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This chapter deals with the novels of Carlos Bulosan and John Okada in the context of the Cold War and the racial politics of masculinity. Bulosan, a Filipino American, and Okada, a Japanese American, present their concerns about racial oppression through gender and sexuality, in this case through the lives of Asian American men who are deeply wounded by the racial violence and discrimination that often worked through emasculation. Okada's No No Boy and Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and The Cry and the Dedication are attempts to recuperate the wounded bodies of Asian American men, speaking to American society in terms that it could understand: freedom and materialism. The recuperated manhood they seek to establish is inevitably limited by the ways in which freedom and materialism are conceptually entangled with the same structure of racial discrimination and economic exploitation that targeted Asian Americans.

In 1898, during the Spanish‐American War, many anti‐imperialists assumed that members of the U.S. woman suffrage movement would be staunch critics of antidemocratic U.S. efforts to establish sovereignty over foreign peoples against their will because of suffragists' own aspirations for self‐government. But suffragists proved to be complex critics of U.S. imperial ambitions. Susan B. Anthony urged suffragists to focus their energies less on opposition to the war and more on keeping the word “male” out of the territorial constitutions and “organic acts” that Congress created to govern its new island possessions in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and thus tacitly lent the support of the suffrage movement to the creation of a U.S. empire.

This chapter considers two novels by the Filipino American authors Jessica Hagedorn and Ninotchka Rosca. Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Rosca's State of War focus upon anti-dictatorial revolutions in the Philippines, placing transvestites and homosexuals in central roles. The queer body arises in the work of these writers because it allows them to address two related historical situations: the relationship of the Philippines to the United States, and the relationship of the dominated to the dominating in the Philippines. In these situations, the queer subject's status as social outsider becomes metaphorical for the Philippines as the forgotten nation in American memory, and metaphorical for the dominated within the Philippines itself. These novels, by putting the queer body at the center of the anti-dictatorial movement, transform that movement into a sexual revolution that displaces the importance of heterosexual identity and marriage found in many constructions of nationalist revolution.

This chapter explores the politics of religious freedom in the Philippines during the early years of U.S. rule. It shows how U.S. officials used this ideal to negotiate the relationship between Christianity and secularism, and to classify and control the diverse peoples of the Philippines. Against the backdrop of the Philippine-American War and then of the Moro War, Americans used religious freedom to impose a new church-state separation that served imperial interests by stripping indigenous leaders of their governing authority. At the same time religious freedom became an ambivalent resource for some Filipinos—such as Gregorio Aglipay, revolutionary priest and founder of the Philippine Independent Church—as they struggled to resist and then to navigate the imposition of U.S. imperial control.

This chapter focuses on the transnational influence flowing to and from church spaces in the Philippines and San Francisco. Supplementing library information with archival research and interviews with key informants, it delves first into the Americanization of Philippine churches and Christianity and then the Filipinization, later on, of San Francisco congregations and religious spaces. This migratory phenomenon has facilitated the creation of kasamahan bonds with Filipino prayers, pastors, icons, rituals, and migrant faithful easily moving back and forth among San Francisco and Philippine spiritual homes and gatherings. This transnational movement not only facilitates the influence of Filipinos on San Francisco communities but also helps them integrate with the broader, multicultural American society.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of the civic engagement of Filipino migrants through religion by showing how the Filipino migrant faithful Filipinize elements of the cultural, political, and economic arenas within the San Francisco Bay Area cities and towns in which they have settled. The book provides a contrarian case to the prevailing assumption that religion and spirituality are diminishing in the rich developed countries of the world and flourishing only in poor developing countries. The empirical evidence gathered during the research for this book suggests that religion and spirituality in rich developed countries, like the United States, are being boosted by new migrant faithful from poor developing countries, like the Philippines. The remainder of the chapter discusses why the Filipino migrant religious experience is important to America; where religion is situated in the life of a Filipino migrant; and how Filipinization should be understood in San Francisco history.

This chapter examines dramatizations of U.S.–Philippine contact during the years leading up to, during, and immediately after the Spanish–American War. In the early years of the American empire, the Filipino/a performing body appears in piecemeal form on diverse U.S. stages, including the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, as part of chautauqua circuits, and on theater venues in major American cities such as New York and Chicago. The chapter specifically turns to two of these sites, the Philippine Reservation at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the musical comedy Shoo-Fly Regiment by the African American creative team of Bob Cole, J. Rosamond, and James Weldon Johnson. It approaches these various performing stages as “contact zones,” as complex terrains of interaction among American patrons, Filipino/a performers, and the Philippines. Furthermore, the chapter also asks how this early contact is present in contemporary Filipino Americans' self-imagination.

This chapter situates the Fukunaga case in the racial setting of Hawai‘i during the 1920s, when the anti-Japanese movement peaked before World War II. It begins by discussing Haole political and economic power, which resulted from Haole’s enforcing race as the dominant organizing principle of social relations. Also outlined is the anti-Japanese movement, which sought to subordinate Japanese Americans because they were considered the most dangerous threat to Haole domination. The chapter discusses previous racial injustices against Japanese and Filipino labor leaders in the 1920s who had upset the racial hierarchy by organizing plantation strikes. It concludes that the racial setting was demarcated by an uneven racial divide between Haoles and non-Haoles because Native Hawaiians had much greater political access than most of the latter.

Contending that Filipino American Studies as diasporic field negotiates to varying ends the vexed borders of area studies, American studies, and Ethnic Studies, Manalansan observes that the problems of borders are by no means limited to semantics but instead encompass issues of unequal power distribution. Indicative of a heretofore under-examined epistemic privilege, these inequalities render visible the present and future predicaments of Filipino American Studies.

