LAS VEGAS — Carlos Bulosan’s 1943 novel “America is in the Heart” sits peacefully at the center table of Belen Gabato’s living room like an attentive, observant shaman. “Life is a foreign language. Every man mispronounced it,” the migrant Filipino’s quintessential Manong once wrote, ushering memories of kababayans who endured racism, poverty, isolation, and bigotry so they’d be able to partake of a slice of the Great American Dream. It was the time when San Francisco’s stores hung signs like “Filipinos and dogs are not allowed,” and labor struggles in a California apple orchard and Alaskan cannery whimpered in the gutters like death wish waiting to unfold.
Bulosan died a pauper, buried in an unmarked grave in a small Seattle town, doomed to be forgotten. Half a century later, the wealth of his memory screams so loud that a mere sight of his book in a warm couch makes us remember that, indeed, America is in the heart.
The recent achievements of Filipino nurses Belen Gabato and Minda Banaria, both based in Las Vegas NV, articulate Bulosan’s inspiration. Life in America is not about muted voices or unswerving subservience, but freedom to stand up and courage to be heard; it is not about vindictiveness or retribution, but industry and competency.
These subsequently become the collective ideals that move the almost four million Filipinos in the U.S., easily comprising 1.5 percent of the population, and growing. “We assert ourselves on the basis of competency than discrimination,” says Gabato, who was recently appointed to the seven-member Nevada State Board of Nursing, the first ethnic Filipino to be chosen by a Governor’s office in any U.S. state. “Most of the time when you talk about discriminatory practices, it’s almost like we divide people to either for or against it, it be-comes a divisive issue.”
“When I walk the streets, I’ll always be viewed as a foreigner,” she adds. “But we have to get out of our minority enclave and participate in the life of the community. Discrimination won’t go away, it’ll take different forms, but it has been reduced. These days, there’s more attention to sensitivity in the workplace, diversity concerns, and awareness of cultural differences in society.”
The Nevada State Board of Nursing is the state agency which licenses, regulates and disciplines the practice of Registered Nurses (RNs), Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs), Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs), Advanced Practitioners of Nursing (APNs) and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs). Its mission is to “protect the public’s health, safety and welfare through the effective regulation of nursing.”
Banaria, on the other hand, credits simply her deep sense of industry, resilience, and faith –traditional Filipino traits that exude a primitive zeal but spiritual strength that were imbued in her when she was young – for her achievements. Her father, a physician in rural Isabela province, died when she was 2; her mother worked days and nights as private dressmaker to the Ysmael family, one of the country’s “old rich” clan to make both ends meet.
Among other recognitions and citations this year alone, Banaria was awarded “Distinguished Nurse of the Year” (2007) by the March of Dimes of Southern Nevada, another first for a Filipino nurse. Patients, friends, co-workers and other health professionals nominate nurses in 24 catego-ries including the category of “Distinguished Nurse of the Year” and “Nurses’ Choice.” In Nevada alone, there were 2,000 nominations for 23 different categories. The ”Distinguished Nurse Award” is the highest.
Founded in 1938, March of Dimes is a United States health charity organization, whose mission is to improve the health of babies, particularly to defeat the epidemic disease polio. Filipino nurses comprise the largest block of foreign-trained nurses working and entering the United States, from 75 percent of all foreign nurses in the 1980s to 43 percent in 2000. Still, Philippine-trained nurses make up 52 percent of all foreigners taking the U.S. nursing licensure exam, well above the Canadian-trained nurses at 12 percent.
Despite these numbers, the U.S. still faces a scarcity of nurses and other healthcare professionals. The demand is expected to become more acute as the U.S.’ 78 million baby boomers retire. A shortage of more than 1 million nurses – amid a workforce of 3 million – is expected by 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates. The demand (for Filipino nurses) doesn’t just usher quantity. The quality of service that the Filipino nurse delivers through generations of US migration is enough reason for recognition. Hence, the recent achievements that Gabato and Banaria received doesn’t come as a surprise; what’s surprising is the fact that these commendations come only now.
