Filipino Americans have had an important presence in the Central Valley, including during the UFW labor movement, in Stockton's Little Manila neighborhood, and in the Bay Area.
First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.
Filled with chop suey houses, gambling dens, and dance halls, Little Manila was the area in Stockton notoriously called Skid Row, but it was also the closest thing Filipinos had to a hometown. Narrated by famed Filipino-American producer, Dean Devlin (Independence Day, The Patriot) this documentary tells the immigrant story as Filipinos experienced it.
This PBS documentary highlights the importance of Stockton's Little Manila area as a center of Filipino American community in the United States, before it was effectively dismantled by a new, crosstown expressway.
Filipino Americans are among the largest groups of Asian Americans as well immigrant groups in the United States. As reflected in this collection, their lives represent the diversity of the immigrant experience and their narratives are a way to understand ethnic identity and Filipino American history. Men and women, old and young, middle and working class, first and second generation, all openly discuss their changing sense of identity, the effects of generational and cultural differences on their families, and the role of community involvement in their lives. Pre- and post-1965 immigrants share their experiences, from the working students who came before WWII, to the manongs in the field, to the stewards and officers in the U.S. Navy, to the "brain drain" professionals, to the Filipinos born and raised in the United States. As Yen Le Espiritu writes in the Introduction, "each of the narratives reveals ways in which Filipino American identity has been and continues to be shaped by a colonial history and a white-dominated culture. It is through recognizing how profoundly race has affected their lives that Filipino Americans forge their ethnic identities--identities that challenge stereotypes and undermine practices of cultural domination." In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
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.