In the 1930s and 1940s Filipino laborers, many of whom were en route to agricultural hubs on the Pacific Coast, packed into movie theaters owned by Japanese immigrants to view Hollywood and Philippine-produced films. These cultural encounters formed an urban public sphere that connected both sides of the Pacific. Filipino patrons remade their public identities and communities through their consumption of film and urban leisure in the western city. This article traces this localized history of spectatorship and exhibition in order to reconsider prevailing understandings of the history of the U.S. West and the rise of cinema and mass commercial culture in the early twentieth century.
