From Grassroots Activist to LA City Commissioner
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Fil-Am Jaime Geaga (standing left) being sworn in as a new member of the L.A. Central Area Planning Commission on April 26, 2023 at L.A. City Hall (Photo from Geaga/Rhodes photo collection).
He started as a student activist in L.A., spent years in San Francisco as a fighter for immigrant rights and Philippine democracy and as an advocate for people living with HIV. Upon returning to L.A., he resumed his community involvement and work for social justice.
“I’m very honored to have received this appointment from Mayor Karen Bass, the first woman to hold L.A.’s top position and who has announced homelessness as her priority,” the new Commissioner stated. “I hope that I can contribute to help mitigate this intractable problem that has plagued many major cities in the country for years.”
The Central Area Planning Commission covers Central City, Central City North, Hollywood, Westlake (including Historic Filipinotown (HiFi)), and Wilshire. Planning commissions play an important role in reviewing and evaluating land-use and development issues in the city.
Geaga also welcomed his new role as a step toward the representation of more Fil-Ams in policymaking in the greater Los Angeles area, which has more than 400,000 members of his own community, the highest concentration of Filipinos outside the Philippines.
Immigrant experience
Geaga’s immigrant story undergirds his prolific activist life. His mother, Remedios (“Remy”) Flores Vergara, a business graduate from San Fernando, La Union, and father, Jose Vargas Geaga, an engineer from Miagao, Iloilo, met and fell in love during the Second World War. They wed after the war and settled in the mountain city of Baguio. To support their growing family, the couple set up a laundry business, securing a contract with the Philippine Military Academy.
The third of four children, Geaga remembers vividly the glistening white uniforms of PMA cadets drying in the hot sun on the grassy hillside near their home. The hills were a convenient supplement to the electric dryers built by his father whenever there was a heavy volume of laundry orders.
Despite the best efforts of his parents, however, the lingering economic woes in a country still recovering from the war drove them to look at immigration to the U.S. as a pathway to a better future for their children. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, removing a quota system based on national origins, provided an additional incentive to their move to Los Angeles, California, where the couple’s relatives had already settled.
In December 1964, Geaga, his mother and three siblings took an ocean liner from Manila to San Francisco, their port of entry into the U.S., to join his father, who had gone ahead to L.A. the year before to get a job, petition for his family, and find housing. The eleven-year-old felt excited to take the month-long trip that stopped in Hongkong, a couple of cities in Japan, and Honolulu. But as the journey proceeded, getting them farther away from their homeland, he felt conflicted, even resentful about being wrenched abruptly from everything that was familiar to him. He and his family started feeling the profound loss of being Filipino that they started speaking in Tagalog, although English had been their medium of communication in their home in Baguio.
Like other immigrant families, Geaga’s parents worked hard to survive in their adopted country. His mother, Remy, found a job at an insurance company, and his father took a high-paying job in Vietnam for a few years that enabled them to buy their own home. As they became more financially stable, his mother cut her work hours and became active in the fast-growing Filipino community. She helped found or co-founded community organizations that advocated for women, affordable housing, hot meals and other services for seniors, fair licensure for Filipino professionals, and educational and cultural programs for youth.
In the early 1980s, Governor Jerry Brown acknowledged Remy Geaga’s advocacy for seniors by appointing her to the California Commission on Aging. In 2010, the city honored her posthumously by naming the intersection of Temple Street and Alvarado Street as Remy V. Geaga Square. She is also memorialized in the Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana mural in Historic FilipinoTown (HiFi), a well-deserved honor for a beloved leader whose community advocacies revolved around HiFi, which became home for the early Filipinos in L.A.
“Almost simultaneous with his graduation from Stanford, Geaga received news that would test his emotional fortitude. He had tested positive for the HIV virus.”
“Through her actions, my mother showed me her boldness to get out there, express and defend her convictions, and fight for what’s best for the community,” Geaga recalled. At the same time, he added, “she taught us how to appreciate our own culture through her teachings about Filipino mores and traditions, the importance of education, and respect for family.”
Geaga also underscored the role of his late father in inspiring his children to do well. “He sacrificed with long absences from his family to pursue overseas jobs in order to provide a good education for his children, effectively becoming one of the early Filipino overseas foreign workers or OFWs,” he remarked.
Political awakening
While in high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, Geaga joined a study group that tackled these questions, as well as the issue of national identity, enabling him to understand how the Spanish and U.S. colonization shaped his country, setting back its full evolution as a nation free of colonial control.
