Critical Filipinx Studies – serie

A transformative look at the lives of Filipina care workers and their mutual aid practicesMigrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their own health to provide care in facilities and private homes throughout the United States. What draws them to such exploitative, low-wage work, and how do they care for themselves? In Caring for Caregivers, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez centers the perspectives of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2021, illuminating their transnational experiences and their strategies and practices to help each other navigate the crumbling US health-care system.These caregivers routinely endure arduous labor conditions, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, abuse, chronic injuries, and illness—and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them further to the frontlines of care and risk. Despite this, they found ways to forge bonds and build networks that provided material and emotional support. Drawing on surveys, individual interviews, and caregivers’ stories as told through kuwentuhan, a Philippine cultural practice of collective storytelling, this book offers an intimate examination of intergenerational care work in the Filipino American community.

A transformative look at the lives of Filipina care workers and their mutual aid practicesMigrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their own health to provide care in facilities and private homes throughout the United States. What draws them to such exploitative, low-wage work, and how do they care for themselves? In Caring for Caregivers, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez centers the perspectives of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2021, illuminating their transnational experiences and their strategies and practices to help each other navigate the crumbling US health-care system.These caregivers routinely endure arduous labor conditions, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, abuse, chronic injuries, and illness—and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them further to the frontlines of care and risk. Despite this, they found ways to forge bonds and build networks that provided material and emotional support. Drawing on surveys, individual interviews, and caregivers’ stories as told through kuwentuhan, a Philippine cultural practice of collective storytelling, this book offers an intimate examination of intergenerational care work in the Filipino American community.

How migrants imagined a country through their acts of returnWhat does it mean to go back home, especially when “home” is shaped by conquest, labor, and longing? This question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism, capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. Through vivid storytelling, Adrian De Leon traces how Filipinos, both at home and overseas, have both shaped the societies they’ve settled in and transformed the very idea of the Philippines itself. By following the emergence of the Filipino return migrant (balikbayan), De Leon explores how statecraft in the Philippines—from the late Spanish period through the post-1946 independent state—attempted to co-opt value from migrant communities. Balikbayan shows how diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations were central to the development of a modern Philippine nation-state, through enabling the continued conquest of the islands’ frontiers, and sustaining the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands were reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearned to connect with their roots. Compiled through deep and thoughtful research in community archives, the itinerant histories brought to life in Balikbayan coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland.

How migrants imagined a country through their acts of returnWhat does it mean to go back home, especially when “home” is shaped by conquest, labor, and longing? This question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism, capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. Through vivid storytelling, Adrian De Leon traces how Filipinos, both at home and overseas, have both shaped the societies they’ve settled in and transformed the very idea of the Philippines itself. By following the emergence of the Filipino return migrant (balikbayan), De Leon explores how statecraft in the Philippines—from the late Spanish period through the post-1946 independent state—attempted to co-opt value from migrant communities. Balikbayan shows how diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations were central to the development of a modern Philippine nation-state, through enabling the continued conquest of the islands’ frontiers, and sustaining the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands were reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearned to connect with their roots. Compiled through deep and thoughtful research in community archives, the itinerant histories brought to life in Balikbayan coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland.

Radicals across borders unite against empire, dictatorship, and enduring legacies of oppressionReframing Filipino American history through the radical politics of its diaspora, Joy Sales uncovers how generations of Filipinos, scattered across the Pacific, forged transnational movements that confronted US empire and Philippine authoritarianism. From the sugarcane strikes of the 1920s to the student uprisings of the 1970s, from the anti-martial law movement that challenged Ferdinand Marcos to the twenty-first-century campaigns against Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, this book reveals how Filipino American activists continually linked their struggles to those in the homeland.Drawing on archival research and oral histories, Sales illuminates a genealogy of activists—workers, students, writers, and organizers—who insisted that liberation in the Philippines was inseparable from struggles abroad. Their campaigns against militarism, dictatorship, and capitalism were not only oppositional but generative: They created new organizations, solidarities, and visions of democracy rooted in the Global South.Foregrounding grassroots organizing, We Are Revolution demonstrates that Filipino radicalism has always been more than a domestic concern; it is a global story of empire and resistance. This sweeping account shows how diasporic Filipino radicals transformed exile into revolution and how their unfinished fight continues to resonate across generations.

From cannery to construction site, workers forged solidarity in shared strugglesAcross the Pacific Northwest in the late twentieth century, Black construction workers, Filipino cannery workers, and a wide network of community activists built a bold experiment in multiracial labor organizing. No Separate Peace tells the story of this movement and the political vision that sustained it: solidarity forged in struggle against racial capitalism, imperial power, and workplace exploitation.Beginning in the early 1970s, activists in Seattle and Alaska created a worker-governed legal office, organized campaigns against discrimination and corruption, and built grassroots alliances linking labor struggles to global movements for liberation. These organizers insisted that solidarity was not a slogan or aspiration but a demanding political practice—one that required sustained collaboration across racial, national, and organizational boundaries.Drawing on oral histories, activist archives, and movement newspapers, Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda traces how Black and Filipino workers developed shared strategies of organizing while confronting the pressures of neoliberal economic restructuring, state repression, and internal debates within labor movements. Their collaborations produced new infrastructures of solidarity, connecting local organizing in the Pacific Northwest to decolonial struggles across the world.By placing workers of color at the center of a global history of activism, No Separate Peace offers a powerful account of how solidarity is collectively built through the labor of shared struggle.