. The one image that began a deeper dive “1909 Filipino Coffee Company” associated with a stall at Pike Place Market was the most direct connection. However, attempting to find any more leads or information associated with the image proved difficult. Emails to the Seattle Public Library, the Municipal Archives, the Museum of History and Industry, and the Pike Place History Association did not result in any more information. Reaching what felt like the end of the most direct route, we had to pivot and take a more expansive gloss and try and find more material related to coffee and the Philippines.

These explorations led us to the Wing Luke Museum’s reading room, the University of Washington Special Collections, and countless hours exploring digital archives and collections at the Library of Congress and Hathitrust. What comes together is a patchwork of findings that leave incomplete but tangible impressions. Import / export logs, advertisements, announcements in coffee industry periodicals, patents for new coffee roasting, brewing, and storing technologies, and often - essays from colonial administrators - often heads of Bureaus related to Agriculture and Forestry, who wished nothing more for the coffee industry to become the Philippines’ golden goose.

To trace Philippine coffee from an era where colonial knowledge production and circulation was dedicated to opening up avenues for solely commercial development is hard. It contains a literal violence - in the words, in the images - and a more expansive and embodied violence, a constant reflection and sitting in the spaces of the soul where colonization is still felt. Who are the people in the images? What happened to the land and people here in Batangas? Who cleaned up at Clarke’s while American administrators dined? And many more.

Making peace with not knowing results in a poetic opening for imagining. Perhaps there is a justice in having an industry that is now just finding itself again. With as much intention as refusal.

** some of the analysis to follow describes colonial processes and shares images from colonial texts ** feel free to use the sidebar to the right to navigate to a different section

 Coffee’s Colonial Legacy

When we read the history of coffee here in Seattle we are often given a historic gloss that highlights the inevitability of Starbucks; the rise of the Seattle as a “cloudy day coffee city” that we know today. 

But the story of coffee in Seattle is far less linear, and far more complicated. One that does not often get told or studied, spare the realm of academia. A long gloss at the rise of a coffee roasting city reveals a patchwork of businesses - both in Seattle and across the globe. Satellites of industry relaying signals often back to a colonial core.

Pamphlets and periodical industry magazines like “spice”, and “forestry”, and “the Seattle buyers’ guide” form a circuit of ideas, people, and agricultural and business methods that come to define coffee industry procedure and practice as a taste for coffee develops beyond its indigenous place of origin. Knowledge gleaned from one industry, such as staving off white mold from French grape vines, translates into methods for saving Arabica coffee plants in the Philippines from coffee blight - with little success. 

So too are overtly racist and aims of 20th century colonialism; seeped in the assumption that changing the morphology of land could change the presumed indolence and backwardness of its people. It is the same grand White designs that moved Earth and people to enclosures at the 1909 Seattle World’s Fair that angled the coffee industry in the Philippines ever more toward the familiarity of plantations. A colonial knowledge set; produced and captured in real time. 

As early as 1904 during the St. Louis world’s fair, the US was interested in displaying the potential investment opportunities of their “new possession.” We see grids and charts and indexes of colonial knowledge marking place to commodity, evidencing an orientation toward fantasy – of economic development and order that signaled to the US a possibility for a productive return on their colonial investment. American administrators thought that if the British, the Netherlands, and Portugal could succeed in developing the coffee production of their colonial holdings then why couldn’t the US? 

Perhaps there is something poetic about all traces disappearing. About the deep knowledge and culture retained, unyielding, the people of  “coffee colored skin” – named through commodity; refusing to grow it; and being the source of its own destruction. 

As demonstrated in the images above, Colonial “Coffee Experiment Stations” were key sites across coffee producing areas that aimed to standardize coffee production to a science. Through generating knowledge on coffee varietals, the areas where they grew best, propagation and maintenance as well as storage and fermentation processes, Colonial administrators hoped these stations would provide the knowledge necessary to develop coffee industries across the globe. Communications between American and Dutch officers describe how uncannily similar they thought the environments of Java and the Philippines, and made their motives for profit clear.

While the material and documents on coffee arriving from the Philippines into Seattle, and a complete picture of who was responsible for this industry only slightly coming into focus - we craft this analysis to further expand the knowledge surrounding coffee and its historical ties to commodity formations in the Philippines, while we look forward to imagine it’s future in ways that are far more intentional and equitable than the processes of the past. 