BELEN GABATO
Belen Gabato, a native of the southern island city of Cebu, came to the U.S. in 1964 as part of the Exchange Visitor Program. She was then the head nurse of Southern Islands Public Hospital in the city. “I was in a group of ten nurses, nine of them were from Manila,” she recalls. “I didn’t know how to speak Tagalog, I am a Cebuana. English was our common language.”
That era, 1955 to 1972, was the height of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, which refers to the reform movements in the United States aimed at abolishing racial discrimination of African Americans. While most Filipinos chose to keep mum and stay “neutral” and “apolitical,” youthful Belen, an idealistic provinciana from the South at that time, imbibed this significant transition in American history as a wide screen of self-realization and education.
“(The) civil rights movement is good for Filipinos and other minorities, not just for the blacks,” Gabato believes. “During those years, it was difficult to find a Filipino nurse who’s a supervisor. We are now at par with our Caucasian counterparts and other internationally-trained nurses in salaries, promotions, and other opportunities.”
The flames of fiery activism, by way of labor organizing, could have settled in Belen’s heart so easily during those years, but it took her more than 20 years to finally physicalize that resolve and converge a huge chunk of Filipino migrant workers, or nurses, into a cohesive and potent organization. In between, she took her graduate studies at the Loyola University Chicago, taught in nursing school, helped her husband Manuel, an internist, in his private practice in Indiana, while she devoted time to raise their two kids – Rachel and Manuel Jr.
In 1990, the family moved to Las Vegas. Three years later, she founded the Philippine Nurses Association of Nevada (PNAN). But it wasn’t easy.
“It was difficult to convince Filipino nurses to join the association,” she remembers. “They were either busy working two jobs or they didn’t see the need for organizing.”
The breakthrough came in 1994. “There was a legislation that says Canadian nurses can come to Nevada without licensure requirement. They were not required to take the state board, but we were. Even Caucasian nurses from other states were required to take the test but not the Canadians, so that was a kind of issue that galvanized us into acting,” she says. Nevada nurses, including Filipino members of PNAN, opposed the bill and won.
“We fought it on the basis of competency,” Gabato reiterates. “That made more nurses to join the organization,” including Minda Banaria who was honored with the Nursing Excellence Award for Community Service through her work with the Las Vegas Medical Mission Foundation in a Philippine Nurses Association convention in Boston last summer. Meantime, the association started its internal education program, which eventually debunked the prevailing stereotype that Filipino women, like most Asians, are blindly subservient to authority and superiors.
“It’s not that we lack assertiveness, it’s just that we lack the facility for speaking well, we have an accent,” Gabato believes. “So we encouraged nurses to study public speaking, even the accent portion of it, so they can communicate well. Long time ago, we tend to defer to authority, we are not going to contradict authority, keep relations nice, keep quiet. These days, we learned to be more assertive, we have learned to speak up and question which only makes our work more effective and competent.”
MINDA BANARIA
While Gabato strikes the uninitiated as a very articulate and upfront leader, Banaria exudes a more subdued aura of leadership and initiative–a homely wisdom and spiritual intimacy that fit her well with her medical mission work in the Philippines. “Service is the rent we pay for being on this earth,” Banaria says. Each year, for the last eight years, Minda, together with other doctors and nurses (Filipinos and Americans) raise funds for, among others, construction of schools for the victims of natural calamities, and continued medical and health care in the barrios, including in her hometown of Cabagan in Isabela.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Delano grape strike of 1964 may have a significant effect in Belen Gabato’s leadership resolve, but for Minda Banaria, the inspiration brought forth by the untimely death of a cousin, Milagros Albano, made her more attuned to the social work aspect of the nursing profession. “Like my cousin, I dreamed of helping the poor. She wasn’t able to realize that dream, I am here to fulfill it,” she says. Her husband Frank, who works for the Las Vegas Metro Police, helps Minda in her medical missions. They have three grownup children and eight grandchildren.
To contact a Board Member, write c/o Nevada State Board of Nursing, 5011 Meadowood Mall Way #300, Reno, NV 89502-6547; or call 1-888-590-6726. For more info, http://www.nur-singboard.state.nv.us/. For information on membership to the Philippine Nurses Association of Nevada, please call Belen Gabato at 702-259-1224.
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