Like other youths across the country, his older brother Jorge Geaga and older sister Joselyn Geaga-Rosenthal, who both attended UCLA, joined antiwar protests and became his role models for progressive political activism. (In 2014, then Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Geaga-Rosenthal, who had an outstanding record of community service, to the L.A. Building and Safety Commission.)
Remy Geaga, like other new immigrants, was initially concerned that her children might be “rocking the boat” or “biting the hands that feed them,” but her own political views would evolve towards a more open and liberal direction. She would later join anti-Marcos demonstrations, despite admonitions from some community leaders.
In 1972, as Geaga was starting his pre-med studies at U.C. Irvine, his politicization increased. Besides participating in various campus study groups that studied Marx, U.S. imperialism, and socialism, his volunteer stint in a class project that visited other U.C. campuses to study their cross-cultural programs opened his eyes into the kind of activism that would bring him closer to his national identity,
At U.C. Berkeley, someone suggested that their group visit the International Hotel (IH) in San Francisco’s Manilatown, which had become the focal point for Asian community organizers who were trying to prevent the eviction of its older residents, including Filipinos. At the site, someone handed Geaga a copy of the Kalayaan newspaper, whose articles gave him a glimpse of a group of U.S. Filipinos concerned about national liberation in the Philippines.
In September of that year, he and the leader of his L.A. study group, another Fil-Am, attended a retreat with similar collectives from other parts of the U.S. in the Santa Cruz Mountains. There, he learned more about Philippine history, pre-Hispanic Philippines, and U.S. colonialism. He was excited to connect these new understandings with his own theoretical readings.
Before the retreat had ended, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines. The participants immediately organized themselves as the National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in the Philippines (NCRCLP). His study group formed the L.A. Chapter, and although he took part in organizing demonstrations and fundraising, this activity was not foremost among his priorities. He was busy with college, his rock band “Barkada,” and an active social life. This would all change in January 1974 when his activism would take a more serious turn.
Two years into college, Geaga gave up his band, transferred to UCLA, and decided to join the Union of Democratic Filipinos (Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino or KDP - www.kdplegacy.org). At the same time, he decided to come out as gay after dealing with his sexuality for years.
The KDP, which was founded in July 1973 and based in Oakland, responded to Geaga’s search for a revolutionary mass organization that dealt with the roots of deep-seated societal problems like racism, inequality, and national discrimination and fought for social justice for people of color. This national formation, which also supported the national democratic movement in the Philippines fighting for genuine independence from U.S. neo-colonial control, attracted both Filipino immigrant and U.S.-born activists, some of whom Geaga had met previously at the IH in San Francisco.
The following year, Geaga was elected to the National Executive Board of the KDP. He put his studies on hold and moved to the Bay Area. His assignment was to provide support to chapters on organizational development, as well as strategizing on national campaigns, such as the defense of nurses Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, who were wrongfully accused of murdering their patients, and negotiating for fair licensure for Filipino nurses recruited from the Philippines. He was also visible at events opposing the Marcos dictatorship and supporting immigrant rights.
In 1982, Geaga had been at the KDP for eight years, working at the Asian Health Services, and growing what would become a long-term relationship with Gary Rhodes, a Missouri native. Though he had given up his pre-med studies, his desire to pursue a career in the medical field had not left him. He enrolled in a Physician Assistant program at Stanford University and graduated in 1984. The following year, he got a part-time job as P.A. at the U.C. Berkeley Public Health Department.
Dealing with a major health challenge
Almost simultaneous with his graduation from Stanford, Geaga received news that would test his emotional fortitude. He had tested positive for the HIV virus. Although the U.S. Department of Health and other government agencies had already identified the virus as the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), there were still a lot of unknowns about the disease. It was not until 1985 that the FDA would approve a standardized test for everyone.
In the meantime, the rate of infection continued to climb and by year end more than 5,000 AIDS-related deaths had been reported. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that “in the 1980s, AIDS had become the leading cause of death among young adults in the United States.” (As of 2018, about 700,000 have died from HIV/AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic in the early 1980s.)
“I had mixed emotions, alternating between getting depressed and being in disbelief upon getting the results. I thought I would die the next day. I had to struggle hard to find a way to process it.” He felt lucky to receive boundless emotional support from his partner, family, and friends. When he asked his mother what she thought of a revealing article written about him in Filipinas magazine, she said, “It is the truth, and you are a hero. You had the courage to come out to our community about your AIDS diagnosis. This has given hope to others.”