 Seattle’s Bustling Port and Clarke’s Confectionary

At Archipelago we’ve framed the flow of people and ideas of Philippine heritage in a sort of tongue and cheek usurpation of the “Portal to the Pacific” - one of Seattle’s many nicknames. But there is truth to this - from the Philippines, to Hawaii, California, and Alaska – even Louisiana, Filipinos and Filipino Americans gathered in Seattle. It has always been a bustling hub. 

Seattle’s placement on the sound and proximity to Asia allowed it to grow into a key import and export hub. Trade companies - especially those that specialized in commodities and materials from countries in Asia, oftentimes benefitting from already established colonial relationships, anchored themselves here in the city. Items such as spices, rice, peanuts, coffee, sugar, and coconut.

These commodities would be priced and then distributed to coffee houses, cafes, grocery stores, etc. From old advertisements, we can discern that coffee from the Philippines and Asia made its way as far as New York. The growth of the railroad and rail shipping facilitated these movements. Further, industries centered around logging and forestry worked across the Pacific in the Philippines to create investment opportunities in resource development - like mining, wood processing, sugar and coconut production, and to the hopes of many - the coffee industry. These industries were framed as concurrent, one easily transformed into another. If the price of sugar went down and became less profitable, instead plant coconut. If coconut wasn’t doing well - plant coffee - and so on…

What made coffee different compared to other commodities grown far away and brought to Seattle was that people discovered green coffee - beans that were fresh and unroasted, were easier to store and transport without compromising their qualities. This paved the way for two parallel industries to develop in Seattle; the patents involving the roasting process, and the patents involving the storage process. In Seattle during the early 20th century, one observes a proliferation of new roasting techniques and technologies. A conference of Pacific Northwest Coffee Roasters highlights this segmentation starting to occur in the coffee economy. From producer → importer → roaster → distributor → retail/cafe → consumer. Documents reporting on the growing coffee industry in Seattle too describe how Pike Place Market essentially became centered around the storage of beans, roasting, and selling coffee by the cup. Entire areas overflowed with coffee beans waiting to be roasted. The introduction of new gas and coal roasting technologies - the one mentioned in the very picture of the 1909 Filipino Coffee company - filled the market with aromas, and further anchored Seattle’s market advantage.

Concurrently in the Philippines, American and expat owned businesses were starting to experiment with vertical integration. Clarke’s confectionary, one of these businesses owned by Chicago born M.A. Clarke (who got his big break as a traveling register salesman in the Philippines) is one of the only documented that worked to grow, roast, and sell coffee from the Philippines in Manila in the early 20th century. While we don’t have a complete story, we have traces of roasteries, pamphlets from the bureau of agriculture, and shops that began to open up marketing specific blends of coffee  - like “Barako”, “Luzon”, and “Manila” blends of “pure Philippine coffee” made by Clarke’s.

Lastly, an advertisement that described Clarke’s confectionery as a “cool” place to dine struck me. “Cool” at this time was not meant to describe the general atmosphere of the establishment, rather - it was to literally describe the environment as “cold.” Favored by US and European businessmen staking their claim on the Philippines’ vast resources, the environment was established to quell the presumed impacts of the tropics on the bodies of White men in particular. This idea, of tropical environments causing indolence and disease, is replicated across the American infrastructure projects in the Philippines - namely the administrative retreat of Baguio, up in the mountains it was also known to grow coffee and provide respite to colonial officials.

While we have the image of the 1909 Coffee Company to anchor us in the history of importing and marketing Philippine Coffee to buyers in the US, as we see, other historical traces are left. It is not an image that stands alone - rather it is upheld by concurrent history and circulating coffee, ideas, and people. We must consider how this market functions concurrently with the 1909 Seattle World’s Fair, and the exhibits of produce and product from the Philippines that it describes - anchored to a hope that by making the American public violently aware of their colonial possessions, that American expert knowledge could spurn a new age of its development and investment through it.

These images, in black and white, in low resolution and highly saturated, portray an incomplete picture both in their attempt to capture and how they are reproduced.

Filipino American Cafes and Import Export Companies

In Seattle, we have a flourishing of coffee culture and cafes that emerged for different needs and reasons, and in different places in the 20th century. In the 1930s, one of the first cafes that catered to Filipino Americans and other non-White immigrants working and living in the CID was Philippine Cafe - which is and has been for some time, a source of inspiration for us here in Seattle and at Archipelago. 

