First Filipino family is a rainbow

Dolores Bradley's family is black, white, yellow and brown, and most definitely red, white and blue.

"My family is a rainbow and you know rainbows are beautiful," she told me the other day.

Her family is being celebrated this week as part of Pagdiriwang, the annual Filipino festival at Seattle Center (June 5-7).

Hers was the first intact Filipino-American family to settle in Seattle, but as with most families, the story is a little more complicated than that.

Filipino Americans are the largest Asian-American group in Washington state, but that presence started with a trickle.

You recall that the United States took control of The Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which made the U.S. a colonial power.

You can get the highlights of Filipino migration to this area at Historylink.org, or a more detailed picture in Fred Cordova's book, "Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans."

Initially, men came here alone. "But ours was the first family, Bradley said, when we visited in the lobby of the building where she lives now.

"My grandfather, Francis Jenkins, was the son of an escaped slave and a Mexican woman," she said. During the war against Spain, the Army sent Sgt. Jenkins to The Philippines as a translator.

He met and married Rufina Clementi, a Filipina whose father was a Spanish official. The Army brought them to Fort Lawton in 1909 and when Jenkins retired, they bought a house in Ballard amid the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes, she said. Bradley, 85, and her brother are the children of the couple's first child, Francesca. "I attended West Woodland Elementary School where I was the only child of color," Bradley said. She stuck out from the kids in her neighborhood and at Ballard High School, but she said, she wouldn't change any of that.

"Either you like me or you don't," she said with a twinkle. She doesn't worry about it either way she said. She was always taught to be proud of who you are and to make the best of whatever situation you are in.

Some people treated her poorly, but she said, "For the few who would attack me and call me names, there were twice as many supporting me and telling they to leave me alone."

More Filipino families moved to Seattle, mostly settling around the International District, and sometimes, Bradley chuckled, "they assumed we must be rich because we lived in Ballard." Sometimes, because she looks like her African-American father, she would have to convince people she had Filipina roots.

Dorothy Cordova, executive director of the Filipino American National Historical Society, said she first learned about the Jenkins family from a historian who was researching Buffalo Soldiers, the famous black Army unit. She says many of the early Filipino families were mixed. Highlighting the Jenkin's story during the festival will put Filipinos who came later in touch with that history and a family very much worth knowing.

Her uncle Frank was a leader among longshoremen and a fighter for civil rights, and Bradley, who owned a home in the Central Area with her husband, often spoke out on behalf of her neighborhood.

She raised four daughters in that house, and helped with her six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, and even took care of other children awhile. "I love children."

Her daughters and their families all live within 10 minutes of the retirement community she moved into in 2007 when she was having health problems.

During our conversation, people keep stopping by to say hi, and to joke with her. She told me she enjoys people, all of them.

"The rainbow is one of the prettiest things we have in nature," she said.

It's certainly worth celebrating.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.