Vicente Villanueva left the Philippines to earn an engineering degree in 1910 as a pensionado, his lineage carries on.
By Mekita Rivas (’12)
Some people enter libraries to uncover the stories of strangers from yesteryear. Others venture into the stacks of hardcovers and paperbacks in search of answers that hit a little closer to home. For Ricco Siasoco, it was a case of the latter when he, his brother Sonny and his mother Alita walked through the doors of Love Library nearly 30 years ago.
“I was really fascinated by my lolo’s story,” Ricco said, referring to his grandfather, Vicente Villanueva, who graduated from Nebraska with an engineering degree in 1910.
Lolo means grandfather in Filipino. Villanueva — who was born on July 14, 1886, in the countryside of Batangas on the island of Luzon — had come to Nebraska from the Philippines sometime in the early 1900s to attend the university. But as Ricco, Sonny and Alita soon learned, that was just the beginning of an epic tale that would go on to span decades and generations.
When they visited the university archives in the 1990s, they hoped the excursion would deliver answers about who Villanueva was. Ricco also thought of it as a way to get closer to his mom. At the time, the two of them lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa. From Ricco’s perspective, an hourlong drive to Lincoln could potentially offer revelations that other people might have to travel thousands of miles to unearth.
“We were kind of close by, and it was a part of the family lore for my mom,” Ricco said. “She had a real regard for her father and would always talk to me about his story. I think at that time — my mom has since passed away — she was more hesitant than me, and I was like, ‘Let’s go and figure this out.’ ”
The librarian they met with was “super friendly,” Ricco recalled, and ultimately found a yearbook that featured an image of Villanueva in the engineering society. At this time, Ricco, Sonny and Alita knew that Villanueva had been an engineer and that he’d studied at Nebraska as a so-called “pensionado.”
In 1903, five years after the Spanish-American War in which Spain ceded colonial control of the Philippines to the United States, the American government passed the Pensionado Act. This legislation sponsored select Filipino students to study in the United States. These students — primarily from elite families in the Philippines — became known as pensionados.
According to Theo Gonzalves, curator of Asian Pacific American history at the Smithsonian Institution’s National American Museum of History, the stated goal of the U.S. pensionado program was to “educate young Filipinos in the United States” so they could “acquire a thorough knowledge of Western civilization” and return them to the colony where they would take up various government positions.
“The program ensured that colonial institutions were infused with the United States’ systems — from government, education, law and medicine, to the military — effectively replacing the Spanish colonial administration that had been in place since the 1500s,” Gonzalves said.
The assimilation of the colony also worked in the other direction. In addition to Filipino students coming to the U.S. for their training, about 600 teachers from the U.S. volunteered to teach in the Philippines. In 1901, they arrived aboard the U.S.S. Thomas and were known as Thomasites.
The information the Siasoco trio wasn’t privy to, however, was that Villanueva hadn’t embarked on his pensionado journey alone. A certain companion from their family tree had followed him all the way to the Lincoln campus.
“I was seeking the story of my lolo, who I knew was a pensionado,” Ricco said. “But there were two brown guys in that 1910 photo. It was just really striking to us. It was striking to the librarian, too. We wondered, ‘Who is this other person?’ ”
That’s when they started putting two and two together, realizing that the mystery man was, in fact, Vicente’s older brother, Bonifacio Villanueva.
“We do not know how a Batangas country boy survived the monthlong ocean traverse, the grueling three-year engineering curricula, where he resided, who his friends were,” Sonny said. “We do know that he and his kuya (elder brother) Bonifacio would be a formidable team, as evidenced by their yearbook entries.”
Both were members of the engineering society and the now-defunct American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and both graduated in 1910 before going back to the Philippines. According to Gonzalves, they were two of the six pensionados who attended UNL. The other Nebraska pensionados were William Pagaduan from Ilocos Sur, Dalmacio Urtula from Pangasinan, Mauricio Lazo from Ilocos Sur and Teodulo Topacio from Cavite.
Many pensionados became leaders throughout the Philippines as cabinet officials, justices, academics and members of various industries.
“Upon return to the Philippines, my grandfather set about wielding his newfound skills,” Sonny said. “We know he became the electrical engineer for the country’s largest public hospital, Philippine General Hospital.”
Vicente retired early and purchased several hectares of land in his wife Mercedes’ hometown of Dasmarinas. There, they would build a comfortable life; according to family legend, he “electrified” the town and their rice mill was the largest and most efficient in the area.
