From Exile to Diaspora: The Filipino Experience in the United States

By Epifanio San Juan Jr.

As the largest contingent of Asian/Pacific Islanders in the United States today, Filipinos have been described as "invisible," "forgotten," marginal "others," and, on the whole, inconsequential. From Exile to Diaspora challenges these stereotypes. With the Philippines undergoing revolutionary transformation, the Filipino diaspora--about six million "overseas contract workers" scattered around the planet--is radically configuring the Filipino presence and potential for change in the U.S. Subsumed before in the category of immigrants, exiles, refugees, etc., Filipinos now claim a nationalitarian, uniquely political/ethical identity removed from panethnic racializing generalities. Filipinos in their singular diversity are reassessing their colonial past and engaging in projects of popular-democratic resistance (of which this work is one) to the transnational system of global commodification.This book examines the received textbook dogmas about the Filipino community before World War II and after. It questions the claims about Filipino assimilation and acculturation, focusing on their encounter with "white supremacy" in various forms. Through analysis and interpretation of imaginative texts and other discursive practices, From Exile to Diaspora seeks to establish a new framework for charting Filipino agency within the constraints of late capitalism. It seeks to open up for laypersons and students of U.S. social history the question of racial justice and equality. San Juan hopes this book will serve as a guide to understanding the nuances of Filipino self-identification in the process of challenging the dominant polity's claim to pluralist and multicultural heterogeneity.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813331692
• ISBN13: 9780813331690
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Critical Analysis of Filipino Amerika

Dr. E. San Juan, Jr., former chair of the department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, is a world-renowned scholar, cultural critic and clearly the most versed in the analysis of neocolonial relations between the Philippines and the United States. This book, by far, has provided the most in depth coverage on the Filipino American community by tracing the historical legacy of famous Filipino American pioneers like Carlos Bulosan, Philip Vera Cruz, and other Filipino Americans. While providing a beautiful presentation of Philippine American relations and the dynamic of the Filipino American being, the underlying tone of the book suggest that the Filipino American phenomenon is a historical one, which is rooted in the oppressive stronghold of U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, that Filipino Americans are a byproduct of those relations, and are, in fact, economic exiles in a land that produced the economic strife they lived in. Today over eight million Filipinos live outside of the Philippines in almost every country on the planet, with a little more than 3 million of them living in the United States. Forced into economic exile because of displacement and poverty created through U.S. imperialism, Filipino Americans should not forget the past they have been dislocated from, through the journey of assimilating into American reality. But they should re-member, restore, and remap their understanding of Philippine-US relations and see how they factor into the equation of global imperialism.