This time in American history being deeply segregated, the rise of Filipino American and Asian Owned businesses catering to the working class was a social and economic lifeline. While a story of coffee may be told mostly from the perspective of successful businesses, to be a Filipino-American or a part of a traditionally marginalized and excluded group means we don’t have a complete vantage point for our history. It is through the hard work of the individuals and groups that actively preserve our culture like the Filipino American National Historical Society, the King County preservation group, archives at the Seattle Public Library, and the Wing Luke Museum sharing constantly that we are able to understand the legacies that have been left behind. 

We have records courtesy of the Gom Hong Collections from the Wing Luke that describe coffee being purchased and sold as early as 1905, and less than a decade later an advertisement for the Tokio Tea Store owned by M. Takeuchi in Pike Place Market importing and purveying “high grade oriental teas and coffees” in 1914. While the history is harder to find - it is important to know that it was always there. Coffee was not or ever confined solely to an imperialist and colonial commodity transformation, the markers of Pan-Asian American ownership are here.

Through the Filipino Forum, we are able to see old advertisements that inform how people were making social connections over coffee - and who these connections were serving. The Filipino Army and Navy Club for example, had a coffee shop where it would serve coffee on weekdays from 10am-2pm. 

Though it took almost a month of research we now know of the Leyte Coffee Shop at the corner [address] that was affiliated with the Leyte Hotel. The Leyte hotel was one of many in the CID that was known to offer long term residences to Filipino workers - mostly single young men. Without any kitchens how would they cook a meal for themselves? 

Important too were the late night gathering places, dance halls and pool rooms, that would sustain social connections and friendships and serve strong coffee late into the night. And the galas of social clubs with dress codes and set menus. And the many writings of Filipino American author Carlos Bulosan, who mentions drinking cups of coffee as he completes his writing, toiles through farm work, and converses with friends. To the cups of coffee that were brought to rallies in the CID led by Bob Santos to preserve the spatial characteristics and communities there, and the cups of coffee that were shared with friends old and new welcoming Filipino American owned businesses to Pike Place market - where folks just coming over from the Philippines could find community and business opportunities through friends and expand their social networks in Seattle.

And in the canneries in Alaska where many Filipino Americans earned their livings working on fish processing lines, cups of strong hot coffee helped fuel workers through to their next shift. We know and see that in segregated bunkhouses, in famous instances of “mug-up’s” - a cannery instituted coffee break advocated for through unions - and in documents describing the work of the canneries in places and newsletters called the Chomly Spectator and others - where some workers have described back in the day only being sustained through jet black coffee – no cream, no sugar, for a 14 hour shift.

These glimpses into a past where Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans began to define the beverage for themselves wether through business or the social worlds they made around it, begins to mark a transition in how coffee culture and coffee is owned and reclaimed by communities that produce it.

 Ben Laigo: Founder of The Door

You can find more writing on the door in countless other places as now it is garnering much deserved attention. In the 1960s, just as coffee was becoming associated with the arts and broader counter-culture movements, Ben Laigo developed a market for specialty espresso beverages. This cafe, called the Door, was literally made out of reclaimed materials. The cafe hosted icons in music - specifically Jazz - and was a gathering place for the exchange of ideas and community as well as one of the first in the city to offer specialty espresso. We have to think about the gravity and significance of this! A Filipino American bringing a new and embracing how coffee could be innovated upon, and embraced the depth of social connections that are made around this drink.

Seeing the last name “Laigo” in Seattle had the whole team buzzing. We know the Laigos through their family owning Philippine Cafe in the 1930s, as we already mentioned - but to see them continuing to lead through hospitality well into the future and to develop coffee beverages at the cusp – to innovate far before starbucks – that is truly some incredible Filipino American History to celebrate. 

Kalsada and the Road Ahead

Paul himself said it best today when he said that coffee feels like it is in a moment of reclamation in the Philippines. What was Clarke’s – that we see in the historic images shared in the walk-through, is now a Filipino owned roastery and a Filipino owned coffee company. 

There is a poetic justice that in some ways the coffee industry could not have been developed until this moment - despite the efforts of Americans and others. 

These images paint an incomplete picture, but they help us understand and contextualize the history of Filipino Americans and the coffee industry in Seattle - from commodity to something more. Perhaps the history of coffee can be an angle into how we move forward in larger agricultural systems with transnational ties, – anchored in the violence of plantations.

This year, marking the 10th anniversary of Kalsada - a company that started here in Seattle and works with a mission that seeks to disrupt the way that coffee is produced for the better. Their work that invests directly in farmers, pays living wages, and moves to build an industry slowly and with intention is a model for agricultural justice and relationality between communities and countries across the Pacific.