There is something fitting about bringing the story of the early Filipino boxers back to San Francisco, where so much of that history was made more than a century ago.
Young Filipino fighters began appearing in the city’s boxing clubs, gymnasiums and arenas. Many arrived anonymously. Only a few would become world champions. They fought at places whose names belong to another San Francisco now—Dreamland Rink, National Hall, the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and, later, Newman’s Gym. They crossed the Pacific carrying their ability, courage and ambition, and in the prize ring helped establish a Filipino boxing tradition that would eventually be recognized around the world.
Today, many of them have returned to San Francisco in tangible form.
Little Brown Dolls No More: The Rise of Filipino Boxers in the Squared Circle, presented by the Filipino American Center at the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin Street), Friends of the SFPL and the SFPL Exhibits Team, and co-curated with the Philippine Boxing Historical Society and Hall of Fame, brings together historic photographs, original paintings, rare books, magazines, boxing gloves, vintage equipment and artifacts to tell the story of the fighters who helped establish the Philippines as one of boxing’s great nations.
The exhibition is housed at the Filipino American Center on the Third Floor of the San Francisco Public Library Main Library—a particularly meaningful home for a story connecting the Philippines, Filipino America and San Francisco.
The exhibition represents years of collecting, research and preservation. But this is not simply a private collection placed inside a library. It is a shared exhibition, shaped through collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library and made accessible to anyone who walks through its doors.
The title Little Brown Dolls No More reaches back to an expression once used by American sportswriters to describe Filipino boxers. The words could sound affectionate on the surface, but they also reflected the patronizing language of another time.
The fighters eventually supplied their own answer.
They fought.
Long before Manny Pacquiao became an international superstar, Filipino boxers were crossing the Pacific and establishing reputations in American rings. San Francisco became one of the important places where that remarkable story unfolded.
Eustaquio “Eddie” Duarte fought at San Francisco’s Dreamland Rink in 1910. Macario Villon and other pioneers followed. By the 1920s, Filipino fighters were becoming contenders in American boxing, with men such as Pete Sarmiento and Pablo Dano carrying the reputation of Philippine fighters into arenas throughout California and across the country.
Then came Francisco Guilledo—the diminutive fighter the world remembers as Pancho Villa.
In 1923, Villa defeated Jimmy Wilde to become world flyweight champion, the first Filipino and Asian world boxing champion. His story would also become permanently connected to Northern California. His final fight took place at Oaks Ball Park in Emeryville on July 4, 1925. He died ten days later at only 23 years old.
Small Montana, Little Dado, Ceferino Garcia and others continued the championship tradition. Decades later came Gabriel “Flash” Elorde, Luisito “Earthquake” Espinosa and ultimately Manny Pacquiao. Yet the exhibition deliberately turns the clock backward, toward the men who helped create the foundation.
Years of research have gone into recovering the stories of the Filipino fighters who helped shape those formative years. Some became world champions. Others were contenders, pioneers and journeymen whose names gradually faded from memory. Throughout the exhibition, their faces and stories emerge through photographs, paintings, periodicals, books and artifacts—each offering another glimpse into the remarkable generation that established the Filipino presence in the prize ring.
Their collective story provides the historical backbone of the exhibition.
Around them are the things that make their world tangible.
Among the most striking pieces are works by renowned painter of champions Rodolfo “Jun” Aquino, better known as “The Artist With a Punch,” and Brian Bonbon of Inksider Tattoo Studio in Lapu-Lapu City.
Their work restores color, personality and presence to fighters we often know only through faded photographs and old newspaper pages. The paintings stand alongside the historical images, each offering another way of seeing the men behind the records.
A dedicated case showcases the tools of their trade.
Historic boxing gloves and vintage equipment bring us even closer. These were not created as museum pieces. Gloves were laced onto hands. Headgear absorbed punches. Training equipment belonged to working gyms and working fighters. Today they survive as reminders of the physical world these boxers inhabited and of how much the sport has changed over the past century.
One of the smallest objects in the exhibition may also be one of the easiest to miss—and one of the most fascinating. Amid the larger paintings, photographs, gloves and equipment, the mouthpiece is a modest object. Look for it. It is a must-see—a small piece of equipment made for one of the biggest fights boxing has ever staged.
Among the oldest treasures are original volumes of Pierce Egan’s Boxiana and Sporting Anecdotes, the great chronicles of the English prize ring published more than two centuries ago. Egan recorded the fighters, personalities, language and culture of bare-knuckle boxing long before the modern gloved era. To see those books alongside the gloves, photographs, paintings and equipment of Filipino fighters is to see different generations of boxing history gathered in one place.
The magazines and periodicals are veritable timestamps of a bygone era, when print was king. Before television, the internet and social media, it was newspapers and sporting publications that carried these fighters into homes, barber shops, gyms and neighborhoods.
Their names once filled the sports pages, and their photographs gave readers a face to remember, even if they never had the chance to see them fight. Today, these aging pages do more than document boxing history. They bring us back to a time when the printed word and a single photograph could turn a fighter into a familiar name—and preserve his story for generations to come.
And San Francisco itself is part of that story.
The city was never merely a backdrop. Filipino fighters trained here, fought here and became part of its sporting life. Dreamland, Civic Auditorium, the Olympic Club and Newman’s Gym are part of that history because of the fighters, trainers, managers, writers, photographers and fans who passed through them.
That connection continued into the modern era. Luisito “Earthquake” Espinosa became closely associated with the Bay Area, and in 2001 Manny Pacquiao fought Agapito Sanchez at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, linking a new generation of Philippine boxing with a city where Filipino fighters had already been throwing punches for nearly a century.
Remembering.
History has a way of reducing fighters to numbers—victories, defeats, draws, knockouts and championships. The objects in this exhibition help us see beyond the record. A photograph gives us a face. A painting gives us another interpretation of that face. An old pair of gloves brings us closer to the ring. A magazine shows us how a fighter was seen in his own time. And books written two centuries ago remind us that these men became part of a boxing tradition much older than themselves.
Together, they tell a story that no single object could tell alone.
That is what makes the partnership behind Little Brown Dolls No More so meaningful. Years were spent finding and preserving these pieces and, just as importantly, the stories attached to them. SFPL has provided the public space where that history can now be encountered, studied and enjoyed by everyone.
And there could hardly be a more fitting place than the Filipino American Center.
Perhaps a longtime boxing fan will recognize a forgotten fighter, a Filipino American family will discover a name they have never heard before, someone who knows little about boxing will first be drawn to a painting, an old pair of gloves, Pacquiao’s mouthpiece or a two-hundred-year-old volume of Boxiana and then become curious about the people and history surrounding it. That curiosity is part of what we hope for.
More than a century after Filipino fighters first stepped into San Francisco rings, a piece of their history has come home—their photographs, paintings, gloves, books and equipment, each carrying a story that deserves to be remembered.
Mabuhay at Salamat! 🇵🇭🥊
Exhibition Information
- Little Brown Dolls No More: The Rise of Filipino Boxers in the Squared Circle remains on exhibition at the Filipino American Center, Third Floor, San Francisco Public Library Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, through January 14, 2027.