Jasper Place hosts one of the city’s largest ethnic groups, Filipinos. This panel celebrates how our community weaves our culture into the tapestry of the larger Edmonton population while maintaining our homes of origin. Filipinos were invited to work as teachers, nurses and engineers in the 1960’s. Our numbers vastly expanded in 2002 through the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program with caregivers, hospitality workers and agricultural workers, among others, filling labour gaps. Their temporary contracts belittled their essential contributions to Canadian society; hence, the Filipino community created Migrante Alberta. It is an organization that lobbies for basic human rights for all Filipinos in Canada and insists on a path to citizenship for all current TFWs and others who became undocumented and remain without human rights protections. This struggle will benefit not just Filipino precarious workers but all workers who lack the human rights that Canada proclaims for its residents.
There are over 62,000 Filipinos living in Edmonton, making our community the largest Asian community in the city. After English, Pilipino, in its several dialects, is the most spoken language in the city. In several Jasper Place neighbourhoods, such as Britannia Youngstown, the 2021 Canadian census showed that more than one in ten residents were Pilipino speakers. Many longer-term residents in JP have become homeowners while more recent immigrants, and especially TFWs, tend to be renters.
In Migrante and other organizations, within our neighbourhoods, and in our workplaces, Filipinos in Jasper Place, as in other areas of Edmonton, seek to build bonds among our ethnic community members while also forming links with Edmontonians as a whole. Jasper Place is one of the communities we call home, and we proudly share our home with all other Canadians and particularly Indigenous Peoples. Through our endeavours, we are strengthening the bonds between generations of Canadians of Filipino origin, preserving memories from our former homes while adding new memories from our new homes. We want to share our multi-generational stories from two distinct countries with all the communities among whom we live while also learning their stories and discussing our shared hopes. As we weave our evolving stories, we strive to enrich not only the design of our communities here but also the tapestry of the ongoing stories of Jasper Place, Edmonton, and Canada as a whole.
All photos on this banner supplied by Migrante Alberta.
Banner concept by Migrante Alberta, created by SignWorks Plus
To learn more about the Filipino Community in Jasper Place, visit Jasper Place Community History Project’s website here: Category: Filipino Community
