The 1920 Marriage of Florincio Loriozo & Benita Ocho:
Persecution and Resilience in the Plantation Era
In July 1920, a photo of Florincio Loriozo and Benita Ocho appeared on the front page of The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, the Honolulu newspaper owned by missionary descendent Lorrin A. Thurston, a prominent businessman and politician who also was author of the Bayonet Constitution and mastermind of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Under the headline “Police Hold Man Masquerading As Woman, Also Male Companion” the article said that there was a report to the police that “something was wrong” following the couple’s courtroom marriage and that they were arrested in the shack where they were living back of the Aiea canefields.
Noting that Ocho, “in a gingham gown, wearing high heeled slippers and with long curly hair,” had been living as a woman for years, the article also said that “an investigation by police revealed both to be men.” While not formally charged with a crime, Ocho was “given a haircut and man’s clothes” and the couple was deported to The Philippines.
That sad chapter easily could have been the end of the story.
But ship records show that Loriozo and Ocho returned to Honolulu from Manila just a few months later, and that they were listed as the parents of a 1 year-old girl named Maria accompanying them on the voyage.
We don’t have any further information about where they resided or what their lives might have been like once they resettled in Hawaiʻi, but this couple shines brightly as unsung heroes who bravely lived life on their own terms at a time when it was dangerous to defy mainstream social norms, and decades ahead of the celebrated marriage equality movement that emerged in the islands in the early 1990s.
Story by Joe Wilson, with additional research by Cindy Texeira.
