Cayetano, who would become the first Filipino-American governor in the United States, was born and raised in Kalihi.

His mother Eleanor's family, originally from Cebu in the Philippines, had been in Hawai'i for two generations. His father, Bonifacio, had arrived in 1928, a 16-year-old from impoverished Pangasinan who had taken the place (and name) of a cousin who had contracted to come to Hawai'i but changed his mind.

Cayetano's parents split when he was 6 years old, leaving him and his younger brother, Kenneth, in the care of his father.

Even as a child, Cayetano had recognized the patronizing, condescending way the people at the neighborhood grocery store would speak to his father.

"My dad was a very kind, gentle man," Cayetano says. "He would just take it. He only had a third-grade education and I think he felt that's just how it was. Like a lot of his generation, he took things in stride because he felt that just being here was an improvement."

Cayetano knew about the long hours his father worked at white-owned hotels to provide for the family. He also knew that the racial and class divisions that limited his family's opportunities were more complex than white and brown. He'd seen, for example, the job and housing ads in the local papers that read "Chinese only" or "Japanese only."

At Farrington High School, Caye-tano mixed easily with his Japanese and Chinese classmates, but the "real world," as he came to understand it, was different. Married at 18 and a father by 19, he worked a series of low-level jobs, looking for an opportunity to improve his life. The final straw came when he was passed over for a promotion at a state job — a job that would eventually go to a 19-year-old with no experience.

Forget Hawai'i. He'd seen enough.

"When I left Hawai'i for Los Angeles, I told my first wife that we were not going to come back to this place," Cayetano recalls.

But in 1963, California, like the rest of the nation, had racial issues of its own that were soon to ignite.

Cayetano attended junior college to make up for an education that had fallen off the tracks during his last two years of high school. In 1966, he transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1971, he entered Loyola University School of Law. Of the 600 students in his Farrington High School class of 1958, Cayetano would be the only one to work as an attorney.

Cayetano returned to Hawai'i after graduation and found the political tides had changed considerably. John Burns, the progressive Hawai'i governor who would become Cayetano's political mentor, was looking to engage communities that were underrepresented in government. In particular, he wanted young Filipinos to be more politically active.

In 1972, Burns appointed Cayetano to the Hawaii Housing Authority.

"I did it because I thought it would help me network," Cayetano says. "But as a commissioner, I went to a lot of hearings and I saw these (legislators) and I felt, 'I could do this.' They were extraordinary, but at the same time, they were also very ordinary."

At the urging of local union representatives, Cayetano decided to run for the state Legislature.

He and his family were living in Pearl City, and advisers suggested that he run in an area with a larger Filipino population. But Cayetano, a Democrat, was determined to win over the place he considered home and, in the process, a neighborhood population that was 60 percent Japanese-American. He and his first wife, Lorraine, walked the neighborhood, talking to everyone they could.

Cayetano won that election and spent two terms in the House of Representatives, and two in the state Senate, where he served as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Majority Policy Committee.

"When I ran and won, it was a breakthrough," he said. "For a Filipino to win, back then, we had to reach outside, because a lot of Filipino voters don't vote — either because they're too busy working two or three jobs, or because they're indifferent because of the way the system is in the Philippines."

In 1986, Cayetano ran with gubernatorial candidate John Waihee and was elected the first Filipino-American lieutenant governor in the U.S. Eight years later, he became the country's first Filipino-American governor. He was re-elected in 1998 in a come-from-behind victory over the Republican candidate, Linda Lingle.

"I never played up my ethnicity like some others, because I felt it would make race an issue and that would offend people," he said. "My strategy was to get support from various ethnicities. I'm Filipino in terms of race and ethnicity, and I feel an affection for my dad's roots, but I grew up here and I'm probably more 'local' than Filipino."

The distinction is significant for the inclusiveness that Caye-tano sought in his political career.

"I wanted people to feel that it was the duty of public office to be of service to everyone," he says.

"When you set aside the issue of ethnicity, everybody is for the same things: better education, reducing crime, taking care of the environment."

Cayetano says he's confident the progress he and his generation of Filipino-Americans have made — progress made possible by immigrant Filipinos who came to Hawai'i desperate for a better life — will continue.