As a young girl, Carmen remembers going to the War Memorial building with her father who was in the First Filipino Regiment of the US Army on many occasions and working/volunteering with Filipino American WWI and WWII veterans. She later worked at ASIAN, Inc. in the 1980’s and then began a long life of political activism, volunteering at various times for a number of political figures
Carmen sometimes worked in paid positions, but often as a volunteer in the hard grunt work of political and community life, helping raise funds, run campaigns. She is an officer of the Filipino American Democratic Club of San Francisco (FADC=SF) for 25 years, on the Board of Directors of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, elected for 5 terms as President of The Alvarado Project and 5-term Executive Director of the Filipino Bar Association of Northern California and a Delegate for the San Francisco Labor Council for 10 years.
Carmen is currently retired from the California Department of Justice in the Office of the Attorney General, working for Kamala Harris. She had her first sense of politics when Governor Pat Brown (Gov. Jerry Brown’s father) came to Kearny Street, San Francisco for a meet and greet with the Filipino community in the late 1950’s . Born in San Francisco, California, in 1954 and given the name of Carmencita Salvacion Monteclaro, she has never left and will never leave San Francisco.. She is married to Ron Choy and has two sons, Jesse (married to Eva Wong) and Rudy; three grandsons, Michael, Justin and Evan. She has three brothers, Steven (married to Victoria Aldana), Rudolph (Rudy), Al John (AJ) Monteclaro and one sister, Elizabeth Monteclaro.
Carmen attended public schools in San Francisco’s Chinatown and North Beach. Upon graduation from Galileo High School, she received a full scholarship to College of Cosmetology and went to City College full-time in the evenings. After purchasing our first house in the Sunset District, she worked at the San Francisco Police Department where she was taught how to read and identify fingerprints in the Bureau of Criminal Information, then became a Fingerprint Tech being mentored by the first Criminalist of the SFPD. At the same time, she continued going to night college full-time, taking Forensic Sciences for three more years but never graduated for maternity reasons.
manilatown.org 