Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation

by Rick Bonus (Editor), Antonio Tiongson Jr. (Editor), Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Contribution by), Angelica Allen (Contribution by), Gina Apostol (Contribution by)

Overview

This volume spotlights the unique suitability and situatedness of Filipinx American studies both as a site for reckoning with the work of historicizing U.S. empire in all of its entanglements, as well as a location for reclaiming and theorizing the interlocking histories and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. It encompasses an interrogation of the foundational status of empire in the interdiscipline; modes of labor analysis and other forms of knowledge production; meaning-making in relation to language, identities, time, and space; the critical contours of Filipinx American schooling and political activism; the indispensability of relational thinking in Filipinx American studies; and the disruptive possibilities of Filipinx American formations. A catalogue of key resources and a selected list of scholarship are also provided. Filipinx American Studies constitutes a coming-to-terms with not only the potentials and possibilities but also the disavowals, silences, and omissions that mark Filipinx American studies. It provides a reflective and critical space for thinking through the ways Filipinx American studies is uniquely and especially suited to the interrogation of the ongoing legacies of U.S. imperialism and the urgencies of the current period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823299591
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Rick Bonus (Edited By)
Rick Bonus is Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author, most recently, of The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University.

Antonio Tiongson (Edited By)
Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of Filipinos Represent: DJs, Racial Authenticity, and the Hip-hop Nation.


