May 30 | Settling St. Malo: The First Permanent Asian American Settlement in the USA
RICHLAND, SC—The Richland Library Main hosts a four-faceted program “Settling St. Malo: The First Permanent Asian American Settlement in the USA” from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm on Saturday, May 30: a screening of a 25-minute documentary, poetry reading, presentation, and Q&A by poet and author Randy Gonzales.
Winner of the 2024 Summerlee Book Prize, Settling St. Malo brings readers back to a time when Louisiana had the largest Filipino population in the United States. It explores a fishing village in Lake Borgne, shrimp drying platforms in Barataria Bay, and the Filipino Colony Bar in New Orleans. It tells of how one of the first Filipino sailors to join the U.S. Navy settled in Louisiana.
Poet Randy Gonzales explores the history of Louisiana’s 19th- and early 20th-century Filipino communities and his family’s story of migration and assimilation through a blend of documentary and lyrical poetry. Settling St. Malo is a history of Filipino Louisiana in verse and an ode to the struggles of immigrant ancestors, a collection of poems whose substance, language, and rhythms are informed by oral histories, diaries, letters, and government documents—poems infused with cultural and visual landscapes and driven by a poet’s desire to account for a lost heritage.
Gonzales is a poet, writer, and community historian invested in telling the story of Filipino Louisiana. Born and raised in New Orleans with little knowledge of his Filipino roots, he has worked to reclaim and share the culture and history of Filipino Louisiana. Randy is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he holds the Dr. James Wilson/BORSF Eminent Scholar Endowed Professorship in Southern Studies. He holds a PhD in English with an emphasis in poetry from the Center of Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. As an officer with the Philippine Louisiana Historical Society, Randy wrote the text for the historical marker to commemorate the Filipino settlement at St. Malo. He has been interviewed extensively and given numerous local, regional, and national talks on Filipino Louisiana.
Settling St. Malo: The First Permanent Asian American Settlement in the USA
Saturday, May 30, 2026
1:00 pm –3:00 pm
Admission: FREE
RIchland Library Main
1431 Assembly St., Columbia, SC 29201
richlandlibrary.com