SAN FRANCISCO — In 1923, Francisco “Pancho Villa” Guilledo put the Philippines on a global stage when he became the first Asian to win the World Flyweight Championship.
Dr. Bernard James Remollino, associate professor of Asian American and Pacific American History at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, recently released a new biography of Guilledo’s quick-lived upbringing and climb to stardom through the early 20th Century.
Remollino immigrated from Makati, Philippines, to the Bay Area in the 1990s and grew up around Stockton and Tracy, living most of his life undocumented, he said. In high school, he developed a fascination with the history of the Philippines, the U.S., and Filipino-American immigrants, subjects which he later dedicated several degrees through City College of San Francisco, UC Berkeley and UCLA.
For years, just as his love for academia led him to become a college professor, he developed an obsession for training in martial arts, eventually becoming a competitor and coach. While sitting in traffic one day, he decided to merge his two passions. In 2017, he started collecting historical documentation of the life and history of Guilledo, who died at 23 in a San Francisco hospital in 1925.
Sometime around the early 2020s, Remollino met Joseph Aquilizan of Bayani Arts. Aquilizan, apart from being a professional artist, was also an avid Muay Thai practitioner and a prolific Filipino-American historian and collector with an extensive treasure trove of original memorabilia from Guilledo’s legendary rise to boxing stardom. After hitting it off, the two agreed to memorialize the intersections of Filipino-American immigration, politics and sports in a new biography of their favorite flyweight hero.
In about three months, armed with decades of historical archives and a shared adoration for the world’s first Filipino boxing champ, the two Filipino Americans wrote “Pancho Villa World Champion 1923” and published it under Bayani Books in 2025.
Remollino spoke with this news organization about his life, history and the work it took to produce the book.
-
Bernard Remollino, author of a new biography of Pancho Villa: World Champion 1923, at Ballast Coffee in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
1 of 6
Bernard Remollino, author of a new biography of Pancho Villa: World Champion 1923, at Ballast Coffee in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
Q: So how do you find yourself in your academic career studying the history of Filipino fighters?
A: I was trying to find my intervention into this story of Filipino-American history. I was trying to find out what stories seemed to matter or what experiences seemed to be most impactful for the people that were living in the 1920s and ’30s. What I was finding is that people were talking about organizing, people were talking about migrant labor and fighting for equal pay for equal work, fighting for dignified working conditions.
And these struggles were not isolated to the union halls, not isolated to the work places. In fact, they were transitioning, or they were being born, into the spaces of sociality – the spaces of leisure, the spaces of rest.
Other scholars had already talked about this. Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, who passed away several years ago, wrote one of the keystone books, “Little Manila is in the Heart,” talking about Little Manila in Stockton. Through her work, and through the work of other scholars and mentors, I was seeing that Filipino Americans were living these very vibrant and rich cultural lives that were intimately connected to the political organizing and the political imaginations that they were mobilizing in this kind of work.
Then I was like, “OK, I want to do cultural history.” My mentors at UCLA were scholars in labor history and cultural history, not related to Filipino-American history, but gave me the framework for how I might ask these questions. I was heading to training, and I think I just shouted it out: “Boxing! Boxers!” And I just asked the question to myself out loud – was there somebody before (Manny) Pacquiao?
When you think of Filipino boxers, Pacquiao looms large for very good reason, but I was wondering if there is a longer thread or tradition or pattern there. That research literally started with a Google search: Filipino boxers, 1920s. And this guy Pancho Villa comes up. He’s not even referred to as Francisco Guilledo, he’s referred to as Pancho Villa, his ring name. The genesis and apex of that ring name I talk about in the book as intersecting with consciousnesses around the Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa.
I was seeing, oh OK there’s this champion here. That’s significant. That looks like it’s something to play into.
Q: What kind of racial and cultural dynamics were you encountering in your research?
A: The context of the Philippine American War and the U.S. colonization of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century brought about this extension of U.S. racial logics that were being applied to African Americans on the continent, that were being applied to these logics of indigenous dispossession. Native Americans were being put into reservations. Treaties were being reneged upon.
A lot of those practices, I was finding, were born into and translated into the Philippine context. These were the infrastructures that the United States believed would be applicable as it was expanding into the Pacific. American audiences, white America in particular, but the American popular consciousness, were framing Filipinos as little brown brothers – as these exploitable bodies for labor in the Philippines, on Hawaiian plantations, in the fields of California and the canneries in Alaska.
This was happening during a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full swing. The Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan was also in full swing. … And then eventually by 1924, we have this full ban on immigrants from Asia – the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. But because Filipinos were technically U.S. nationals, they were exempt from that.
We see animosity and violence being kneaded out as a result of this growingly visible population of mostly Filipino men in the 1920s and ’30s. And that racial animus was what was making it – as Dorothy Fujita-Rony, who writes on Filipino-American workers in Seattle, identified – this time, the 1920s and ’30s, as a period of profound violence against Filipinos in the United States. And profound is the operative word there; this kind of almost unfathomable mode of receiving racialized hostility.
You have letters being written to Sunnyvale and San Jose, Santa Clara city governments saying, “Get rid of all Filipinos or we’ll burn this place down.” You have signs at hotels in Stockton saying, “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”
These were the kind of dynamics that were identifying the visible presence of Filipino men in particular, but Filipinos in general, as being a threat in some way, shape or form, to the identity, to the makeup, to the character of what was viewed to be American. We always see resistance and pushback to that. We see that in the insistence of Filipino Americans to assert their presence, and we see that in the realm of boxing as well.
And I argue this in the book – boxing offered an alternative means for Filipinos to view themselves and to see themselves outside of the prescriptions of the American cultural industry, the U.S. government, in the Philippines and in Hawaii … framing Filipinos as either these exploitable bodies for labor or these diminutive savages that were on display at human zoos in places like the St. Louis World’s Fair.
So boxing in many ways offered this narrative of possibility for Filipino fans, Filipino spectators of fighting. Whether or not they were fans, they understood that Pancho Villa was often this intervention, this alternative.
-
Pancho Villa: World Champion 1923 at Ballast Coffee in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
1 of 3
Pancho Villa: World Champion 1923 at Ballast Coffee in San Francisco, Calif., on Friday, April 10, 2026. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)
Q: What are the lessons that you want people to take away from this story?
A: That I think this story is much bigger than just the individual, and that this story is much bigger than just boxing. The first line of this book in the introductions says that this is not a boxing book. This is a history of resistance to the U.S. empire mediated through the cultural industry of boxing.
We have to also look at that in its broader context. That’s saying that Francisco, yes he is this exemplar, he becomes this model for folks; but the story doesn’t start or end with him. And just as we must be careful, I think about putting too much stake in heroes.
We have to remember that this is part of this larger collective negotiation with history, with identity and with the radical possibilities of being able to transform our present moment so that it can be iterated outward into future ancestors, future generations.
Bernard Remollino Profile
Position: Associate professor of Asian American and Pacific American History, San Joaquin Delta College
Education: City College of San Francisco, UC Berkeley, UCLA
Residence: San Francisco (Sunset District)
5 things to know about Bernard Remollino
1. He is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.
2. He is an avid motorcyclist.
3. He enjoys getting tattooed, and has a Bakunawa, or Filipino moon-eating dragon spirit, tattooed on his head.
4. He is formerly undocumented.
5. He is a National Trustee for the Filipino American National Historical Society and board member for the FANHS Museum in Stockton.
