Filipino American History Month: Books

A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin's murder. Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story.

In western countries, including the United States, foreign-trained nurses constitute a crucial labor supply. Far and away the largest number of these nurses come from the Philippines. Why is it that a developing nation with a comparatively greater need for trained medical professionals sends so many of its nurses to work in wealthier countries? Catherine Ceniza Choy engages this question through an examination of the unique relationship between the professionalization of nursing and the twentieth-century migration of Filipinos to 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.

Tagalog for Beginners is a straightforward and user-friendly guide to the Tagalog language. It is the book to help you learn Tagalog (Filipino) on your own, quickly and accurately--whether you're traveling to the Philippines for a vacation or a business trip, or you have ties to the sizeable Tagalog-speaking community in the U.S., or you're merely a language lover.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, blue-collar Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, lived a hardscrabble existence. Immigrant parents endured blatant racism, sporadic violence, and poverty. At the same time, their US-born children faced more subtle forms of racism, such as the low expectations of teachers and counselors in the public school system. In this collection of autobiographical essays, acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Peter Bacho centers the experiences of the Pinoy generation that grew up in Seattle's multiethnic neighborhoods, from the Central Area to Beacon Hill to Rainier Valley.

U.S. intervention in the Philippines began with the little-known 1899 Philippine-American War. Using the war as its departure point in analyzing U.S.-Philippine relations, Vestiges of War retrieves this willfully forgotten event and places it where it properly belongs--as the catalyst that led to increasing U.S. interventionism and expansionism in the Asia Pacific region.

Stanley Karnow Karnow goes back 500 years to paint a fascinating portrait of Philippine history, ultimately focusing on the U.S.'s imperial experience in the islands. Here is the truth about America's attempt to remake the Philippines "in our image"--complete with American political, educational, and cultural institutions

"The experience of the Philippines from the 1960s to the 1980s vividly illustrates the interplay between wealth and power in the course of economic development. During this period, the benefits of economic growth conspicuously failed to trickle down. Broad sectors of the Filipino people experienced deepening poverty.

An A-Z encyclopedia covering the principal battles and campaigns, key military and political figures, and the political maneuvering during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance.

An often overshadowed event in American military history, the Spanish-American War began as a humanitarian effort on the part of the United States to provide military assistance for the liberation of Cuba from Spanish domination. At the time, no one knew that this simple premise would result in an American empire.

After years of occupying a vexed position in the American academy, Philippine studies has come into its own, emerging as a trenchant and dynamic space of inquiry. Filipino Studies is a field-defining collection of vibrant voices, critical perspectives, and provocative ideas about the cultural, political, and economic state of the Philippines and its diaspora.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.

Filipino farmworkers sat down in the grape fields of Delano, California, in 1965 and began the strike that brought about a dramatic turn in the long history of farm labor struggles in California. Their efforts led to the creation of the United Farm Workers union under Cesar Chavez, with Philip Vera Cruz as its vice-president and highest-ranking Filipino officer.

When Asian Americans are discussed in the media the reference is often to people of Chinese or Japanese descent. However, the largest Asian American ethnic group is Filipino, a group of which little is known or written despite its long-standing history with the United States. This interdisciplinary analysis rectifies this dearth of information by addressing ethnic identity, the impact of different colonizations on ethnic identity, personal and family relationships, mental health, race, and racism.

Is race only about the color of your skin? In The Latinos of Asia, Anthony Christian Ocampo shows that what "color" you are depends largely on your social context. Filipino Americans, for example, helped establish the Asian American movement and are classified by the U.S. Census as Asian. But the legacy of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines means that they share many cultural characteristics with Latinos, such as last names, religion, and language. Thus, Filipinos' "color"--their sense of connection with other racial groups--changes depending on their social context.

Lila's little town of Shady Palms has resurrected the Miss Teen Shady Palms Beauty Pageant, which she won many years ago - a fact that serves as a wedge between Lila and her cousin slash rival, Bernadette. But when the head judge of the pageant is murdered and Bernadette becomes the main suspect, the two must put aside their differences and solve the case - because it looks like one of them might be next.

This book is the first to look beyond traditional metropolitan hubs of settlement to explore the migration of Filipino women in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Based on interviews with first-generation immigrant Filipino women and temporary foreign workers, this book explores how the shared experience of migration forms the basis for new identities, communities, transnational ties, and multiple levels of belonging in Canada.

The Last Language on Earth is an ethnographic history of the disputed Eskayan language, spoken today by an isolated upland community living on the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. After Eskaya people were first 'discovered' in 1980, visitors described the group as a lost tribe preserving a unique language and writing system. Others argued that the Eskaya were merely members of a utopian rural cult who had invented their own language and script.

In Insurgent Communities, Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history.

The debut collection from a vibrant, streetwise voice: Winner of the 2002 Members' Choice Award from the Asian American Writers Workshop. Patrick Rosal's poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shaped their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longingsexual and filialand on the poet's Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.

A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines, Monstress heralds the arrival of a breathtaking new talent on the literary scene: Lysley Tenorio. Already the worthy recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Stegner Fellowship, Tenorio brilliantly explores the need to find connections, the melancholy of isolation, and the sometimes suffocating ties of family in tales that range from a California army base to a steamy moviehouse in Manilla, to the dangerous false glitter of Hollywood.

These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere--and, sometimes, turning back again.

A new collection of stories, essays, poems, artwork incorporating elements of traditional Filipino myths by contemporary Filipino authors from the United States and the Philippines.

"This pioneering book is an empirically grounded, theoretically informed, and insightful ethnographic account of work regimes in call centers ... It is a sophisticated discussion of intricately connected work components constituting a 'transnational service assembly line,' the spaces for and expressions of resistance and reflexivity within a highly standardized and heavily regulated work environment, and the 'outsourceable selves' of agents, responding as unseen products of the global call center enterprise, to external imperatives." - Maria Cynthia Rose Banzon-Bautista

A RUSA Award-winning novel! The first book in a new culinary cozy series full of sharp humor and delectable dishes-one that might just be killer.... When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, her life seems to be following all the typical rom-com tropes. She's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's failing restaurant, and she has to deal with a group of matchmaking aunties who shower her with love and judgment. But when a notoriously nasty food critic (who happens to be her ex-boyfriend) drops dead moments after a confrontation with Lila, her life quickly swerves from a Nora Ephron romp to an Agatha Christie case.

Immerse yourself in a fantasy world of Filipino myth, magic, and supernatural suspense! Lambana--the realm of supernatural fairies known as Diwata--has fallen, and the Magic Prohibition Act has been enacted. To add to his troubles, there's something wrong with Conrad's heart and only magic can prolong his life. He teams up with Ignacio, a well-connected friend who promises to hook him up with the Diwata and their magical treatments--a quest that's not only risky but highly illegal!

When two cultures collide, the results are explosive--a graphic novel rom-com like no other! Halina Mitchell is half-Filipino, half-American. She's also a native New Yorker--sophisticated, beautiful and confident. On her first visit to the Philippines, she arrives in Manila to reconnect with relatives only to encounter a world of surprises that turn all her assumptions on their head.