Karin Aguilar-San Juan is a professor and chair of American studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her undergraduate courses include U.S. Imperialism from the Philippines to Vietnam, Critical Prison Studies, and Bruce Lee, His Life and Legacy. With Frank Joyce, she coedited The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Just World Books, 2015); she also edited and introduced The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (South End Press, 1994). She is part of the Race, Love, and Liberation Laboratory (for growing spiritual things), a planning group associated with Clouds in Water Zen Center.
Angelica Allen is an assistant professor of Africana studies at Chapman University. She received her PhD in African and African diaspora studies from the University of Texas at Austin and holds an MA in Africana studies from New York University. Her book project explores a community in the Philippines known as the Black Amerasians, a population born from the union of African American military men and Filipina women. As both a member of the Black Amerasian community and a scholar of that community’s experiences, Angelica’s goal is to develop a research project dedicated to advancing social justice by granting more visibility to Black Amerasian perspectives. She is a visual artist and has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African- American and African Studies.
Gina Apostol's fourth novel, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the 10 Best Books of 2018. Her third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book award. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan C. Laya Prize for Best Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her most recent work has focused on the Philippine -American War and acts of narration as forms of invention and liberation. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She grew up in the Philippines and lives in New York City and western Massachusetts.
Nerissa Balce is the author of the book Body Parts of Empire. She works on Asian American literature, Filipinx studies, US popular culture, and the racial meanings of the Filipino body in the American imagination. She is an associate professor of Asian American studies at SUNY Stony Brook.
Joi Barrios teaches Filipino and Philippine literature at the University of California, Berkeley after serving as an associate professor at the University of the Philippines College of Arts and Letters (UP). Barrios has a PhD in Filipino (Philippine literature) from UP and has also taught as visiting faculty at University of California, Irvine; University of California, Los Angeles; and the Osaka University of Foreign Studies. She is the author of several books, among them Tagalog for Beginners (Tuttle, 2011) and Intermediate Tagalog (Tuttle, 2015), and has coedited the Concise Tagalog Dictionary: Tagalog-English English Tagalog (with Nenita Pambid Domingo and Romulo Baquiran Jr.; Tuttle, 2017). Additionally, she has published Mula sa mga Pakpak ng Entablado: Pagyapak at Paglipad ng Kababaihang Mandudula (From the Theater Wings: Grounding and Flight of Women Playwrights; University of the Philippines Press, 2005), four poetry books, a book of novelettes, and a book of plays. In addition to several national writing awards, she has won three lifetime achievement awards: Weaver of History Award, given to one hundred women for contributions to Philippine society in the twentieth century by the National Centennial Commission, 1998; the TOWNS (Ten Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service) Award, 2004; and the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas (National Balagtas Lifetime Achievement Award) for Poetry in Filipino, 2016.
Victor Bascara is an associate professor in, and former chair of, the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he specializes in Asian American cultural politics and the critical study of colonial discourse. He is the author of Model-Minority Imperialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and his writings have been published in journals such as American Literary History, American Quarterly, GLQ, American Literature, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal, and the Asian American Law Journal, and in collections such as Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University Press, 2011), Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Duke University Press, 2007), Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2015), The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press, 2016), and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2005). One of his current projects is an examination of isolationism and imperialism in US culture during the interwar period (c. 1919–1941). He coedited (with Lisa Nakamura) a special issue of Amerasia Journal on “Adaption and Its Discontents: Asian American Cultural Politics across Platforms” and (with Keith Camacho and Elizabeth DeLoughrey) a special issue of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific on “Gender and Sexual Politics of Pacific Island Militarisation.” And he coedited (with Josephine Park) Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Jody Blanco teaches the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian) and modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian American literatures at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines (University of California Press, 2009; University of the Philippines Press 2010). His current book manuscript explores the counter -Hispanizing thrust of the mission as frontier(izing) institution and the literature of “spiritual conquest” in the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His articles have appeared in the Radical History Review, Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto), and Amerasia Journal, as well as various book anthologies. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and Unitas. He is also the director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of California, San Diego.
