Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California, located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed “the Pinoy Capital of the United States.” In this fascinating ethnographic study of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community. Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the immigrants’ identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of transnationalism, he looks at the “double lives” of both recent and established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled with reminders of their homeland’s culture, like newspapers, shops and festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and people they left behind.

Drawing on in-depth research in the Philippines, this book reveals how local forms of political and economic monopoly may thrive under conditions of democracy and capitalist development.

From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other lifeworlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labortime. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital.

For many Filipinos, one word � kumusta, how are you � is all it takes to forge a connection with a stranger anywhere in the world. In Canada's prairie provinces, this connection has inspired community building and created both national and transnational identities for the women who identify as pinay. This book is the first to look beyond traditional metropolitan hubs of settlement to explore the migration of Filipino women in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Based on interviews with first-generation immigrant Filipino women and temporary foreign workers, Pinay on the Prairies is a revealing study of identity and community in Canada and an exploration of feminism, transnational identities, migration, and diaspora in a global era.

The story of this nation of over seven thousand islands, from ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation, and beyond. A History of the Philippines recasts various Philippine narratives with an eye for the layers of colonial and post-colonial history that have created this diverse and fascinating population. It begins with the pre-Westernized Philippines in the sixteenth century and continues through the 1899 Philippine-American War and the nation's relationship with the United States’ controlling presence, culminating with its independence in 1946 and two ongoing insurgencies, one Islamic and one Communist. Award-winning author Luis H. Francia creates an illuminating portrait that offers valuable insights into the heart and soul of the modern Filipino, laying bare the multicultural, multiracial society of contemporary times.

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, Roderick Labrador delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawai'i have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, Labrador speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era. Critiquing the popular image of Hawai'i as a postracial paradise, he reveals how Filipino immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) where they've settled, and how these discourses shape their identities. He also shows how the struggle for community empowerment, identity territorialization, and the process of placing and boundary making continue to affect how minority groups construct the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves and others.