Danilo De Leon is a Filipino immigrant who currently makes his home in Jasper Place. The attached transcript contains excerpts from a longer interview conducted by the Alberta Labour History Institute1 in September 2022. De Leon arrived in Alberta in 2009 as a temporary foreign worker (TFW); in 2021 he became national chair of Migrante Canada. Employed as a cleaner by Bee Clean, he and other workers claimed that the employer neither paid them overtime nor paid for all hours worked. They were working at the University of Alberta, which had contracted out cleaning of its buildings to Bee Clean.
Since 2019, De Leon has lived in Jasper Place on 156th Street where a lot of Filipinos from different walks of life reside. Tagalog is, in fact, the second language spoken in this area.
What unites them, he says, is that:
“…they have the same thing in common – they are all workers. They all work hard to make money, work hard to meet ends, and work hard to send money back home, especially for the family that depends on them.”
Two of the reasons Filipinos choose to live in the area are because rents “are way cheaper here,” and because it’s close to the Annunciation Catholic Church on 94th Avenue and 163rd Street.
When asked what the Filipino community living in the Jasper Place area would most benefit from, De Leon replied:
First I guess a centre, a centre where they can meet and talk and develop skills, talk about the issues of life and the issues in the community, if there are any. To develop a relationship. If you live in a community and you want to develop a good relationship with everyone in the community, you need to have a centre. A centre where people can meet, a centre where people are welcome, and give everyone a chance to develop their skills and talent. I think those are the things that we need. Everything starts with communication. If we have a centre that’s open communication for everything, [and] will welcome those kind of things, then that’s where small things started and became big in the future.
1Interview with Danilo De Leon, September 8, 2022. Courtesy of the Alberta Labour History Institute.