Alana J. Bock is a PhD candidate in American studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Bock also holds an MA in American studies from UNM as well as a double-major BA in US history and art history/theory/criticism from the University of California, San Diego. Her primary research interests include Filipinx American studies, visuality and performance, queer of color critique, empire, haunting, and neoliberalism. She currently serves as a board member for the Feminist Research Institute at UNM.
Sony Coranez Bolton is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He studies the intersections of Latinx and Filipinx cultural politics, literature, and embodiment through the lenses of postcolonial disability, queer of color critique, and transnational feminism. His forthcoming book, Crip Colonial Critique: Mestizaje, US Colonialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines, analyzes the disability politics of mixed-race Filipinx during the historical transition from Spanish colonial to US colonial rule. His other work has appeared in Journal of Asian American Studies, Revista Filipina, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America among other venues.
Lucy MSP Burns, author of Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of Empire (New York University Press, 2013), is an associate professor at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department. Burns is also a dramaturg and initiated a project on the impact of COVID-19 closures on BIPOC theater, https://www.bipoctheatresurveys.com.
Richard T. Chu (AB Ateneo de Manila University; MA Stanford University; PhD University of Southern California) is Five-College Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has published various articles focusing on the history of the Chinese and Chinese mestizos in the Philippines and centering on issues of ethnicity, gender, and nationalism. He is the author of Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture 1860s–1930s (Brill, 2010; Anvil, 2012) and Chinese Merchants of Binondo during the Late Nineteenth Century (University of Santo Tomas Press, 2010). He also recently coedited with Mark Blasius an anthology on LGBTIQA+ studies in the Philippines, entitled More Tomboy, More Bakla Than We Admit (Vibal Publishing, 2021). Currently, he is working on his next book project entitled The “Chinaman” Question: A Conundrum in US Imperial Policy in the Philippines, 1898–1908 that analyzes different newspaper articles and other textual materials dealing with the “Chinaman” question in the Philippines and the implementation of the Chinese exclusion laws in the country.
Gerardo "Gary" A. Colmenar is a humanities and social sciences librarian / social sciences coordinator at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) library with subject liaison assignments for Asian American studies, Native American studies, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. He was the UCSB Davidson Library Fellow, 1998–2000. He is a cohost and coproducer of No Alibis, a public affairs radio program on KCSB 91.9 FM Santa Barbara that airs Wednesday mornings, 9:00–11:00 a.m. PST. No Alibis streams at www .kcsb.org. His published works are “Engaging with Ethnic Studies Librarians: An Interview with Lillian Castillo-Speed and gerardo “gary” colmenar,” in Ethnic Studies in Academic and Research Libraries (Association of College and Research Libraries, ALA, 2021) and “Doing the Work You Want Your Library Work to Do: Reflections of an Academic Librarian,” in Asian American Librarians and Library Services: Activism, Collaborations, and Strategies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). These are available in the University of California repository at https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsb.
Kim Compoc is an assistant professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i—West O‘ahu. In both her activism and scholarship, she is interested in how the story of empire becomes more evident through continued engagement with other stories of resistance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.
Denise Cruz is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) and the editor of Yay Panlilio’s The Crucible: An Autobiography of Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla (Rutgers University Press, 2009). Other articles have appeared or are forthcoming in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, and in the collection Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. Her research centers on the use of spatial and geographic frameworks to analyze gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures. She is currently working on a study of Philippine fashion and an analysis of the importance of regions and regionalism to Asian America.
Reuben B. Deleon is a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education and Organizational Change program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also received a master of education in educational leadership and policy studies with a focus in higher education from the University of Washington. His research spans various topics within the intersection of Asian American studies and higher education. Currently, his research utilizes student narratives and experiences to interrogate and critique prominent theories of racial/ethnic identity development, student development, and student involvement in post-secondary institutions.
Josen Masangkay Diaz is an assistant professor of ethnic studies and affiliated with the Program in Women and Gender Studies at the University of San Diego. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (forthcoming from Duke University Press) traces the collaborations between US liberalism and Philippine authoritarianism during the Cold War period to illuminate the ways that colonial discourses of self-determination set the discursive boundaries of Filipinx subjectivity. Her work appears in Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Signs, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Kritika Kultura.
Robert Diaz is an associate professor and graduate coordinator in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at University of Toronto. His research, teaching, and community work focus on the rich intersections between transpacific, diasporic, and migratory forms of cultural expression. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in Signs, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas. Diaz is also committed to equity and the pursuit of social justice. He has worked with organizations in the greater Toronto area that seek to better the lives of racially marginalized, queer, and Indigenous communities. He is the coeditor of Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries, a groundbreaking collection that foregrounds the contributions of LGBTQ Filipinxs to Canadian culture and society (Northwestern University Press, 2017).
