On a Sunday morning in southeast Los Angeles County, the parking lot of Seafood City on Norwalk Boulevard fills with families carrying out boxes of pandesal and bags of frozen lumpia, the smell of fried garlic rice drifting from the food court. For tens of thousands of people, this is where the week resets. The Filipinos in Cerritos, California built one of the most prosperous Filipino American communities in the country, and they did it quietly, one nursing shift and one paid-off mortgage at a time.
The Place
Cerritos sits on the southeast edge of Los Angeles County, a planned, low-rise grid of cul-de-sacs and manicured medians a short drive from the 605 and 91 freeways. It was incorporated in 1956 as Dairy Valley, a town of dairy farms, and did not take the name Cerritos until 1967, just as the cows gave way to tract homes.
Between 1970 and 1972 it was the fastest-growing city in California, its population leaping from a few thousand to more than 40,000 in five years. The California State Board of Equalization once ranked its residents the second-highest retail spenders in the state, behind only Beverly Hills.
Today Cerritos is roughly 62 per cent Asian, one of the most heavily Asian cities in Southern California, according to census figures for the city. Filipinos are its single largest ancestry group within that population.
How It Became Filipino
The professionals who arrived after 1965
The story of Filipinos in Cerritos begins with a law passed two thousand miles away. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had throttled Asian immigration for decades, and it opened a preference category for skilled professionals.
The Philippines had a surplus of exactly the people America suddenly wanted: nurses trained in an American-modelled system, physicians, engineers, accountants, all of them fluent in English. They came on professional visas, not as labourers, and they came with credentials that translated directly into Southern California salaries.
This matters because it shaped where they settled. Filipino immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s were not, by and large, looking for an ethnic enclave to shelter in. They were looking for good schools, safe streets and a house with a lawn. Cerritos, building those streets and that lawn at exactly that moment, was made for them.
Buying into a brand-new town
The timing was almost perfect. As Filipino professionals were arriving in the Los Angeles basin through the late 1960s and 1970s, Cerritos was throwing up thousands of new homes on former dairy land. There was no established old-money order to push newcomers out, no decades-old neighbourhood map dictating who belonged where.
A nurse and an engineer pooling two professional incomes could qualify for a new four-bedroom house here as readily as anyone. Filipino families bought, and then they did what immigrant families do: they told their relatives. A cousin sponsored a sibling, a sister sponsored a parent, a colleague mentioned a listing on the same street.
This is chain migration in its most ordinary form, not driven by famine or war but by word of mouth among people who already trusted each other. Street by street, the Filipino share of Cerritos grew.
The schools that sealed it
If one institution explains why Filipino families came to Cerritos and never left, it is the ABC Unified School District. The initials stand for Artesia, Bloomfield and Carmenita, three small districts unified in 1965, and the district became known statewide for its academic results.
Its crown is Whitney High School in Cerritos, a public magnet that U.S. News & World Report has ranked among the very top high schools in California and the nation. Its student body is overwhelmingly Asian, and Filipino students make up a substantial share. Cerritos High School, the comprehensive neighbourhood school, counts a large Pacific Islander and Filipino population among its students.
For a generation raised to see education as the family’s surest investment, a town with schools like these was not a luxury. It was the entire point. Parents who could afford to live anywhere in the county chose the district first and the house second.
From households to a community
By the 1980s and 1990s, the scattered households had become a community with its own gravity. Filipino families anchored their lives in Catholic parishes, where the Christmas novena of Simbang Gabi, the nine dawn Masses leading to Christmas, filled the pews from 16 December.
The neighbouring city of Artesia developed a dense strip of Asian businesses, and Cerritos itself drew the supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants that turned a place to live into a place to belong. The arrival of a Seafood City supermarket, the largest Filipino grocery chain in North America, gave the community a commercial heart it could drive to in ten minutes.
The second generation grew up bilingual at home and fluent in college admissions, and many of them, having left for university, came back to raise their own children in the same district their parents had chosen.
Filipino professional and civic life took organised form too. Healthcare remained the backbone, with Cerritos families staffing hospitals and clinics across the southeast county, and the rise of Filipino business associations gave shopkeepers, accountants and realtors a network of their own. By the time the Coalition of Filipino American Chambers of Commerce planted its headquarters in Cerritos, the community had moved from arrival to influence, no longer guests in a new suburb but among its founding citizens.
The Landmarks
Seafood City Supermarket, 17202 Norwalk Boulevard. The Filipino anchor of Cerritos and a Sunday ritual for thousands of families. Inside the centre you find a Red Ribbon bakeshop and a Chow King; a Jollibee, the Filipino fast-food icon, sits in the surrounding plaza. It is grocery store, food court and meeting place in one.
