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© 2021 Rosem Morton
Left: On April 1959, Araceli Teodoro [Marcial] received her pin from the Chinese General Hospital in Manila for finishing her nursing degree. The pinning ceremony has become a time-honored tradition since 1916 in the United States and United Kingdom.
Archival Image: Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry
Right: “I was so excited to attend my graduation,” says Elizabeth Grace Capadngan, a Filipino telemetry nurse at Doctors Community Medical Center, in Maryland. Elizabeth Grace has been a practicing registered nurse for a few years. She finished her Bachelors degree in nursing in the spring of 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she was unable to have her graduation ceremony.
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© 2021 Rosem Morton
Left: Lovella Eugenio, 47, is an operating room nurse in Baltimore, Maryland. She is among the more than 150,000 Filipino nurses who have migrated to the United States since the 1960s, making them the largest group of immigrant nurses in the country.
Right: Filipino nurses pose in a garden in Mindanao, Philippines in 1923 before they eventually migrated to the United States.
Archival Image: Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry
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© 2021 Rosem Morton
Left: A Filipino nursing student poses at San Ramon heights in Mindanao, Philippines between 1921 and 1926.
Archival Image: Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry
Right: “We moved to the United States because it was a good opportunity for our family,” says Marc Bontogon, a Filipino telemetry nurse at Doctors Community Medical Center, in Maryland.
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© 2021 Rosem Morton
Left: Leane Bulaong, 51, is an operating room nurse in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the sole breadwinner of her family since her husband and daughter are both in nursing school. Her other daughter, Jennifer, is a nurse in Missouri. Some days Leane works 7 days a week in the hospital. Due to her increased in hospital exposure, Leane became ill with the COVID-19 virus last November and was hospitalized for four days.
Right: Felicidad Nolasco Acena posed outside a Filipino YMCA club. Acena was a Filipino nurse who migrated to Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. But after less than a year, she felt culturally isolated and moved to New York City where there was a thriving Filipino American community. She worked at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn.
Archival Image: Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry
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© 2021 Rosem Morton
Red cross nurses in the Philippines pose for a portrait in 1919.
Archival Image: Fighting America's Fight, 1919 Public Domain in library of Congress
Public Story
Diaspora on the Frontlines
Credits:
rosem morton
Updated: 06/02/21
Diaspora on the Frontlines
(ongoing)
Story and photographs featured on
-National Geographic
-GMA Philippines
-Rappler Philippines
supported by The National Geographic Society
Nearly 32 percent of the 213 registered nurses who have died of COVID and related complications are of Filipino descent.
Filipino nurses have been on the frontlines of many health crises over the years and it is not by accident. Healthcare in the Philippines was largely modeled after the American system during the U.S. occupation, which lasted 48 years. This prepared Filipinos to become nurses abroad instead of their home country.
The first large wave of Filipino immigrants began after World War II when the U.S. created the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP), which facilitated the entry of foreign nationals to help ease labor shortages. In 1948, the Philippines and the U.S. entered into an agreement for the financing of bi-national centers to coordinate educational exchange programs in various fields, including healthcare. By the 1960s, the demand for nurses increased dramatically following the passage of Medicare and Medicaid and a spike in illnesses such as the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
My project, Diaspora on the Frontlines, documents five Filipino nursing families, making up 9 nurses, all of whom represent the large population that have been historically shaped to fill the US shortage of nurses. This project is comprised of documentary images of their lives, along with historical and present day diptychs to illustrate the missing and present day stories of these migrants.
Special thanks to Ren Capucao and Catherine Ceniza Choy for your research and work on this issue.
Thank you to the Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry for the archival images.
