On August 9, the 22nd People’s Ball honored 21 outstanding Filipino Americans and an organization at Newark’s Airport Marriott-evidence that Filipino America’s unglamorous, uncelebrated labor has been the load-bearing wall of this community for decades.
Once a year, the ritual reverses itself. The physicians, the diplomats, and the organizers who have spent careers deliberately out of frame are pulled forward and set, briefly, at the center of the room. This year, on August 9, the Newark Liberty International Airport Marriott hosted the 22nd iteration of that reversal, honoring 21 outstanding Filipino Americans-individuals, two husband-and-wife pairs, and one community organization-at a midday luncheon that behaves less like a gala than a family reunion that happens to have a printed program.
What distinguishes this year’s ceremony is the sheer density of history compressed into a few hours. Five decades of nursing innovation. Diplomatic postings spanning continents. A gelato chef trained in Italy. A community group that fed roughly 450 people through the worst of a pandemic. I have tracked a number of these names for years – watched the work accumulate long before any institution thought to attach an award to it – and reading through the full roster, a through-line emerges unmistakably: this is a diaspora fluent in loyalty to two flags at once, and unwilling to shortchange either. Fiesta Talks Magazine will carry the fuller version for its readership of more than 7,000.
The afternoon also received a genuine Broadway benediction. William Michals-who made his Broadway debut as the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and later played Emile de Becque in Lincoln Center Theater’s Tony Award-winning revival of South Pacific-performed alongside Desi Oakley, the original Jenna in the first national tour of Waitress, who later starred as Roxie Hart in Chicago on Broadway.
The patriotism on display here runs in two directions simultaneously, and nobody in the room treats that as a contradiction requiring resolution. This year’s honorees embody that duality precisely: a mayor who took his oath of office in a New Jersey borough hall and never once stopped calling Baler, Aurora home; a nurse who spent thirty years inside a New York City government office safeguarding the public health of the city that adopted her; a community that will mount a Sinulog procession one weekend and Jersey City’s largest Veterans Parade the next.
Diplomatic and Civic Leadership
Ambassador Senen T. Mangalile received the Diplomatic Excellence and Leadership Award. He has served as Philippine Consul General in New York since 2023 – a name I’ve tracked for years – and departs next for Cambodia as Ambassador. Mayor Arvin Amatorio, honored with the Distinguished Public Service and Community Leadership Award, has been Mayor of Bergenfield, New Jersey, since 2019, reelected unopposed. Pam Andes earned the Community Liaison and Public Service Award as scheduler for Jersey City Mayor James Solomon, having organized the city’s first Veterans Parade.
Health and Nursing
Dr. Elvy G. Barroso received the Distinguished Leadership Award in Tuberculosis Prevention after thirty-one years with NYC’s Bureau of Tuberculosis Control; her work has held my attention for a long time. Warly Remegio, DNP, RN, took home the Transformational Leadership in Nursing Education Award as System VP for Nursing Education at Hartford HealthCare and a 2024 Modern Healthcare 40 Under 40 honoree. Janet Mary Cuaycong was recognized with the Gerontological Nursing and Rehabilitation Care Award for developing the ‘STRIDE’ framework at Mount Sinai West. Dr. Jamille Nagtalon-Ramos received the University Healthcare and Leadership Award as a Rutgers-Camden scholar researching Filipina American reproductive health.
‘None of them were choosing one flag over the other. None of them had to.’
Daisy Briones Macadaeg, BSN, RN, earned the Legacy of Care and Compassion Award as a thirty-six-year ICU nurse at Englewood Health with a long record of medical missions in the Philippines. Edynne Baclay-Loquellano received the Nursing and Community Service Award as Assistant Director of Nursing and 2025 president of JCI Philippine-New York. Ramona Sansait Gapasin was honored with the Distinguished Community Builder Award as a fifty-five-year Medical Laboratory Scientist who leads the Ladies for Rizal New Jersey Chapter USA. And Dr. Francisco ‘Kits’ Reyes and Corazon ‘Cora’ Cajucom Reyes together received the Lifetime Empowerment Couple Award for Healing, Heritage and Humanitarian Service-a retired surgeon and a corporate nurse, both names dear to me well before this award reached them.