Kale Bantigue Fajardo is an associate professor of American studies and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His academic training is in cultural anthropology and feminist / gender / queer studies, Philippine studies, Filipino/a American studies, and Asian American studies. His PhD and MA are from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his bachelor’s degree is from Cornell University. Professor Fajardo’s first book, Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; University of the Philippines Press, 2013) is an interdisciplinary ethnography that analyzes the cultural politics of Filipinx migrant and maritime masculinities in the local/global shipping industry, in the context of local/global neoliberal capitalism. He uses Philippine postcolonial theory, queer theory, and feminist theory to analyze the above. In particular, his book is concerned with how the Philippine state uses seamen (or the figure of Filipinx seamen) to promote neoliberal economic policies and projects in Manila and the Philippine nation. Filipino Crosscurrents is based on fieldwork conducted in Manila and Oakland, as well as on board an industrial container ship that voyaged from Oakland to Hong Kong (via Osaka, Tokyo, and Kaohsiung). Professor Fajardo has also been working on a public anthropology project called “We Heart Malolos: Kapwa, Kasaysayan at Kalikasan (Unity, History, and the Environment),” funded by a Grant-In- Aid of Scholarship and Artistry from the University of Minnesota (summer 2012 to winter 2015). Through this project, he is conducting research in his hometown of Malolos, Bulacan, in the Philippines and is collaborating with the Center for Bulacan Studies at Bulacan State University to organize a series of Malolos-related and Malolos-based kapwa, kasaysayan, and kalikasan educational events and programs.
Vernadette Gonzales is a professor of American studies and director of the honors program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her areas of research include studies of tourism and militarism, transnational cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, Asian American cultural and literary studies, and globalization studies with a focus on Asia and the Pacific. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the modern military and touristic ideologies, cultures, and technologies of mobility and surveillance in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. Her second book, Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke University Press, 2021) is a genealogy of imperial geopolitics and desire through the life story of a mixed-race vaudeville and film actor and sometime-mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. She is coeditor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (Duke University Press, 2019), and a decolonial guide series for the press.
Theodore S. Gonzalves is a scholar of comparative cultural studies whose work has received generous support as a Fulbright scholar and senior fellowships at the Smithsonian, UNC Chapel Hill, and the Library of Congress. Dr. Gonzalves’s publications include Stage Presence: Conversations with Filipino American Performing Artists (Meritage, 2007), The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora (Temple University Press, 2009), Carlos Villa and the Integrity of Spaces (Meritage, 2011), Filipinos in Hawai‘i, co -authored with Roderick N. Labrador (Arcadia, 2011), and Gossip, Sex, and the End of the World: Collected Works of tongue in A mood, coedited with A. Samson Manalo (Arkipelago, 2021). In the field of performing arts, Theo served on the advisory board for Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu and Bindlestiff Studio, a San Francisco performing arts venue; cofounded the artist-run recording label, Jeepney Dash Records; played keyboards for the legendary Bobby Banduria; and toured extensively as the musical director for the theater troupe, tongue in A mood. Theo’s musical work has been featured at concerts such as the Asian American Jazz Festival and performances at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. He has also written, produced, and performed several scores for independent film projects. Dr. Gonzalves is curator of Asian Pacific American History at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He served as the twenty-first president of the Association for Asian American Studies.
Anna Romina Guevarra is the founding director of the Global Asian Studies Program and Co-PI of the AANAPISI Initiative and cofounder of the Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown, Chicago, public history project (https://dis-placements.com) at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and community-engaged work focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of care work, the Philippine diaspora, and critical race/ethnic studies. One of her projects explores the global commoditization and simulation of carework through the prism of robotic innovation -theorizing the divide between human and machine in the context of race, gender, and neoliberal capital, with implications for articulations of “skill,” carework, and the geopolitical boundaries between the North and South. Another project (with Gayatri Reddy) explores the relationship between diaspora and empire—tracing the history of the descendants of Indian sepoys who settled in the Philippines after the eighteenth-century British occupation of the country. Finally, as a cofounder of the Dis/Placements project, she is documenting, through oral histories and archival work, over 200 years of displacement in one Chicago neighborhood by mapping everyday people’s resistance in response to “urban renewal” policies that have displaced multiple communities. She is the author of the award winning book Marketing Dreams and Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers, an ethnography that narrates the multilayered racialized and gendered processes of brokering Filipinx labor, the Philippines’ highly prized “export,” and she is a coeditor of Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age. Her work has also appeared in interdisciplinary journals like Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Social Identities, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Pacific Affairs, and numerous edited anthologies.
