Manila Village

Manila Village, Louisiana, USA

Settlements such as Manila Village in Jefferson Parish and St. Malo in St. Bernard Parish were founded in the mid-nineteenth century and became home to Filipino sailors and laborers. With houses plat-formed on stilts, the fishermen caught and dried their precious commodity, shrimp, for export to Asia, Canada, South and Central America. Weather conditions eventually destroyed St. Malo in 1915 and Manila Village in 1965. On July 24, 1870, the Spanish-speaking residents of St. Malo founded the first Filipino social club called Sociedad de Beneficencia de los Hispano Filipinos to provide relief and support for the group’s members, including the purchasing of a burial places for their deceased.^[1]

In 2012, a single marker was dedicated in the town of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana. The original Manila Village established in the mid 1800s in Lafitte consisted of buildings and other structures built above the water on stilts. Manila Plaza, located in front of Jean Lafitte Town Hall at 2654 Jean Lafitte Blvd., holds several historical markers and plaques acknowledging important figures in the Lafitte-area Filipino history. While there were several Filipino settlements scattered along the Louisiana coast in the late 1800s, Manila Village was the largest. Dedicated to carving out a new life, these immigrants built their homes and other structures on stilts above the water and relied on the natural bounty of the waterways to provide for their families. They implemented a system of platforms on which they dried shrimp, becoming the forerunners of the dried shrimp industry in Louisiana today. The community suspended above the water thrived for almost a century, until it was decimated by Hurricane Betsy in 1965.^[2]

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