Goldilocks, near Los Cerritos Center. The Filipino bakery institution, famous for ube cakes, polvoron and the boxes of pastries that travel to every birthday and despedida. Its trays of mamon and ensaymada are a fixture at Cerritos celebrations.
St. Linus Catholic Church, 13915 Shoemaker Avenue, Norwalk. Just over the city line, this parish has long served Filipino families from Cerritos and Norwalk, and it celebrates Simbang Gabi each December. For many households the dawn Masses are the truest marker that Christmas has begun.
Whitney High School, Cerritos. The public magnet that draws families from across the region and beyond, repeatedly ranked among the best high schools in California. Its overwhelmingly Asian student body, with a strong Filipino contingent, makes it a point of pride and a reason families put down roots.
Los Cerritos Center, 239 Los Cerritos Center. The regional shopping mall at the city’s commercial core, one of the largest employers in town. For decades it has been the default weekend destination for Cerritos families, Filipino and otherwise, a neutral ground where the whole multi-ethnic city mixes.
Cerritos Library, 18025 Bloomfield Avenue. The city’s striking, futuristic public library, a civic landmark that signalled how seriously Cerritos took its own ambitions. It is the kind of public investment that drew education-minded families and kept them.
Coalition of Filipino American Chambers of Commerce, 18000 Studebaker Road, Suite 700. The headquarters of a regional coalition of Filipino American business chambers is based in Cerritos, and the locally founded Filipino American Chamber of Commerce of Cerritos, established in 2020, works to support Filipino-owned small businesses. Together they reflect how far the community has moved from immigrant arrival to economic establishment.
Where They Came From
The Filipinos who built Cerritos came disproportionately from the professional and urban Philippines: nurses and doctors trained in Manila and the larger provincial cities, engineers and accountants with degrees and English fluency that the post-1965 visa system rewarded.
They were not, for the most part, the farm-labour migration of the early twentieth century that built Filipino communities in places like National City and Stockton. They were a later, more credentialed wave, the same one that filled hospitals across Southern California with Filipino nurses.
That origin shaped the community’s character. A migration of professionals produced a community that valued schooling above almost everything, that bought rather than rented, and that spread out into a quiet suburb instead of clustering in a single downtown district.
Cerritos Today
Cerritos remains one of the most affluent and most Asian cities in Los Angeles County, and the Filipino community is woven through every part of it. It is not a Filipinotown in the way that Historic Filipinotown in Los Angeles is, with a defined district and a public identity. It is something quieter and, in its own way, more complete: a place where Filipino families simply are the establishment.
The city’s Filipinos share Cerritos with substantial Korean and Chinese communities, each with its own businesses and institutions, in a rare American suburb where no white majority sets the terms. That coexistence is part of what makes the place work.
The challenges are the ordinary ones of success. Home prices have climbed beyond the reach of many young Filipino professionals, who increasingly settle in newer suburbs further out, much as families did a generation ago in places like West Covina. The second and third generations are more American than their grandparents could have imagined. But the bakeries are still busy, the dawn Masses still fill in December, and the schools are still the reason people come.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there a lot of Filipinos in Cerritos, California?
Yes. Cerritos is roughly 62 per cent Asian, and Filipinos are the single largest ancestry group within that Asian population, ahead of Korean and Chinese residents. The Filipinos in Cerritos, California form one of the most established Filipino American communities in the country.
Why did Filipinos settle in Cerritos?
Filipino professionals who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform, many of them nurses, doctors and engineers, were drawn to Cerritos as it built thousands of new homes in a brand-new town with no entrenched old order. Excellent schools and chain migration among relatives did the rest.
What schools make Cerritos attractive to Filipino families?
The ABC Unified School District is the main draw. Whitney High School, a public magnet in Cerritos, is consistently ranked among the top high schools in California, and Filipino students make up a large share of its enrolment.
Where can I find Filipino food and groceries in Cerritos?
Seafood City Supermarket at 17202 Norwalk Boulevard is the main Filipino grocery anchor, with a Red Ribbon, a Chow King and a nearby Jollibee. Goldilocks bakery, near Los Cerritos Center, is the go-to for ube cakes and Filipino pastries.
How do Filipinos in Cerritos compare to other Filipino communities in California?
Cerritos represents the affluent, professional, suburban end of the Filipino American experience, distinct from older working-class enclaves. The Filipinos in Cerritos, California built a community defined by homeownership, schooling and quiet prosperity rather than a single visible downtown.
Is Cerritos a Filipino town like Historic Filipinotown?
Not quite. Cerritos has no formally designated Filipino district. Instead, Filipino families are spread across the whole city and are part of its civic and economic establishment, sharing the suburb with large Korean and Chinese communities.
If your family’s story passed through Cerritos, or any of the places Filipinos have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a nursing degree in Manila to a four-bedroom house off Bloomfield Avenue, to wherever you are now.