Geaga also found refuge in education, helping him deal with his diagnosis. His job at U.C. Berkeley raised his awareness about the disease, giving him a sense of control. He became the clinical coordinator for an HIV study among 1,000 subjects, who were interviewed and subjected to lab tests and physical exams by his research team. At the same time, he devoured the most recent research papers, scientific findings, and other materials related to HIV-AIDS.
“Learning about the natural history of the disease provided me with valuable knowledge about its progression and encouraged me to further my studies at SF State, where I graduated with a B.A. in Biology degree in 1986,” noted Geaga. Still feeling healthy, strong, and hopeful, he began to pay more attention to disturbing findings about AIDS in the Filipino community.
In 1988, health authorities revealed that Filipinos had the highest rate of AIDS among Asian-Pacific Islander groups in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the major concentrations of the AIDS epidemic on the West Coast. The CDC reported that nearly half of the 83 AIDS cases in the San Francisco Asian community were Filipinos, and according to the L.A. Department of Public Health, there were 15 cases among Filipinos, topping the total 49 cases among Asians.
Geaga had to go through some soul-searching to see whether he was ready to do something about this concerning phenomenon. Despite his initial ambivalence, he thought that the need for an organization dedicated to tackling AIDS in the Filipino community was overwhelming enough, especially with all the misinformation about the epidemic among Filipinos. A few months after the CDC and L.A. DPH reports were released, he founded the Filipino Task Force on AIDS (FTFA) and became its first Executive Director.
Geaga receiving an award for his community prevention and education work on HIV-AIDS from the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention at its Annual Award Dinner on June 22, 1995 at Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco. (Photo from Geaga/Rhodes photo collection)
FTFA’s mission
FTFA focused on education and prevention in a community where there were many taboos about sex and being gay. FTFA increased the visibility of the issue by doing community outreach and dissemination of information about HIV, safe sex practices, and available services for people with HIV. They also provided counseling, direct services, and a weekly safe space for Filipino gay men called Tambayan, where they could socialize and talk about their health concerns or issues that pertain to their experiences as immigrants.
Victor Hall, who served as FTFA staff and later as Executive Director from 1999 to 2004, stated, “Under Jaime’s leadership, we were able to implement a program that allowed Filipinos living with HIV/AIDS and their families to understand and access resources. FTFA also set a precedent by launching the first support groups for Filipinos living with HIV-AIDS in the country.”
Geaga’s expertise became recognized nationally, and he was recruited as an executive board member of the National Minority AIDS Council, a member of the San Francisco HIV Planning Council, and a consultant for the CDC. He participated in various initiatives to address HIV-AIDS issues within people of color communities. He also co-authored studies on the disease that were presented at international conferences. A master at multi-tasking, he was doing all this while pursuing a Master’s in Public Health program at U.C. Berkeley. He graduated in 1993.
While keeping up with the latest developments in the science about HIV-AIDS and taking the available HIV drug therapy, the virus began to take a toll on his health, especially on his eyesight. When his T-cell count went below the laboratory marker for AIDS, he was officially diagnosed with the disease, causing Geaga to undergo another major emotional turmoil. In order to pay attention to his health, he resigned from the FTFA, joined support groups, and practiced yoga and meditation. His search for spirituality led him to explore his own upbringing as a Catholic and other faiths, giving him much solace. As soon as he felt physically and psychologically ready, his next thought was to travel.
In 1994, accompanied by members of his family, he took a trip to the Philippines for the first time in thirty years. The following year, he joined a delegation from the San Francisco General Hospital to attend a people-to-people program on HIV in Beijing, China. He also started paying visits to his former KDP comrades living in different U.S. cities.
Facing one’s mortality, then a glimmer of hope
In late 1995, Geaga was appointed to President Bill Clinton’s Presidential Commission on HIV-AIDS and invited to the swearing in in Washington, D.C. As he was preparing at his hotel to attend the ceremony, he suffered a serious medical emergency. He and his partner quickly took the next flight back to San Francisco, where Geaga was confined at Kaiser Hospital. It was his first major AIDS complication.
By the spring of 1996, as he began experiencing more opportunistic infections, Geaga became preoccupied with his mortality. Knowing the disease progression, he predicted that he would have at most six months to live. He felt scared but struggled to think hard how to navigate this stage in his condition. Then he remembered an incident from 1983 that had never left him.
Geaga was working at a U.C. hospital as a phlebotomist and doing his early morning rounds when he entered one his room assignments. In the dim light of dawn, he saw a young man lying in bed and an older woman sitting quietly in a corner of the room, looking distressed and intently watching. As Geaga finished drawing blood from the patient, the woman began weeping uncontrollably. Before he left the room, he talked to her to see if she needed some help. He found out that she was the mother of the patient and had just arrived from New York City. She told him that she had been feeling desperate after finding out that her gay son, who was only in his 20s, was dying of AIDS.