This chapter argues that the traditional Western bildungsroman as a form is xenophobic at its foundation, with the adolescent’s requisite assimilation into white normativity as the standard telos for masculine identity development. Identifying the Filipino American bildungsroman as a distinct rejection of the traditional Western bildung, the chapter focuses on the ways in which Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel, American Son, exemplifies the refusal to adhere to European standards of adolescent identity development. Through his use of dual narrators, non-linear character development, simulated masculine identifications, biracial or mestizo identities, and multiple and conflicting national identifications, Roley presents ambivalent and unresolved narrative conclusions to reflect the adolescent’s essential hybridity, refusing Western standards of social integration marked by positive assimilation. By resisting the colonialist model of development, Roley’s work asserts the distinctiveness of the Filipino American bildungs roman as itself a rejection of whiteness.

This chapter demonstrates how ardent Filipino American youth, many socialized in faith-influenced family relations and schooling, have joined forces with their parents' and grandparents' generations to tackle certain social injustices. It focuses on the critical role played by Filipino faithful and their spiritual communities in the pursuit of justice for Filipino World War II veterans and around extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. It discusses the strategies these Filipino American youth used to convince the larger American public and the global community to join them in planning and launching intergenerational counterhegemonic activities, or bayanihan initiatives. These activities have included protest marches, letter-writing campaigns, testifying before Senate and House committees, and candlelight vigils.

Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.

This chapter discusses how Filipino Americans “filipinize” their Catholic religiosity through performing particular types of ministry and charity, particularly the act of sending balikbayan boxes back to relatives in the Philippines. At the same time, the church helps to reinforce and pass on Filipino values, such as utang na loob (debt of gratitude), and bayanihan (mutual cooperation for the common good). The chapter shows how the second generation continues the practice of remitting balikbayan, with 40% of them sending goods back to their parents' homeland. Institutions such as Catholic universities, parachurch organizations, and student groups also provide the infrastructure and space to develop filipinized Catholicism. These acts of religious institutions and structures merging with ethnic values and transnational connections help nurture and promote ethnoreligion.

While studies of anti-miscegenation laws and interracial sex in the South tend to focus on white and black relationships, Asian Americans were also subjected to Jim Crow discrimination when it came to prohibitions on interracial sex and marriages. The in-between racial and political status of Asians challenged the black-and-white sexual and legal order of the South. This chapter focuses on two court cases from Georgia and Virginia that highlight the complexities of Asian-initiated battles against sexual and racial laws and norms in southern states: the 1932 Annunciatio v. State of Georgia case and the 1955 Naim v. Naim Supreme Court appeal that began in Virginia.

This chapter focuses on the role of food in the religious life of migrants. It expounds on the ways in which the adaptive spirit of faithful Filipino migrants helps them negotiate the complexities associated with migration to multicultural San Francisco. The chapter also demonstrates how the American, Latino, and Asian elements embedded within Filipino culture facilitate migrants' absorption and accommodation of San Francisco's culturally diverse environment. Adaptive kasamahan in two sites—Iglesia ni Cristo in Daly City and Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in downtown San Francisco—illustrates how Filipino faithful accommodate and adapt to the many practical challenges of migrant life, such as locating work, as well as the emotional pitfalls, such as homesickness and loneliness.

This chapter provides evidence from San Francisco disputing the premise of Robert Putnam's critically acclaimed book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that social capital, especially the bridging variety, has declined all over the United States. It presents evidence that describes how the Filipino migrants' adaptive spirit, mediated through San Francisco churches, allows them to balance the competing social and civic responsibilities of new migrants, which include religious obligations and civic duties in both the United States and the Philippines. It uses two bayanihan case studies to illuminate more clearly how the adaptive spirits (or esprit de corps) of migrant faithful at Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in San Francisco and the Iglesia ni Cristo in Daly City are cultivated and channeled for the betterment of American society.

This chapter explores the dynamics of intergenerational kasamahan (bonding Filipinization). It begins by discussing the respect filled interactions observed between youth and their elders in homes and Filipinized churches, and then explores what university students in San Francisco—particularly children of Filipino migrant faithful who attend spiritual schools—learn about social justice, community organizing, and counterhegemonic actions vis-à-vis the church. Next, it explores how these students use their classroom and library learning to foster a passion for justice within themselves and then release this passion as revolutionary action to challenge injustices in American society. Using an in-depth case discussion of Saint Augustine's Catholic Church in South San Francisco, the chapter elaborates on four conditions that are necessary for transforming passionate energy and revolutionary spirit into intergenerational kasamahan. The case study shows how these factors all come together as a passionate energy and revolutionary spirit that brings together young and old parishioners toward the confrontation of a critical immigrant rights issue at the San Francisco International Airport.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book focuses on the debates over the Philippine-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Drawing on the thoughts of Mark Twain, the book unpacks the sense of national identity that Twain shared with his contemporaries, their deep-seated assumptions about what it meant to be an American citizen, and their anxieties about the role that the United States should play on the world stage. In the process, it shows how a narrative of American identity, formulated over the course of the nineteenth century to impose unity on an ever-increasing multiplicity, was enlisted to support arguments over the annexation of the Philippines. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the fiction of Frank R. Steward, an African American captain who served in the U.S. Volunteer Army in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War. His short stories feature a formal experiment in literary perspective: unraced narrators whom readers can choose to identify as black or white. The chapter links this choice to Steward's interests both in detaching race from nation in representations of black military service and in opposing conventional representations of black soldiers structured by the forms of local color and plantation; however, the effect of his stories is hardly to champion a raceless American self in opposition to a raced Filipino other. The stories graft a number of familiar colonial binaries onto the foundational dualism of self and other, such as civilized/savage, male/female, writing/speech, order/disorder, and yet they also fundamentally destabilize notions of white U.S. empire and create affiliations between Filipinos abroad and African Americans at home.