In total, the pensionado program provided an American education to about 500 Filipino students in exchange for at least 18 months of government service. As such, the program’s legacy is complex. While it did provide pathways to opportunity for a chosen few, its implementation was part of the concerted U.S. effort to assimilate Filipinos into Western culture. The program also exacerbated tension among certain socioeconomic classes. Some pensionados were associated with the unwelcome American presence and authority in the Philippines. The Philippines was under colonialist rule until the U.S. granted its full independence in 1946.
“The quick answer (to how the Pensionado program is viewed) is education and opportunities are good all around,” Ricco said. “And then the long answer is complicated. And every individual family in the U.S. is influenced by global forces and imperialism.”
The pensionado program ended in 1943 and was the largest American scholarship program until the Fulbright Program was established in 1948. These days, such programs that are specific to international students generally take a different approach.
“For many years, assimilation was the objective — individuals needed to act, dress, and look like the majority of the community,” said Dr. Marco Barker, vice chancellor of diversity and inclusion at UNL. “While these early programs had some challenges, they provided a pathway to pursue higher education and earn a college degree. Today, there is a growing expectation that with the goal of access, organizations become nimbler and more dynamic — stretching and expanding themselves to embrace differences and to change the way they function to respond to the wide representation of the people they serve.”
Vicente and Mercedes had seven children — two boys and five girls. Though Vicente never returned to the States, his youngest daughter Alita did, emigrating sometime in the 1960s. She went to graduate school in Michigan and became a second-grade teacher at a public school in Des Moines.
Alita, too, had seven children. Sonny was born in the Philippines and finished medical school there before landing in Wisconsin, where he lived and worked as an anesthesiologist. Ricco, meanwhile, was born in Des Moines and went on to become a writer, educator and activist.
“I think, OK, my lolo was impacted because there was an opportunity in the United States, then he went back and his daughter was like, ‘I love education and I’m actually going to go to the U.S. for more opportunity,” Ricco said. “One of the questions that I asked myself is, did my mom think Iowa was close to where her father studied? And knowing my mom, she probably did. So, I think that’s why we might have ended up in Iowa.”
When Alita accepted a guidance counselor position in Council Bluffs, Sonny and Ricco’s sister, Susan, took over her second-grade classroom, continuing the legacy that education has played in the Siasoco lineage. And, what’s more, the UNL connection didn’t end with Vicente and Bonifacio. Susan’s youngest daughter, Angela, played basketball for Creighton University in the late 1990s and then coached women’s basketball at UNL. Angela’s brother, Andrew, is also a Husker who graduated in 2012 with a business degree.
Since Ricco and Sonny are 23 years apart in age, they had markedly different relationships with their lolo. Ricco’s recollections are fragmented, pieced together mostly by sepia-toned film photographs and weathered relics, like his grandfather’s wrinkled diploma from UNL, which currently hangs on the wall of his San Francisco home.
Sonny’s memories are sparse as well, though he did spend more time with him in the Philippines. Their grandfather smoked cigars. He wrapped a foot-long plumbing pipe in newspapers “for protection from street dogs.” When he was deep into the grip of his Alzheimer’s disease, he began collecting empty corned beef cans. “He used them as ashtrays all over the house,” Sonny shared.
Then there was the time Vicente got lost. For weeks, the family couldn’t find him. So, they put an ad in the Manila Times. At the time, they lived in San Andres, which is by Manila Bay. But he had walked all the way over to Caloocan, about 10 to 15 miles north.
“We found him across town a week later in the kind custody of some folks who were as charmed by him as we all were,” Sonny said. “A family had adopted him for the whole month. They were feeding him. He was like their surrogate grandpa and then they saw that ad we put in the paper.”
That anecdote embodies who Vicente was, even in the later years of his life when he was in the throes of such a devastating disease.
“He was always friendly, very friendly,” Sonny said. “He was never angry. He was never mad. I think that was reflective of his personality.”
On April 7, 1976, at age 89, after a three-decade battle with Alzheimer’s disease, Vicente passed away. Today, his story continues through his descendants, many of whom have found their way back to the Midwest where it all began.
And back in the Philippines, though the Siasoco ancestral acreage in Dasmarinas has since been sold off, a couple of hectares were donated to the town. Fittingly enough, it became the spot where the town’s elementary school and high school were located and is now known as the Vicente P. Villanueva Memorial School.
“He came here as a study abroad student, and his commitment to going back to the Philippines influenced not just the Filipino community he was in, but also our family,” Ricco said. “My mom was an educator, I’m an educator and like half my family is educators. I really think it made an impact on all of us — the importance of education. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m pretty sincere about that. I love being an educator.”