Many students of Filipino ancestry attend Waipahu High but Lao's experience illustrates the difference between those more enmeshed in Island traditions and those adhering to ethnic customs.

The variations within the Filipino-American community here were celebrated yesterday in the first Filipino-American Festival, an event that attempted to bring together the different strands.

And as the community moves toward next year's centennial of Filipino immigration, many of its members will be reflecting on how plantation-era history and the persistence of ethnic ties have shaped them.

Lao's acculturation is not uncommon among the Islands' myriad immigrant groups.

Lani Aglia, left, made outfits for the Larawan Youth Ensemble in Kalihi on Thursday in preparation for the Filipino-American Festival. Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser

Filipinos are by far the largest group of immigrants admitted as permanent residents each year. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, 3,050 Filipinos were among the total of 4,907 immigrants admitted here.

As a result, about two-thirds of Hawai'i's Filipino population consists of first-generation immigrants, said Dean Alegado and so the culture of origin is never far away.

"In between you have a lot of folks who came in very young, and who are kind of bicultural," said Alegado, chairman of the University of Hawai'i-Manoa ethnic studies department and is working on a book about the Islands' Filipino community. "Even the second-generation folks now are beginning to relate more with what's going on in the Philippines."

Still, many Hawai'i-born Filipinos say that the impulse to blend into the landscape can mean that your own culture sinks beneath the surface. That's not always a bad thing, said Richard Borromeo, 34.

While growing up in Mililani, Borromeo went to school in the quintessential Hawaiian ethnic chop-suey. At home he spoke Ilocano, but in his friends' homes he'd sample their cultures.

"You're localized because of assimilating with everyone," he said. "Later, you have this identity crisis, so then you go back and discover who you are."

Borromeo turned and looked around the Kalihi studio of the Larawan Youth Ensemble, where his children joined others in rehearsing for a concert held last night at the Hawai'i Theatre. Many of them are enrolled in part to head off that same identity crisis, said their teacher, ensemble founder Leo Gozar.

"The plantation workers came, they had bad experiences, they'd never speak Ilocano in school," said Gozar, who first came to Hawai'i in 1976 as part of the famous Bayanihan Dance Company. "They became 'haolefied,' but inside them they are wanting. Their children now have children.

"One of the parents told me she's so excited to have their kids learn the dance because they didn't have the chance growing up."

Robin Campaniano, president of the insurance firm AIG Hawai'i, said his half-Filipino, half-Japanese ancestry left him somewhat on the fence ethnically when he went to school. And, he acknowledged, the disadvantaged status of the original immigrants left some Filipino youths feeling stigmatized by their ethnicity.

"I don't think I ever looked at the Filipino side until I was in my late 20s," he said. "I was on an official trip to the Philippines with Gov. (George) Ariyoshi — it was a really good introduction to Filipino culture.

"It was an eye-opening trip for many of us. Some people said, 'I always tried to hide the fact that I was Filipino, pretended I was Spanish ... this is kind of cool, we're kind of out about it.' "

Isle singer Marlene Baldueza said she felt a clearer cultural identity, owing to her parents' involvement with Filipino associations. However, when she visited the large Filipino community in San Francisco, she admired the more overt "Asian pride" the teens there expressed.

"Because of the local culture there are so many mixes here you don't see anyone's nationalities anymore," she said.

State Rep. Michael Magoay, elected by the North Shore community where he was born, remembered the tension between the colorful Filipino demeanor and laid-back local culture.

"Once you go visit the Philippines, you see the culture is very rich," Magoay said. "Locals are more reserved; they say, 'Eh, no make 'A.' But once you go out of your element and find out where they're coming from, you understand why you're a Filipino."

Magoay said some immigrant students he meets on school visits abandon their language a year after their arrival in the rush to fit in.

"They tell me they're 'shame,' and I say, 'Why are you shame?' " he said. "Those barriers are just within your mind."

Barriers are likely to come down through the mounting size and influence of the community, if nothing else, Alegado said.

"I think there's more acceptance of being bicultural," he said. "And as long as the first generation continues to be the majority, they set the agenda."