It’s Manny Time in Little Manila
Pacquiao’s Title Fight Saturday Energizes the Region’s Filipino Enclaves; ‘He Gives Me Goosebumps’. Pacquiao, who holds titles in a record eight weight classes, takes on Shane Mosley Saturday at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for the WBO welterweight title, and for Pacquiao’s countrymen, any Manny fight is a big fight. “Oh yes, of course it’s party time when Manny fights,” Han Lazaro said, as she stepped out in the area known as Little Manila with her two sons, 9-year-old Angelo and 6-year-old Augustine. An immigrant from Manila who’s been in America for six years, she says that as distastefully “violent” as boxing may be, she lets her boys watch because she wants “them to see the culture their parents come from and be proud of that.”
“My dad likes him because he likes Filipinos!” little Augustine says, mock-punching like a mini-Pacquiao. The largest group of overseas Filipinos live in America, and while California and Hawaii boast the largest concentrations of Americans of Filipino ancestry, the New York metropolitan area has a sizable population, too. Tagalog is one of the 10 most-spoken languages in Queens. Manhattan annually hosts a Philippine Independence Day Parade and the Five Corners district here in Jersey City has a slew of Filipino restaurants, food stores and doctors’ offices.
There, at Casa Manila, a Filipino restaurant farther up Newark Avenue, men eating an earlier dinner took breaks from their Kare-kare and Mungo to say rooting for Pacquiao is about rooting for one of their own. “The Philippines are a small country and to see how big he has become—he says anybody can do it,” Damaso Bugarin said. Bugarin left a province north of Manila 30 years ago for America and like De La Cruz, he said he is more a Pacquiao fan than a straight boxing aficionado.