Positively No Filipinos Allowed

Essays challenging conventional narratives of Filipino American history and culture.

The first Filipino settlers arrived in Stockton, California, around 1898, and through most of the 20th century, this city was home to the largest community of Filipinos outside the Philippines. Because countless Filipinos worked in, passed through, and settled here, it became the crossroads of Filipino America. Yet immigrants were greeted with signs that read "Positively No Filipinos Allowed" and were segregated to a four-block area centered on Lafayette and El Dorado Streets, which they called "Little Manila." In the 1970s, redevelopment and the Crosstown Freeway decimated the Little Manila neighborhood. Despite these barriers, Filipino Americans have created a vibrant ethnic community and a rich cultural legacy. Filipino immigrants and their descendants have shaped the history, culture, and economy of the San Joaquin Delta area.

Filipino Americans, who experience life in the United States as immigrants, colonized nationals, and racial minorities, have been little studied, though they are one of our largest immigrant groups. Based on her in-depth interviews with more than one hundred Filipinos in San Diego, California, Yen Le Espiritu investigates how Filipino women and men are transformed through the experience of migration, and how they in turn remake the social world around them. Her sensitive analysis reveals that Filipino Americans confront U.S. domestic racism and global power structures by living transnational lives that are shaped as much by literal and symbolic ties to the Philippines as they are by social, economic, and political realities in the United States. Espiritu deftly weaves vivid first-person narratives with larger social and historical contexts as she discovers the meaning of home, community, gender, and intergenerational relations among Filipinos. Among other topics, she explores the ways that female sexuality is defined in contradistinction to American mores and shows how this process becomes a way of opposing racial subjugation in this country. She also examines how Filipinos have integrated themselves into the American workplace and looks closely at the effects of colonialism.

Examines the history of Philippine immigration to the United States, discussing why they came, what they did when they got here, where they settled, and customs they brought with them.

There are over 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, where the legacies of Western colonialism continue to exist and propagate the message that anything Filipino is inferior to anything American or Western. Thus, many Filipinos dream of immigrating to various Western countries, mostly to the United States. Today, Filipinos have the second highest yearly immigration rate into the United States and compose the second largest immigrant group in the country. Also, Filipinos in America number over 3 million, making them the second largest Asian American ethnic group in the country. Not surprisingly, there has been increased attention on the experiences of Filipinos and Filipino Americans as minorities and immigrants, as well as toward better understanding their identity, cultural values, and mental health.However, given the conditions of postcolonial Philippines and the contemporary experiences of oppression by Filipinos in America, one cannot completely and accurately understand the minority, immigrant, and psychological experiences of this group outside the context of colonialism and contemporary oppression. Thus, this text focuses on the psychological effects of historical colonialism and contemporary oppression among Filipinos and Filipino Americans. It takes the reader from indigenous Tao culture, Spanish and American colonialism, colonial mentality or internalized oppression along with its implications on Kapwa, identity, and mental health, to decolonization in the clinical, community, and research settings.This book is a multidisciplinary and empirical approach to Filipino and Filipino American psychology. It is intended for the entire community, teachers, researchers, students, and service providers interested in or who are working with Filipinos and Filipino Americans, or those who are interested in the psychological consequences of colonialism and oppression. This book may serve as a tool for remembering the past and as a tool for awakening to address the present.

In Choreographing in Color , J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop's regulation, the "euphemism," as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism - the zombie, hero, robot, and judge - constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power. Choreographing in Color therefore reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible.

"In this highly original and inspired book, Espiritu bursts the binaries and shows us how the tensions of race, gender, nation, and colonial legacies situate contemporary transnationalism. Conceptually rich and empirically grounded, Home Bound blurs the borders of sociology and cultural studies like no other book I know. Kudos to Espiritu for this boundary-breaking tour de force!"—Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica: Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence "A singular achievement. Not only does it cast light on the deep historical entanglements of immigration and imperialism, citizenship and race, and gender and subjectivity in the United States, but by highlighting the varied voices of Filipino Americans, it also calls attention to their creative potential to make a home under some of the most inhospitable conditions. Theoretically rich, empirically grounded, and lucidly written, this book marks a major advance in our attempts to understand the 'specter of migration' haunting the world today."—Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History "Home Bound combines excellent ethnography of the Filipino experience in the U.S. with a brilliant and devastating critique of traditional scholarship on immigration. Espiritu's analysis of how the vectors of identity articulate with one another is particularly cutting-edge."—Sarah J. Mahler, author of American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins "Using a critical transnational, feminist, and historical perspective, Espiritu insightfully and sensitively analyzes the meaning of home, community, friendship, love, and family for Filipino Americans. In the process, she unveils what these immigrants can tell us about gender, race, politics, economics, and culture in the United States today."—Diane L. Wolf, author of Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java "Espiritu makes an outstanding contribution to our appreciation of the dynamics of immigrant cultures within the political economy of transnationalism."—Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

The Philippines became Canada's largest source of short- and long-term migrants in 2010, surpassing China and India, both of which are more than ten times larger. The fourth-largest racialized minority group in the country, the Filipino community is frequently understood by such figures as the victimized nanny, the selfless nurse, and the gangster youth. On one hand, these narratives concentrate attention, in narrow and stereotypical ways, on critical issues. On the other, they render other problems facing Filipino communities invisible. This landmark book, the first wide-ranging edited collection on Filipinos in Canada, explores gender, migration and labour, youth spaces and subjectivities, representation and community resistance to certain representations. Looking at these from the vantage points of anthropology, cultural studies, education, geography, history, information science, literature, political science, sociology, and women and gender studies, Filipinos in Canada provides a strong foundation for future work in this area.