Bay Area American Filipino writers may not be all that well known in American Canyon, a fact some want to change.

Recently the Filipino American Association of American Canyon, and the American Canyon Family Resource Center, a social services group, organized the first reading by Filipino American writers in American Canyon.

“We wanted to celebrate the diversity of our community,” said Sherry Tennyson, executive director, of the American Canyon Family Resource Center.

Vallejo author Mel Orpilla, whose father, a retired Mare Island Shipyard worker, immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in the 1920s and celebrated his 101st birthday this summer, said many people do not realize there are Filipino American authors in the Bay Area. Filipinos’ contribution to the community needs to be preserved, he also said during the three-hour event at the Recreation Center on Elliott Drive.

The five writers’ read their work and spoke about the discrimination Filipinos faced in America, biculturalism and Filipino traditions.

“We fought for civil rights,” said one of the authors, Evangeline “ Vangie” Canonizado Buell of Berkeley, recalling the signs that read “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”

The writers spoke about the need to tell the story of the Filipinos to the younger generations.

Orpilla, who works in public relations for Kaiser Permanente, showed pictures from his book, “Filipinos in Vallejo.” The book, published in 2005, chronicles the Filipino community, active in Vallejo since 1912, through photographs from private collections. The pictures show Filipinos at social and civic events, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, and other places in Vallejo.

Buell, 75, whose grandfather was a Black soldier stationed in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and the Phillippine-American War, read a segment from her book, “Twenty-five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride,” which chronicles 100 years of her family’s history. The book won the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for Nonfiction.

The title refers to the her 18th birthday celebration, when a family friend offered the animals to her outraged father in exchange for her hand. Her dad refused.

“Take your  chickens and pig and go back to the farm,” answered her father angrily, before shooing the friend from the house.

Janet Stickmon, a Napa Valley College instructor, who considers Buell a mentor, read from her book “Crushing Soft Rubies,” on her formative years  as the daughter of a Black father and Filipino mother.

One reason she wanted to write her autobiography was to help others who were biracial, with both parents members of a minority. Stickmon, who  lost both parents, wanted the readers in similar situation to feel less isolated, she said.

While racism still exists, she also believes that younger generations have benefited from their elders’ fight against discrimination, she also said.

Penelope Villarica Flores, a professor at the College of Education at San Francisco State University, read from her book on Filipinos who worked in Laos as members of Operation Brotherhood, an organization that sent about 900 medical doctors, nurses, teachers and others from the Philippines to Laos from 1954 to 1975 during the Vietnam War.

“Nobody knew about us. We were the invisible guys,” said Flores, who worked in Laos as a social worker and teacher between 1957 and 1961.

Tony Robles, a tenants rights advocate in San Francisco and an author of children’s books, read poetry. So did Edwin Lozada, another San Franciscan, who read poetry in English and Ilocano, a language spoken in the northern Philippines.

Lozada, a Spanish language and literature high school teacher, said he is working on an anthology of Filipino American writers scheduled to be published in 2008.

The Filipino American Association of American Canyon, an association with 120 families, will purchase the books for the American Canyon Library, said Anthony Quicho, the association’s president.