Leader. Organizer. Father-figure. In the city of Lynwood, you’ll find him...

The Activist-Dentist

By Marisse G. Abelgas

A short, stocky Hispanic man gets up from the dentist’s chair, ambles hesitatingly from the hall to the reception area and sidles up to the counter where Dr. Carlos Manlapaz, D.D.M., is filling out a prescription for another patient.

“I can only give you $10 right now,” the man says, almost in a whisper.

Dr. Manlapaz looks up and smiles quizzically. “Why?” he asks. “What did you do with all the money you earned this month?”

“Oh, I sent it to my wife and children in Mexico,” the man answers shyly in heavily-accented English. “It’s really very hard. But I promise to pay you the rest next month. My word is good.”

“Of course it is. I trust you. It’s not a problem. You can pay me when you have enough,” Dr. Manlapaz says as he gently drapes an arm over the man’s shoulders and walks him to the door.

Heaving a sigh after the patient leaves, he finally tells his staff : “Not everything in life is about money.”

Dr. Carlos Manlapaz has lived by this philosophy for the most part of his life. It seems that every cause, every project, or every civic or professional group he has worked for (and there are plenty) has benefited from his philanthropic attitude that “man does not live by bread alone.”

In the the city of Lynwood, where he has practiced dentistry for the past 30 years -- and where he has just been appointed Planning Commissioner by Lynwood City Mayor Ricardo Sanchez -- the 66-year-old dentist is known and revered for his benevolence . An activist dentist, if you will, who has a reputation for never turning away patients because of their inability to pay.

“Sometimes, they ask me if they can do menial jobs for me in exchange for the dental service that I give them. So I give them a gallon of paint and ask them to paint the fence in front of the building. That’s probably the only fence that gets painted 10 times a year,” he laughs.

Members of the Filipino-American community know him well. A leader and fighter of causes from the time he set foot as a dentist in America, Dr. Manlapaz is credited with spearheading the group which fought long and hard for the successful passage of the Dental Bill allowing foreign dental graduates to take the California Dental Examinations without going back to school. It was a boon for the thousands of foreign dentists who, before the bill was enacted into law, could not take the examination for licensure without having to undergo years of study all over again. More than that, it opened the legal floodgates for foreign practitioners of other professions to seek the same equality regarding licensure.

Now a successful dental practitioner, Dr. Manlapaz recalls it wasn’t so easy back then, when, as a fledgling dentist in 1969 who had just graduated from the University of the East in the Philippines, he had come to America only to be told that he had to go back to school all over again before he could be allowed to even take the dental examination and get the license that would allow him to practice his profession in California.

Left without a choice, he enrolled at UCLA where, in 1971, he plunged head-on into the business of organizing fellow dental graduates from the Philippines into the Filipino Dental Society. Their goal: how to get a license without having to suffer through what they deemed to be a discriminatory policy of government. Their solution: go to the law-making body of the state and get a law passed that would end the discrimination. Although Dr. Manlapaz relates there were certain Filipinos who blocked their every move, his group nevertheless received support from then Congressman Willie Brown and Senator Milton Mark. Subsequently too, he was advised to organize dental graduates of other enthic origins and get them involved as well, in order to ensure the passage of the bill. To do this, Dr. Manlapaz and his original group of leaders which included John Bides, Juanito Cruz and Bibit Ocampo of San Francisco, decided they had to change the name of the Filipino Dental Society into the more encompassing California Association of Foreign Dentists. Like its predecessor organization, the group elected Dr. Manlapaz as its first president.

Eventually, Dr. Manlapaz says, the bill was signed into law by then Governor Ronald Reagan, but only after so much frustration, heartaches and political back-stabbing. It also set him back financially, having met expenses for the movement by dipping into his and his family’s coffers. It wasn’t a setback big enough to deter him from his goal of becoming a successful dentist, he hastens to add. With his family solidly behind him, he finally finished his Post Graduate Courses at UCLA in 1972 and was admitted to Dental Practice in the State of California that same year.

He set his sights on the city of Lynwood, where he was living at that time, for his dental practice. “In order to start a practice, you either start from scratch or you buy an existing one,” Dr. Manlapaz explains. He adds that he was lucky. He saw a building in Lynwood owned by a German immigrant, asked the owner if he could work for him, and was accepted. Two months later, he says, the owner died in a accident.

Still, his luck hadn’t run out. There was a medical clinic right next door where Dr. Manlapaz again found work for two years. “I had extensive experience as a surgery assistant. I was in the U.S. Army for two years, then I joined the Air Force for four years before practicing dentistry. I was trained as an operating specialist and because there were no interns in the Air Force, I became a surgery assistant.”

But again, in 1980, the owner passed away, and in the wake of the owner’s death, the building was donated to a foundation, leaving the young Manlapaz jobless once more.

Others would have found such a series of events unsettling. He didn’t. On the very same day he lost his job, he went out for a leisurely walk and chanced upon a building with a “For Rent” sign at the front. “The building used to house a grocery store, “he recalls, “and it needed a lot of renovation. But there was the option to buy, and I knew I could clean up the place and make it look presentable.” It would become his dental clinic for the next 30 years.

Looking back, he laughs heartily at how he tried to build a clientele base during those formative years of his private practice. “I figured that if I ran for public office in Lynwood, people would get to know me and I would have more clients. That didn’t work. I lost the election, and afterwards, people -- especially the Hispanics and African Americans -- would come up to me and say something like, ‘I don’t want you as my dentist anymore... you ran against my cousin during the election’. Now, when a client asks me if I still intend to go into politics, I always say, no, no, no. Please... tell all your relatives, I promise I will never run in an election again.”

