Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries

by Yen Le Espiritu

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Asian American, History

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Cara Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school

[S. Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

left no critical stone unturned. though it's now even more demoralizing to me just how deep FilAms are in their conservative stockholm syndrome mannn

i only wish that sociological texts weren't so suffocating to read

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent book examines the home-making efforts of Filipino men and women in San Diego, California as a way to theorize their agency while applying space theory. Espiritu states, “This book is about how home is both connected to and disconnected from the physical space in which one lives.”

This book begins by establishing the importance of the colonial and neocolonial relations between the U.S. and the Philippines. As the author explains, “Without starting here, we risk reducing Filipino migration to just another immigrant stream.” But this is not just a historical framework. Espiritu explains that “immigrant lives are shaped not only by the social location of their group within the host country but also by the position of their home country within the global racial order.” Finally, Espiritu examines the immigrants as desiring subjects, whose immigration is shaped by their personal wants, desires, and actions as much as anything.

Explicit attention to the gendering of the Filipino experience expresses itself through sections on Filipino navy recruits and Filipina health care professionals. The author analyze work patterns as well as gendered experiences of home and family for both men and women. She examines the construction of Filipino gender identities against the construction of immoral white women as a strategy of resistance that links authentic Filipina identity to patriarchal circuits of power. The final chapter of this book connects the issues around identity, belonging and home discussed in the work to militarization of the border, just south of San Diego. According to the author, “we need to conceptualize immigration not as a site for assessing the acceptability of the immigrants, but as a site for critiquing state claims of liberal democracy and cultural inclusion, for studying contestations over definition of citizenship and over terms of inclusion, and for understanding the formation and negotiation of racialized and gendered identities.” The final pages of the book are positive affirmations of the active trangressive border crossings and activism of three Filipinas today.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me a few years to finish this one, just because I kept picking up other books, but I'm glad I did.