Allan Punzalan Isaac is a professor of American studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, which received the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award, and Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at LaSalle University in Manila as a Senior Fulbright Scholar.
Martin F. Manalansan IV is a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Professor Manalansan is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2003; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006). He is editor/coeditor of four anthologies: Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press, 2016), Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (Temple University Press, 2000), Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York University Press, 2002), and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013). He has edited several journal special issues including a special issue of the International Migration Review on gender and migration and more recently, a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies entitled “Feeling Filipinos.” He has published in numerous journals including GLQ, Antipode, Cultural Anthropology, positions: east asian cultural critique, and Radical History, among others. Among his many awards are the Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2003, the Excellence in Mentorship Award in 2013 from the Association of Asian American Studies, the Richard Yarborough Mentoring Prize in 2016 from the American Studies Association, and the Crompton-Noll Award for the best LGBTQ essay in 2016 from the Modern Language Association. His current book projects include the ethical and embodied dimensions of the lives and struggles of undocumented queer immigrants, Asian American immigrant culinary cultures, the affective dimensions of Filipinx migrant labor, and Filipinx return migration.
Dina Maramba is a full professor of higher education in the School of Educational Studies at the Claremont Graduate University. Her research focuses on equity, diversity, and social justice within the context of higher education. Her interests include the influence of educational institutions and campus climates on the access and success among students of color, underserved and first-generation college students; the experiences of Filipinx Americans and Asian Americans / Pacific Islanders students, faculty, and administrators in higher education institutions. She has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles including “Critiquing Empire Through Desirability: A Review of 40 Years of Filipinx Americans in Educational Research 1980–2020” (with Edward R. Curammeng and Xavier Hernandez). Her coedited books include The “Other” Students: Filipino Americans, Education and Power (with Rick Bonus), Bridging Research and Practice to Support Asian American Students (with Corinne Kodama), and Transformative Practices for Minority Student Success: Accomplishments of Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institutions (with Timothy Fong). Having presented her research nationally and internationally, her work includes publications in the Review of Educational Research, Journal of College Student Development, Journal of Higher Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, and Educational Policy.
Cynthia Marasigan is a historian and associate professor in Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her research interests include US empire, Afro-Asian intersections, and Asian American history. Her forthcoming book, Empire’s Color Lines: How African American Soldiers and Filipino Revolutionaries Transformed Amigo Warfare (Duke University Press), explores intersections of US imperialism, Jim Crow, and colonial resistance by analyzing a range of Black soldier–Filipinx interactions during the Philippine-American War and its aftermath.
Edward Nadurata is a PhD student in global and international studies with a Designated Emphasis in Medical Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and received his MA in Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also editorial assistant for Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. His main research interests lie in the intersections of aging, disability, migration, and globalization.
JoAnna Poblete is a professor of history at Claremont Graduate University (CGU). She got her PhD in US history from University of California, Los Angeles and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to CGU, she worked for six years as an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. Her first book, titled Islanders in the Empire: Filipinos and Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘i, was published in 2014 through the Asian American Experience Series at the University of Illinois Press. Her second book, titled Balancing the Tides: Marine Policies in American Sāmoa, became available as an open-access, free PDF in 2019 and paper copies were published in March 2020 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Poblete’s current book project focuses on the role of women in the oil industry on St. Croix, part of the unincorporated territory of the US Virgin Islands. She has also published articles in American Quarterly, the Pacific Historical Review, Cambridge History of America in the World, and Women, Gender and Families of Color.
Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John’s University. Rodriguez is a former scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture in Harlem, New York City. His research explores new conceptions of “the human” that are driving the grassroots social movements of late modernity’s structurally marginalized global populations. His forthcoming book is an intellectual biography of Black studies professor, fiction writer, and radical humanist Sylvia Wynter.
Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, and collaborator who works with and within abolitionist and other radical communities and movements. Since 2001, he has maintained a day job as a professor at the University of California, Riverside. His peers elected him President of the American Studies Association for 2020–2021, and in 2020 he was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Dylan is the author of three books, including White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez is an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco (USF), and is the only tenured Pinay at the university. She also serves on the boards of USF’s Master’s in migration studies, critical diversity studies, Asian Pacific American studies, and Yuchengco Philippine studies programs. She was born in Honolulu; raised in San Diego; graduated magna cum laude from the University of California, San Diego; completed her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; and studies and teaches about race, ethnicity, gender, immigration, and generation. She is the author of Celebrating Debutantes and Quinceañeras: Coming of Age in American Ethnic Communities (Temple University Press, 2013). Her new research explores how US young adults who identify as neither monoracially Black or white imagine and discuss race and civic participation. She has been an active member of Asian Women United of California since 1998, and has served the organization as president since 2004.
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is the founding director of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, the first of its kind at a major research university in the United States. The center leads research, educational, and community -engaged projects on the Filipinx diasporic experience. She is also a widely published scholar with expertise on Philippine migration. Her first book, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), received an honorable mention for best social science book by the Association for Asian American Studies. In late 2019, she published Filipino American Transnational Activism: Diasporic Politics among the Second Generation (Brill). Presently, she is coauthoring a book on Filipino immigration to the United States since the early 2000s; the book is under advance contract with the University of Hawai‘i Press. Alongside her scholarly work, Rodriguez works as a community organizer. She has long worked with Migrante International, the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), the Filipino American Educators Association of California (FAEAC), among other organizations.
J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez is a Katutubo American refugee from the Philippines who is Aeta (Samal-Ita), Igorot (Ifugao), Lipi (Sambali), Moro (Iranun), and Ilokano. They are currently a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Jeffrey Santa Ana is an associate professor of English and affiliated faculty in Asian and Asian American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University, the State University of New York. He is the author of Racial Feelings: Asian America in a Capitalist Culture of Emotion (Temple University Press, 2015). He has published articles on Asian North American literature and Filipinx American studies in Signs, positions, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. He is a coeditor and contributor of the volume Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). His current book is titled Transpacific Ecological Imagination: Envisioning the Decolonial Anthropocene. The book conceives a transpacific ecological imagination to investigate environmental crisis and explore remembering the natural world in Pacific Islander and Asian diasporic cultural works (literature, memoir, graphic narrative, and film).
Dean Itsuji Saranillo is an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His teaching and research interests are in settler colonialism and critical Indigenous studies, Asian American and Pacific Island histories, and cultural studies. His book, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), examines the complex interplay between different Asian American groups, Native Hawaiians, and whites within historical flashpoints of interaction shaped by opposing versions of history.
Michael Schulze-Oechtering is an assistant professor of history at California State University East Bay. He received his PhD in comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research uses social movement history and comparative ethnic studies to explore how communities of color in the United States have both questioned and crossed racial boundaries. His research has been published by the Amerasia Journal and Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. His current book project, No Separate Peace: Black and Filipinx Workers and the Labor of Solidarity in the Pacific Northwest, is currently under contract with the University of Washington Press and examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipinx cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Sarita Echavez See is the author of The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York University Press, 2017; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018) and The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and coeditor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). She is at work on a book called Make Do about inventive artistic and everyday cultural practices that emanate out of material need, racialized experience, and everyday resilience. She is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Roy B. Taggueg Jr. (RJ) is an undocumented, queer, Filipinx PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. He is currently serving as the director of research at the UC Davis Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, and is part of the inaugural cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Research Scholars Program. As part of his work for the Bulosan Center, Taggueg is currently managing the Filipin[x]s Counts! Filipinx/Filipinx-American Health and Well-Being Survey and Kwentuhan Series. Taggueg’s research focuses primarily on using community-engaged, mixed-method strategies to analyze the experiences of Filipinxs in California as they endure, evolve, and adapt to the dynamics of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Table of Contents

