Los Angeles opened Filipino American History Month by putting a Tagalog word on a street sign. On October 1, the city dedicated the intersection of Roscoe Boulevard and Woodman Avenue in Panorama City as Kapwa Square, recognizing a corner of the San Fernando Valley that Filipino families have been building into a community hub for decades. The motion was introduced in August 2025 by Councilmembers Imelda Padilla, whose district includes Panorama City, and Ysabel Jurado, the first Filipina elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

What does kapwa mean?

The council motion defines kapwa as "to see oneself in the other and to recognize our shared identity." In Filipino thought it is less a vocabulary word than a worldview, the idea that the self and the other are not separate, and that you owe your neighbor the care you would give yourself. It sits underneath a lot of everyday Filipino behavior that outsiders notice without naming: the extra plate set out for whoever shows up, the instinct to help before being asked.

Choosing that word, rather than a person's name or a flag, says something about what the square is meant to honor. It is not a monument to one leader. It is a marker for a way of living together that made this intersection what it is.

Why Roscoe and Woodman

Anyone who has shopped for groceries in the Valley knows the corner. Seafood City Supermarket sits at 8231 Woodman Avenue, and Island Pacific Supermarket opened its first location in Panorama City in March 2000, according to Hoodline. Around them is a dense ring of Filipino restaurants, bakeries, remittance centers and small businesses. The Inquirer described the Roscoe and Woodman corridor as a hub of Filipino life in the San Fernando Valley.

The neighborhood's institutions are growing, too. The Pilipino Workers Center, which organizes caregivers and domestic workers, opened its first Valley community hub in Panorama City in 2025. Its executive director, Aquilina Soriano-Versoza, was among the community leaders at the dedication, along with Janelle Adeloga Parra, president of the Los Angeles Filipino Association of City Employees, and historian Joseph Bernardo, whose book Filipinos in the San Fernando Valley was published by Arcadia in August 2025.

"This square dedication honors the deep roots Filipinos have grown in Los Angeles, creating iconic community spaces like this corridor," Jurado said, as reported by AsAmNews. "These acknowledgements are a testament to how our shared roots helped shape the cultural fabric of this city."

The Filipino map of Los Angeles is bigger than one neighborhood

Filipino Americans are the largest Asian American ethnic group in both the City of Los Angeles and the state of California, according to Public Matters, cited by Hoodline. Yet for a long time the community's presence on the city's official map came down mostly to Historic Filipinotown, the area west of downtown that received its designation in 2002.

That designation mattered, but it also hid how Filipino Los Angeles actually lives. Families spread out to Eagle Rock, Carson, West Covina, Cerritos and the Valley, following jobs, housing prices and the hospitals where so many Filipino nurses work. Panorama City is one of those places where the community grew without much official notice. Kapwa Square is a way of saying the map should match the people.

Bernardo's book documents more than a century of Filipino migration to the San Fernando Valley, which is a useful corrective on its own. The Valley is often told as a suburban story, and Filipino workers, farmhands and families were part of it far earlier than most residents assume.

A sign is a start, not a strategy

Commemorative designations are cheap for a city to grant, and they can become a substitute for the harder work of keeping a community in place. Panorama City is a working class neighborhood, and the same forces reshaping the rest of Los Angeles, rising rents, commercial turnover and the cost of running a small business, apply here.

The more telling signs will come later: whether the Filipino businesses at Roscoe and Woodman are still there in ten years, whether the Pilipino Workers Center hub gets the support to grow, and whether the city treats the corridor as a community asset when it makes decisions about zoning and development. Historic Filipinotown has had more than two decades to show how far a name alone goes.

How to celebrate Filipino American History Month in the Valley

October is Filipino American History Month, recognized nationally because the first recorded landing of Filipinos in what is now the United States took place at Morro Bay, California, in October 1587. If you are in Los Angeles this month, Kapwa Square is a good place to start. Go hungry, shop the markets, eat at the family restaurants nearby, and spend your money where the community has spent decades building something worth naming.