Unbending Cane not only provides a well-researched and accurate historical account of one of the most controversial labor leaders to come out of Hawaii before World War II, but also explores the complex layers of the man who took on the powerful sugar barons to seek justice for those working in Hawaii's cane fields.

In the early 1900s, workers from new U.S. colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico held unusual legal status. Denied citizenship, they nonetheless had the right to move freely in and out of U.S. jurisdiction. As a result, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans could seek jobs in the United States and its territories despite the anti-immigration policies in place at the time. JoAnna Poblete's Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai'i takes an in-depth look at how the two groups fared in a third new colony, Hawai'i. Using plantation documents, missionary records, government documents, and oral histories, Poblete analyzes how the workers interacted with Hawaiian government structures and businesses, how U.S. policies for colonial workers differed from those for citizens or foreigners, and how policies aided corporate and imperial interests. A rare tandem study of two groups at work on foreign soil, Islanders in the Empire offers a new perspective on American imperialism and labor issues of the era.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hawai'i changed rapidly from a conservative oligarchy firmly controlled by a Euro-American elite to arguably the most progressive part of the United States. Spearheading the shift were tens of thousands of sugar, pineapple, and dock workers who challenged their powerful employers by joining the left-led International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. In this theoretically innovative study, Moon-Kie Jung explains how Filipinos, Japanese, Portuguese, and others overcame entrenched racial divisions and successfully mobilized a mass working-class movement. He overturns the unquestioned assumption that this interracial effort traded racial politics for class politics. Instead, the movement "reworked race" by incorporating and rearticulating racial meanings and practices into a new ideology of class. Through its groundbreaking historical analysis, Reworking Race radically rethinks interracial politics in theory and practice.

In the early twentieth century—not long after 1898, when the United States claimed the Philippines as an American colony—Filipinas/os became a vital part of the agricultural economy of California's fertile San Joaquin Delta. In downtown Stockton, they created Little Manila, a vibrant community of hotels, pool halls, dance halls, restaurants, grocery stores, churches, union halls, and barbershops. Little Manila was home to the largest community of Filipinas/os outside of the Philippines until the neighborhood was decimated by urban redevelopment in the 1960s. Narrating a history spanning much of the twentieth century, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon traces the growth of Stockton's Filipina/o American community, the birth and eventual destruction of Little Manila, and recent efforts to remember and preserve it. Mabalon draws on oral histories, newspapers, photographs, personal archives, and her own family's history in Stockton. She reveals how Filipina/o immigrants created a community and ethnic culture shaped by their identities as colonial subjects of the United States, their racialization in Stockton as brown people, and their collective experiences in the fields and in the Little Manila neighborhood. In the process, Mabalon places Filipinas/os at the center of the development of California agriculture and the urban West.

After emerging from the tumult of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the field of Asian American studies has enjoyed rapid and extraordinary growth. Nonetheless, many aspects of Asian American history still remain open to debate. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History offers the first comprehensive commentary on the state of the field, simultaneously assessing where Asian American studies came from and what the future holds. In this volume, thirty leading scholars offer original essays on a wide range of topics. The chapters trace Asian American history from the beginning of the migration flows toward the Pacific Islands and the American continent to Japanese American incarceration and Asian American participation in World War II, from the experience of exclusion, violence, and racism to the social and political activism of the late twentieth century. The authors explore many of the key aspects of the Asian American experience, including politics, economy, intellectual life, the arts, education, religion, labor, gender, family, urban development, and legal history. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History demonstrates how the roots of Asian American history are linked to visions of a nation marked by justice and equity and to a deep effort to participate in a global project aimed at liberation. The contributors to this volume attest to the ongoing importance of these ideals, showing how the mass politics, creative expressions, and the imagination that emerged during the 1960s are still relevant today. It is an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of Asian Americans and how they have helped change the face of the United States.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a wave of Filipino immigration to the United States, following in the footsteps of earlier Chinese and Japanese immigrants, the first and second “Asiatic invasions.” Perceived as alien because of their Asian ethnicity yet legally defined as American nationals granted more rights than other immigrants, Filipino American national identity was built upon the shifting sands of contradiction, ambiguity, and hostility. Rick Baldoz explores the complex relationship between Filipinos and the U.S. by looking at the politics of immigration, race, and citizenship on both sides of the Philippine-American divide: internationally through an examination of American imperial ascendancy and domestically through an exploration of the social formation of Filipino communities in the United States. He reveals how American practices of racial exclusion repeatedly collided with the imperatives of U.S. overseas expansion. A unique portrait of the Filipino American experience, The Third Asiatic Invasion links the Filipino experience to that of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Chinese and Native Americans, among others, revealing how the politics of exclusion played out over time against different population groups. Weaving together an impressive range of materials—including newspapers, government reports, legal documents and archival sources—into a seamless narrative, Baldoz illustrates how the quixotic status of Filipinos played a significant role in transforming the politics of race, immigration and nationality in the United States.

Filipino Americans are one of the three largest Asian American groups in the United States and the second largest immigrant population in the country. Yet within the field of Asian American Studies, Filipino American history and culture have received comparatively less attention than have other ethnic groups. Over the past twenty years, however, Filipino American scholars across various disciplines have published numerous books and research articles, as a way of addressing their unique concerns and experiences as an ethnic group. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies, the first on the topic of Filipino American Studies, offers a comprehensive survey of an emerging field, focusing on the Filipino diaspora in the United States as well as highlighting issues facing immigrant groups in general. It covers a broad range of topics and disciplines including activism and education, arts and humanities, health, history and historical figures, immigration, psychology, regional trends, and sociology and social issues.

The Filipino Migration Experience introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. Mina Roces suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing Filipino migrantsas critics of the family and cultural constructions of sexuality, as consumers and investors, as philanthropists, as activists, and, as historians. They have been able to transform fundamental social institutions and well-entrenched traditional norms, as well as alter the business, economic and cultural landscapes of both the homeland and the host countries to which they have migrated. Mina Roces tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, tapping into hitherto underused primary sources from the "migrant archives" and more than 70 interviews. Bringing the fields of Filipino migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies together, this book analyzes some of the areas where Filipino migrants have forever changed the status quo.

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. Contributors: Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Angelica J. Allen, Gina Apostol, Nerissa S. Balce, Joi Barrios-Leblanc, Victor Bascara, Jody Blanco, Alana Bock, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Richard T. Chu, Gary A. Colemnar, Kim Compoc, Denise Cruz, Reuben B. Deleon, Josen Masangkay Diaz, Robert Diaz, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Theodore S. Gonzalves, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Dina C. Maramba, Cynthia Marasigan, Edward Nadurata, JoAnna Poblete, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Dylan Rodríguez, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Michael Schulze-Oechtering, Sarita Echavez See, Roy B. Taggueg Jr.

Angeles Monrayo (1912–2000) began her diary on January 10, 1924, a few months before she and her father and older brother moved from a sugar plantation in Waipahu to Pablo Manlapit’s strike camp in Honolulu. Here for the first time is a young Filipino girl’s view of life in Hawaii and central California in the first decades of the twentieth century—a significant and often turbulent period for immigrant and migrant labor in both settings. Angeles’ vivid, simple language takes us into the heart of an early Filipino family as its members come to terms with poverty and racism and struggle to build new lives in a new world. But even as Angeles recounts the hardships of immigrant life, her diary of "everyday things" never lets us forget that she and the people around her went to school and church, enjoyed music and dancing, told jokes, went to the movies, and fell in love. Essays by Jonathan Okamura and Dawn Mabalon enlarge on Angeles’ account of early working-class Filipinos and situate her experience in the larger history of Filipino migration to the United States.