That image guided him in planning how to live his last few months. He decided to return to L.A. to be closer to his family.
In the spring of 1996, he and Rhodes sold their house in San Francisco, moved south, and stayed at Geaga’s parents’ home in Echo Park. (In 2002, a large part of Echo Park would be designated as Historic Filipinotown.) His whole family and friends rallied around him, but it won’t be long before his fateful prediction would take a pivotal shift.
A month after their move, a combination of antiretroviral drugs known as anti-HIV cocktail therapy, which had been found by scientists to be very promising, was released. His doctor immediately switched him into this treatment, and shortly after Geaga saw his HIV viral load begin to decrease dramatically. He saw positive changes in his body and felt his strength coming back. In the meantime, the side effects from the new drugs and increasing problems with his eyes continued to concern him, causing him to view the new AIDS drugs with cautious optimism. However, he could not help thinking, “The cocktail is here. I will survive.”
In 1999, he and Rhodes bought a duplex in Silver Lake, one unit of which they turned into a guest house in order to augment their income. Geaga continued to take care of his health and underwent several eye surgeries. Yet, he made himself available as a consultant with CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1999 to 2005 to sit at panels that reviewed policies and guidelines for HIV-AIDS care and treatment.
Geaga also found the time to complete a two-year culinary course at Los Angeles Trade Tech, a community college, which brought him to Paris for a few months for a cooking internship arranged by a friend.
By 2005, he began to get involved in community projects on a limited basis, and by 2017, as his health further improved and notwithstanding his limited vision, he resumed his activism full steam.
Renewing community activism
Geaga is now the Chair of the Carlos Bulosan Book Club (www.CBBC.club), a project of Echo Park Library, which has sponsored book readings and promoted Fil-Am history, art, and culture. He was a member of the editorial board of the KDP book project, A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos, and is Board chair of the newly established KDP Legacy, Inc. He has given presentations at LGBT and Fil-Am history conferences and become active in voter education with the Pilipino American Los Angeles Democrats (PALAD).
Founder and chair Geaga with members of the Carlos Bulosan Book Club. (Photo from CBBC collection)
Cindy Domingo, a former KDP leader and Board Chair of the Legacy of Equality, Leadership and Organizing (LELO) in Seattle, was not surprised at Geaga's ability to swiftly reintegrate into community activism. She said, “Having worked with Jaime for almost 50 years, he has exhibited an ability to act with crucial skills, knowledge, and adeptness to address the needs of many but especially those most at need, making him most qualified to serve on L.A.’s city planning commission.”
In 2018, Geaga participated in the formation of the Historic Filipinotown (HiFi) Coalition, aimed at building a cohesive strategy for the development of HiFi located in the Echo Park District in central L.A. The coalition includes legacy organizations, such as FilAm Arts, Filipino American Community of Los Angeles (FACLA), Filipino American Service Group, Inc. (FASGI), Pilipino Workers Center (PWC), and Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA).
Members of the Historic Filipinotown (HiFi) Coalition meeting with Hugo Soto-Martinez, newly-elected member of L.A. Council District 13 (fourth from left). (Photo from HiFi Coalition photo collection)
The historic district, which has a vibrant Filipino community, received the HiFi designation in 2002 after years of community lobbying. Twenty years later, the community again played a leading role in the effort to build the HiFi Eastern Gateway that spans across and 30 feet over Beverly Boulevard at Belmont Avenue and serves as a welcoming arch to the area. It has become a symbol of the presence of Fil-Ams in L.A. and their contributions to U.S. history.
The Historic Filipinotown (HiFi) Eastern Gateway, designed by Eliseo Art Silva. (Photo by Comoelsol Estugloriasinfinn/ wikimedia commons)
Geaga remarked, “Whenever I take a walk around HiFi, I cannot help but think about the legacy of my mother Remy and the other Fil-Ams of her generation who charted the path towards more visibility, recognition, and betterment of the Filipino community in L.A.” Decades after the appointment of his mother to the state Commission on Aging, he has assumed a similar responsibility on a city level and in effect received the torch of his family’s history of community service.
“While my early activism had differed from my mother in our approaches, we shared the same vision of achieving equal rights for Filipino Americans in the U.S. and freedom and democracy for Filipinos in the Philippines,” Geaga stated.
Mila De Guzman is the author of Women Against Marcos: Stories of Filipino and Filipino American Women Who Fought a Dictator.
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