Ironically, the dentist who turned his back on politics would never really be detached from it. The scion of Dr. Jose Carlos Manlapaz and Guadalupe Paredes of Bangued in the northern province of Abra in the Philippines, grandson of Senator Quintin Paredes and nephew of Justices Lourdes San Diego and Jose Ma. Paredes, Dr. Manlapaz would, time and again, find himself embroigled in political events and activities that would mark and characterize his life as a Filipino immigrant in America.

Years after former President Ferdinand Marcos had been deposed, after President Cory Aquino had stepped down and then President Fidel Ramos had assumed power, Dr. Manlapaz would fight “vehemently against the appointment of Tomas ‘Buddy’ Gomez as Philippine consul-general in Los Angeles. He did this, he says now, because Gomez had called Ilocanos “ignoramuses” and because he had witnessed first hand how Gomez had given an old lady the “dirty finger” while he was consul general in Honolulu, Hawaii. President Ramos eventually withdrew Gomez’ nomination.

He organized the coalition of pro-Marcos, pro-Aquino and pro-Ramos factions in California which opposed the “rush, shady and scandalous sale” of Philippine Airlines (PAL) to relatives of former President Cory Aquino. The coalition was eventually able to stop the “immediate resale of PAL.”

Dr. Manlapaz also created different committees to “rally against the mandatory collection of three years’ income tax as a pre-requisite to renew Philippine passports in Los Angeles.” He notes that Philippine Consulates in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. do not implement this policy.

When then Speaker of the House Jose de Venecia filed a bill for dual citizenship for Filipinos, Dr. Manlapaz was again at the forefront, believing that “natural-born Filipino citizens should not lose their Filipino citizenship if they obtain citizenship in another country.”

His ability to organize and mobilize people for causes he personally espoused has not gone unnoticed by the community, nor by the powers-that-be in the Philippines. In 1996, he was elected by members of the Filipino-American community to head the Philippine Independence Centennial Coordinating Council of Southern California (PICCCSC), and to lead the annual Philippine Independence Day celebration until the Philippines’ Centennial Anniversary last year. Again, digging deep into his personal coffers to defray costs of the events and activities (“There was no budget for those things,” he avers, “but I had to see it through.”), Manlapaz lived up to the community’s expectations of a true leader by breaking the attendance record for such events. On May 30, 1998, in celebration of the Philippines’s Centennial Independence Day, the controversial yet soft-spoken dentist led his countrymen and other Americans along the streets of Downtown Los Angeles all the way to Echo Park, in what has been billed as Southern California’s biggest Filipino parade and exposition.

His involvement in U.S. mainstream politics led to his selection as the first Filipino delegate to the Republican Convention in Dallas, Texas in 1984 during the Reagan-Bush campaign, his election as Chairman of the Filipino-American Republican Council of California (which he co-founded) in 1990, and Chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Los Angeles Dental Society in 1981. He co-founded the “Brown for Brown Movement,” a statewide grassroots organization which was largely credited for getting Jerry Brown re-elected as Governor of California.

His current involvement in community affairs includes the national chairmanship of the Ilocano National Association, USA and Chairmanship of the Board of the Federation of California Dentists. He is also the treasurer of the Lynwood Chamber of Commerce and has held the presidency of several professional and civic organizations based in California.

Recently, when longtime friend Joseph Estrada became a candidate for the highest office of the Philippines, Dr. Manlapaz gave his unconditional support during the campaign, acting as political campaign strategist in the U.S. West Coast. After winning the election, President Estrada appointed the Lynwood-based dentist as his chief coordinator for JEEP-West Coast, USA (Justice, Economy, Environment and Peace), which had evolved from a campaign organization into a consultative body to help the new president in the implementation of his administration’s platform.

Dr. Manlapaz smiles as he recalls a conversation he had with the newly-elected president immediately after the elections. “ He asked me what I wanted in exchange for helping him win. I told him, ‘you know, if you give me a job in the Philippines, I would probabaly earn, say P50,000. That’s just a little over a thousand dollars. I make much much more than that as a dentist in America.’ So I said to him, ‘no, I don’t want anything from you. All I ask as a friend, is that whenever I call you, day or night, you will take my call, or return my call if you’re busy, and you won’t hide from me because you know I’m not calling to ask you for anything.”

Dr. Manlapaz says his friend --the new president -- was silent for a few moments. “Then he smiled and hugged me. He said, ‘I wish all Filipinos were like you.’”

A few days before being interviewed for this article, Dr. Manlapaz received his appointment as Planning Commissioner of the city of Lynwood. Asked what his job and responsibilities would be as Planning Commissioner of a city where only three percent of the population are Filipinos, he rattles off a long list of duties that includes overseeing and “approving all structures, extensions, buildings in the city.” Typically, the man is undaunted by the seeming magnitude of the job. His wife Perla, who is his office manager, and daughter Cathy who is his dental assistant and girl friday, are equally elated yet composed about the appointment, perhaps because they have witnessesed -- more than once -- how their “boss” can get things done.

So, is he still shunning local politics in favor of dentistry at this point? Dr. Manlapaz shifts his gaze from his wife, to his daughter, to his 11-year-old son who has been patiently waiting for his father to end the interview. Then he grins broadly.

Almost inaudibly, he finally says, “We’ll see. We’ll see.”