Joseph Ileto -- A New Tobera
by Emil Guillermo

This past week the bloody news of Los Angeles brought to mind the name of Fermin Tobera.

Ring a bell?

Tobera, a Filipino immigrant who came to America in the ‘20s, was until this week, the most famous Filipino victim of white male rage.

He was a “manong,” an “old timer” like my dad. Although my dad worked the kitchens in the city, many Filipinos bypassed the prospects of a tough urban experience and took the rural route instead -- to the fields. In Northern California, the road often led to the coastal farming community of Watsonville, where many of the immigrants ultimately settled as pickers and laborers.

But in the depressed economy of the time, the fields were no safe haven. The Filipinos met a growing resentment from the existing agriculture community that didn’t take competition from a new group in town. When they weren’t at work, Filipinos were all too often seen as stylish, well-dressed “cocks-of-the walk.” They were different. They were social. They danced. Sometimes with white women. Sometimes too many times with white women. Consider all the elements in the emotional cauldron of the times, and maybe we can begin to understand how it all brought on a stunning display of antipathy toward Filipinos by angry white males.

In 1930, after months of antagonism, a full-bore white-led race riot erupted in Watsonville. The target was Filipinos who were burned out, intimidated and beaten. When it was all over, one man was left brutally murdered in cold blood.

Fermin Tobera.

Fast forward to the present. 1999.

Joseph Ileto, a 39-year-old Filipino immigrant, who had come to America 15 years ago. By his profile, he could have been an immigrant “everyman.” He finished high school here, then studied engineering at a community college.

Named after St. Joseph, the patron saint of the worker, Ileto was the typical “hard working immigrant.” Work two jobs? Of course. He made long two-hour commutes working as a tester of electrical equipment. But he had to room with his brother to cut down expenses. To make ends meet, he held a second job, as many do, as a civil servant. Ileto was a part-time postal worker.

In the LA suburb of Chatsworth, Ileto was giving the regular carrier a day off. He was doing another guy’s route, delivering mail. Maybe he’d been worried about all the new dogs he’d encounter. Or some missing address.

Typical occupational concerns. But certainly not getting shot up by some loon going “postal,” a not-so-subtle irony of our modern times.

Buford Oneal Furrow, Jr., the alleged gunman who opened fire on the North Valley Jewish Community Center and left five wounded, including three young children, was about an hour away from that initial scene in Granada Hills.

Shooting up Jews, he said, “was a wake up call” to America.

Killing a Filipino was just sport.

According to his FBI confession, Furrow was driving a new Toyota Camry and happened to see a U.S. Postal carrier standing on the street near a postal van.

Furrow parked his car. He was carrying a loaded Glock model 26 in his back pocket. He approached Ileto and asked him if he would mail a letter for him. Ileto agreed and was promptly shot two times. He bent over and tried to run away.

But Furrow says he then shot the mail carrier a few times in the back until he saw the mail carrier fall to the ground, face down.

Furrow then got back into the Toyota and drove away.

The autopsy revealed Ileto was riddled with nine bullets. He was the only one of Furrow’s alleged victims to die.

I repeat the confession of Furrow, because there’s something cold, something casual about it all. It was, by Furrow’s own admission, just a generic opportunity to get a non-white who worked for the Federal government.

But talk about aiming low. A substitute mail carrier? Bad enough as it was, this wasn’t some assassination of a public official.

That’s the pathetic and powerless rage of Furrow.

It does however, create an awareness of the diversity within the non-white ranks, and results in the uplifting of an anonymous Filipino immigrant named Joseph Ileto.

Perhaps it was fated. Ileto’s fate that day would be to make the news at the hands of Furrow, unemployed white supremacist on a mission.

He’ll be the lynchpin in the case for those seeking the maximum penalty against Furrow. He’ll be the focus on discussions for renewed calls for tougher hate crime laws. He’ll be another reminder that America has gone way beyond black and white.

Just don’t buy any notion that he was simply “in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the New California, where minorities are the majority, where Filipinos are the largest Asian American group, where Asians outnumber African Americans, Joseph Ileto was right where he belonged.

And now it’s his fate to go down in contemporary history as the modern day Fermin Tobera, a reminder that hate and ignorance dies hard in the land of the free.