Education and Business
Rosemarie Espiritu-Parreño received the Lifetime Achievement Award after nearly six decades teaching, including three at CUNY, and a stint as a New York Times ESOL Teacher of the Year. Michael Molin earned the Banking Excellence and Cultural Impact Award as First VP and Retail Banking Branch Leader at Valley Bank, with twenty-five years advocating financial literacy. Senen Cabalfin received the Humanitarian Service and Community Leadership Award as a nurse turned entrepreneur building group homes for elders across New Jersey and Florida. And Myk Alba took the Business and Community Partnership Award as a pastor and marketer whose creative work has touched Apple Studios, Netflix, and Marvel.
Arts and Artisanship
Francia Michelle Magsaysay received the Culinary Artisanship and Cultural Heritage Award as an Italy-trained gelato master who now runs Francy’s Artisanal Ice Cream in Bergenfield. Marcos ‘Ping’ Panlilio earned the Creative Excellence in Sustainable Design Award after four decades in landscape architecture, now fashioning sustainable Filipiniana garments from reclaimed textiles. And Rosalinda Medina Rupel received the Civic Leadership and Community Empowerment Award as a former UNDP planner, librarian, and stage actress who now chairs PAFCOM’s board.
Stewardship and Community
Ria Serrano received the Intergenerational Impact Award as Executive Director of PACCAL, running wellness programming for elders and mentorship for young professionals. Airein and Glenn Butler earned the Philippine Environmental Advocates Award for spreading marine literacy through Beneath the Sea-Ocean Pals across the Philippines.
Bayanihan
Cebuanos Engaging in Building Unity, Inc. (CEBU Inc.) received the Bayanihan Award for running the pandemic-era Gasa sa Gugma program, which fed roughly 450 peopleSet the twenty-one names side by side and a pattern surfaces. Surgeon and nurse, diplomat and gelato chef, librarian-turned-actress and reformed landscape architect, banker and bureau official – the arcs never rhyme, and they were never meant to; each was assembled out of a different set of accidents, ambitions, and inherited obligations. And yet nearly every one of them has a moment where the path should have broken and instead simply changed direction: a career interrupted by illness, a homeland traded for an unfamiliar coastline, a profession set aside for something more urgent than the profession itself. The particulars differ from name to name; the underlying grammar does not. These are people who took displacement, disease, or grief – the raw, undignified material of a life disrupted – and built something load-bearing, something the rest of us have been quietly standing on for years without asking who built it.
There is a patriotism beneath all of it, and it is worth naming outright rather than leaving it as ambient texture. We tend to narrate the diaspora through its most visible exports – athletes on a podium, entertainers on a marquee, capital moving through a remittance line – because visibility is what journalism instinctively reaches for. What this roster actually reveals is quieter, less photogenic, and considerably more durable: a tuberculosis nurse decorated by both the CDC and the Philippine presidency, an honor that requires two governments to independently arrive at the same verdict about the same life; a mayor’s scheduler who organized a city’s first Veterans Parade, a gesture aimed not inward at her own community but outward, toward the servicemen and women who serve this country regardless of where their families once came from; a couple whose forty-year marriage has quietly supported causes on both sides of the Pacific, uninterrupted by distance or decade. Empowerment, as this event quietly insists on defining it, is not spectacle and was never meant to be. It is simply overdue credit, issued decades late, to people who never once mistook loyalty to one flag for a betrayal of the other – who understood, long before anyone handed them a plaque to confirm it, that devotion doesn’t have to be divided between two countries. It can be given fully to both.
The People’s Ball performs this same act every year, and its persistence is itself a kind of argument: it takes the unglamorous, uncompensated labor of holding a community together – the scheduling, the mentoring, the thirty-one-year tenures inside government offices nobody thinks to romanticize – and enters it into the record before it can dissolve into anonymity, the way most quiet labor eventually does. But the ceremony itself, the luncheon, the citations read aloud into a hotel ballroom microphone, is not where the real work happens. The real transmission happens elsewhere, in the room’s periphery, in the folding chairs at the back and the doorways near the kitchen: in the younger nurses, diplomats, and organizers standing at the edges, watching their elders receive applause for work that was never done for applause, quietly absorbing the one lesson this luncheon exists to teach-that patriotism, practiced twice over and sustained long enough without ever being asked to choose a side, eventually stops being a personal virtue and becomes, instead, something you hand down.