Locating Filipino Americans

Rick Bonus is an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

• CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Marking Locations 1. Cartographies of Ethnicity 2. Filipinos and Filipinas in America 3. Marking and Marketing Identities in Filipino "Oriental" Stores 4. Palengke Politics and Beauty Pageants in Filipino Community Centers 5. Homeland Memories and Media: Filipino Images and Imaginations in America Conclusion: Re-marking Locations Notes Index

"Bonus draws on contemporary insights of cultural studies while grounding its tendency toward idealism in a very material sense of power. His subjects are actors, not victims of narratives. He does an effective and sometimes elegant job of capturing their adjustment and resistance to being neither and both Filipino and American." -John Horton, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UCLA "Filipino Americans rank as the second largest Asian-American population in the USA, following Chinese Americans. This book draws from the author's ethnographic studies of Filipino-American communities in Los Angeles and San Diego,California, in the early 1990s. Bonus focuses on commercial establishments such as markets, community centers, and ethnic newspapers as sites where Filipino Americans publicly construct their ethnic identities in relation to the historical and contemporary conditions they face as members of US society. He contends that Filipino-American identity formation reflects two forces: a need to respond to and resist historical and institutional rendering of invisibility, exploitation, silencing and racial constructing, and a desire to claim 'space' within the category 'American' on their own terms." -SAGE Race Relations Abastracts "Bonus combines oral interviews, multi-disciplinary theories, history and ethnographic fieldwork and provides sophisticated and through analyses of his findings. What is refreshing is not only the telling Taglish (i.e., a combination of Tagalog and English) responses by interviewees to his questions, but his scholarly commitment to the interviewees of the study." -Pacific Reader