Filipinx American Critique: An Introduction | 1
Rick Bonus and Antonio T. Tiongson Jr.

Section A: Reckoning

Part I: Empire as Endless War
1. Empire: Turns and Returns | 33
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
2. Empire as the Rule of War and Fascism | 42
Nerissa S. Balce
3. Empire: US States at the Intersection of Diaspora and Indigeneity | 57
Dean Itsuji Saranillio
4. The Persistence of War through Migration | 67
Cynthia Marasigan
5. Liminal Services: Third Spaces of Being within the United States | 83
JoAnna Poblete
6. “Genocide” and the Poetics of Alter-Being in the Obsolescence of the “Filipino American” | 91
Dylan Rodríguez

Part II: Labor and Knowledge/Power
7. Filipinx Labor and the Contradictions of US Empire | 103
Josen Masangkay Diaz
8. On History, Development, and Filipinx American Studies: Emergent, Dominant, and Residual | 111
Victor Bascara
9. The Limits of “Immigration” Frameworks:
Centering Empire in Analyzing Migration and the Diaspora | 118
Roy B. Taggueg Jr. and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez
10. Including the Excluded:
The “Chinese” in the Philippines and the Study of “Migration” in Filipinx American Studies | 128
Richard T. Chu
11. Labor and Carework | 138
Anna Romina Guevarra
12. The Labor of History in Filipinx Historiography | 148
Jody Blanco

Section B: Reclamation

Part III: Across Language, Sex-Gender, and Space-Time Geographies
13. Pag-uugat at Paglalayag (Roots and Journeys): Filipino Language Learning and Activism | 165
Joi Barrios
14. In an Archipelago and Sea of Complexities: Contemporary Intersectional / Transpacific / Decolonial Queer and/or Trans Filipinx American Studies | 174
Kale Bantigue Fajardo
15. Datíng as Affect in Filipinx Migration | 185
Allan Punzalan Isaac
16. Gender: A Transpacific Feminist Approach to Filipinx Studies | 192
Denise Cruz
17. The Contingencies of Kasarian | 201
Robert Diaz

Part IV: Critical Schooling and Justice in Other Words
18. Filipinx Americans and Higher Education | 211
Dina C. Maramba
19. Filipinx American College Student Identities: A Critique of Models | 221
Reuben B. Deleon
20. Third World Studies and the Living Archive of US-based Filipinx Activism | 229
Michael Schulze-Oechtering
21. Activism Is in the Heart of Filipinx American Studies | 239
Jeffrey Santa Ana
22. Filipinx American Activism—and Why I Once Loved Manny Pacquiao | 256
Karín Aguilar-San Juan
23. Considerations from the US-Occupied Pacific | 267
Kim Compoc

Section C: Transformation

Part V: Relationalities, Intimacies, and Entanglements
24. Filipinxness: An Epochal Perspective | 279
Anthony Bayani Rodriguez
25. A Tale of Two “X”s: Queer Filipinx and Latinx Linguistic Intimacies | 284
Sony Coráñez Bolton
26. Hypervisible (In)visibility: Black Amerasians | 291
Angelica J. Allen
27. Why I Don’t (Really) Consider Myself a Filipinx:
Complicating “Filipinxness” from a Katutubo Intervention | 298
J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez
28. Repertoires on Other Stages | 308
Theodore S. Gonzalves

Part VI: Recalcitrant Bodies, Unruly Vernaculars
29. Confronting Worldly Acts: Filipinx Performances and Their Elsewheres | 323
Lucy MSP Burns
30. Aye Nako!: The Frustrations of Filipinx American Illegibility | 335
Alana J. Bock
31. Who Cares?: Ability and the Elderly Question in Filipinx American Studies | 343
Edward Nadurata
32. Dalaga na!: Gender and Youth Studies Come of Age in Filipinx Studies | 352
Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez
33. Unpacking Hiya: (Trans)national “Traits” and the (Un)making of Filipinxness | 362
Martin F. Manalansan IV
34. Language Run Amok | 370
Sarita Echavez See

Afterword | 379
Gina Apostol

Appendixes: Key Resources in Filipinx American Studies
A. A Selection of Library Research Tools and Web Resources Related to Filipinx American Studies | 385
Gerardo A. Colmenar
B. Selected List of Scholarship on Filipinx American Studies | 403
Edward Nadurata

Acknowledgments | 415
List of Contributors | 419
Index | 435

Editorial Reviews

In this book, all parts speak to the others: Labor is inextricable from history and migration is moored to identity and performance is linked to gender and language is inseparable from empire and affect is related to labor and on down the chain. Repetitions boomerang and wake us. Connections rule. In the gaps lie some salvations.—Gina Apostol, from the Afterword

From the Publisher