Every organization has an official history: the dates, the names, the milestones recorded in minutes and newsletters and annual reports. But the real history of the Philippine American Bar Association lives somewhere else. It lives in the stories of the lawyers who showed up to the first meetings, who argued over bylaws in borrowed conference rooms, who wrote personal checks when the treasury ran dry, and who kept this organization alive through the difficult years because they believed in what it stood for.

As PABA marks its 50th anniversary, we are committed to capturing those stories before they are lost.

The PABA Oral History Project is a series of long-form interviews with the people who built this organization. Each piece is a conversation with one of PABA’s consequential leaders, edited for readability but written to preserve the subject’s voice and personality.

The series will grow throughout PABA’s anniversary year and beyond. We invite you to read, to share, and to reach out if you have a story of your own that deserves to be told.

Arnold Pamplona interviews retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mel Red Recaña for the PABA Oral History Project in the courtroom of Judge Julian C. Recaña, Los Angeles Superior Court, March 24, 2026.

Interview No. 1

Mel Avanzado
Founding President and CEO, PABA Foundation
Former Member, PABA Board of Governors

If you ask anyone who has been involved with PABA over the past few decades, Mel Avanzado’s name will come up quickly, and usually with a smile. A longtime member of PABA’s Board of Governors, Mel was one of the key figures who formalized the organization’s governance structure in its early years, and the driving force behind the creation of the PABA Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Filipino American law students. He is also an accomplished trial attorney, the founder and principal of The Avanzado Law Firm, APLC, and a consistent voice for increasing Filipino and Asian American representation on the California bench.

In this conversation, Mel talks about his early years with PABA, the founding of the PABA Foundation, the time he testified before the California Commission on Judicial Appointments on behalf of then-Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, and what he hopes the next fifty years hold for the organization he helped build.

Interview conducted March 15, 2026, in Arcadia, California.

Read the full interview

Interview No. 2

The Honorable Mel Red Recaña
Retired Judge, Los Angeles Superior Court
Lifetime Achievement Honoree, PABA

When Mel Red Recaña arrived in the United States in 1968, he was working a rate clerk’s job at the Southern Pacific Railroad and had no particular plan to practice law here. Then a chance meeting at a friend’s house changed everything. He learned that a Philippine-trained lawyer could petition the California State Bar to sit for the bar exam, found an obscure 1920 Philippine Supreme Court case to support the argument, and made history. He became the first Filipino American deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County, and on June 13, 1981, was sworn in by Governor Jerry Brown before more than a thousand people at MacArthur Park as the first Filipino American judge in the United States.

What followed was a career that kept making history. He engineered a change to California law just so he could attend Harvard. He became Presiding Judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. He presided over the nationally watched Kevin Spacey case. And in 2015, he swore in his own son Julian as a Superior Court judge, appointed by the same Governor Jerry Brown who had sworn Red in 34 years earlier.

In this conversation, Judge Recaña talks about the accident, the meeting, and the argument that started it all — and what he hopes the next generation of Filipino American lawyers will do with the doors he helped open.

Interview conducted March 24, 2026, in the courtroom of Judge Julian C. Recaña, Los Angeles Superior Court.

Read the full interview