Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries
by Yen Le Espiritu

How do Filipino migrants and their children fit in American society? What does it mean to be a Filipino – and a “Filipino family” – in the United States? What happens to the American Dream when, neither black nor white, Filipinos confront racism? What fault lines are marked by differences among Filipinos themselves? What does the Philippine mean for immigrants and succeeding generations? The provocative exploration of these questions in Yen Le Espiritu’s Homebound highlights the tensions, ironies, and potentials in transnational Filipino American lives. A must read.
— Filomeno V. Aguilar
    Editor, Philippine Studies and Convenor,
    “Study on Migration and the Family,” Ateneo de Manila University

From the book

Migration is significant in the reconstitution of identities because it allows migrants partially to escape from subject identity(ies) constructed and contained by the laws and cultures of any single nation-state. As a multiply constituted people, Filipino American identities and lives are formed and informed by different notions of “home,” by the struggles to be “at home” in multiple locations, and by overlapping and competing loyalties to various causes in all these homes. The stresses of migration—the struggles against xenophobia, cultural racism, and economic discrimination—have intensified considerably Filipino immigrants’ identification with their place of origin. At the same time, they have also firmly rooted Filipinos in joined struggles with each other and with other kin communities to define and claim their place in the United States. In their struggles for a place to be, Filipino immigrants have shifted between multiple and dynamic identities, simultaneously and enlarging their scope of affiliations.

YEN LE ESPIRITU is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (1997); Filipino American Lives (1995); and Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (1992).

Empire, Nation, Diaspora
Vicente L. Rafael, Series Editor

Philippine Copyright 2008. 6x9 inches. 284 pages.

ISBN: 978-971-550-580-2

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