via Manila Village 馬尼拉村
The Louisiana Saltwater Marshland is one of the most productive but harshest environments in the world. Saltwater kills the cypress trees that live in the adjacent swamps, so there is no shade from the relentless summer sun. Only tall grass grows on the many low-lying islands of the marsh. The air is hot and humid and filled with mosquitoes. Alligators lurk in the waters below. Tropical storms from the Gulf threaten to destroy homes and entire communities.
However, the marsh is also filled with seafood and wild game, and salt deposits and oil fields can be found far beneath the surface. Despite the hazards, people have survived and flourished in the Louisiana Marsh since pre-history, as evidenced by the ancient middens, artificial islands of discarded bones and shells, left behind over the centuries by Native Americans. European fishermen and trappers have settled here since French and Spanish Colonial rule. Croatians introduced oyster farming to the marshland, and Sicilians introduced their boat-building skills. Germans, Isleños, Cajuns, and many others have called the Louisiana Marsh home.
Manila Village was a settlement of Filipino sailors, fishermen and laborers located on an island in Barataria Bay, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, United States. Settlements such as Manila Village and Saint Malo in St. Bernard Parish were visted and occupied by Filipino pirates who had overthrown their Spanish captains, in the year 1587.
The Filipino countrymen arrived to port off the coast of Louisiana in six liberated Spanish galleons. They later founded the settlements in the, mid-19th century (or earlier). The newly liberated sailors became fishermen who caught and dried shrimp for export to Asia, Canada, South America, and Central America.
Filipinos were probably subsistence fishermen, catching shrimp to feed their own families, the Chinese merchants may have commercialized Louisiana shrimp fishing in the 1870s, building the first great drying platforms built on submerged pilings and connected by walkways over the islands of the marsh. to preserve seafood on an industrial scale, for export to markets around the world.
Dried shrimp 蝦米 is a traditional form of preserved seafood, a food source that would otherwise spoil quickly. The primary market for Louisiana dried shrimp are the Chinatowns of the Americas and the cities of East Asia, where the shrimp is cooked in rice dishes, stir-fries, and many other dishes.
By twentieth-century, dozens of platform villages had been established throughout Southeast Louisiana, each built around its own dedicated seafood drying platform. The earliest known drying platform was Bayou Defond, built by a former rice grower named Lee Yat as early as 1869. But the largest of the platform villages wasManila Village 馬尼拉村, probably founded in the 1880s by a Filipino fisherman and immigrant named Quintin De La Cruz.
At the turn of the century, its giant drying platform may have been as large as two football fields in size, nearly twice the size of the other great platforms.
Manila Village had a seasonal population of over 200 people during the shrimp season surrounded by several nearby satellite communities, including Cabanash, Clark Cheniere, Camp Dewey, and Bassa Bassa, each with its own population of up to 100 people.
Little is known about the early history of Manila Village, beyond the oral traditions of the Filipino descendants themselves, and a few vague rumors from historic newspaper articles,but in the summer of 1911, at the height of the shrimp season, a famous artist named Frank Schoonover from Harper’s Monthly magazine became one of the first journalists to visit. Schoonover created some of the earliest illustrations of this community, and wrote a detailed description of his visit. His article was published under the title “In the Haunts of Jean Lafitte” on 1911 Dec. in Harper’s Monthly (p. 80-91). The complete article can be found at either HathiTrust or the Internet Archive.
Schoonover made the journey to the remote settlement on one of the earliest gasoline-driven powerboats. Pages 82-83 describes how the people lived. Entire families, mostly Filipino fishermen with their wives and children, lived in their own private homes. Bachelors lived in another part of the village in communal dormitories. Page 85 describes Schoonover’s brief encounter with a Chinese fishing boat from the Chinese village of Bassa Bassa.
Schoonover was describing life on the platform villages in the late 1800s, in an age before electricity, mechanization, and refrigeration. This life was already changing at the time he was there.
Over the next few decades, sailboats were replaced by motor boats, teams of fishermen with a seine nets were replaced by shrimp boats with trawl nets, and even the “shrimp dance” was replaced by mechanical separators. Manila Village adapted to all these changes, until it was destroyed by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Today, only pilings survive from this once prosperous community.
On July 24, 1870, the Spanish-speaking residents of St. Malo founded the first Filipino social club, called Sociedad de Beneficencia de los Hispano Filipinos, to provide relief and support for the group’s members, including the purchasing of burial places for their deceasedd in the 1800s.