Excerpt from Chapter 1 for The Latinos of Asia

1

In the Spring of 2011, I was in my last year of the sociology PhD program at UCLA. I’d been in the program for nearly seven years—long enough to have finished law school twice with time to spare. Like most graduate students, I wasn’t making much money. Working as a college teaching assistant for the majority of my twenties hardly brought in the big bucks. So when I walked by this flyer in the UCLA sociology building, I thought I’d hit the jackpot:

ALCOHOL STUDY
Do you drink alcohol regularly?
Are you Asian American?
For completion of the study, participants would be
compensated up to $215.

This study was tailor made for me. Given the typical stresses of PhD life, my fellow grad students and I were no strangers to the local bars, and as a Filipino, my ethnic roots were from Asia. This would be the easiest two hundred bucks I’d ever make in my life, I thought.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I called the study coordinator to set up an appointment for the following Monday, but before I hung up the phone, I mentioned that I was Filipino. This was when everything went downhill.

“I’m sorry, but you’re not eligible for the study,” the coordinator said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because we can only have Chinese, Japanese, and Korean participants in the study.”

“But I’m Filipino. Your flyer said it wanted Asian American participants.”

“Yes, but we need a genetically similar sample.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

I knew the genetics argument was bogus. Anyone who’s taken Introduction to Sociology knows that race is a social construction, not a genetic one. People, not biology, determine the meaning of racial categories. Besides, there is a consensus within the scientific community that with respect to genetics, “all human beings, regardless of race, are 99.9 percent the same.”¹ Even though I had science on my side, the coordinator wouldn’t budge. By her definition, I wasn’t Asian American. I hung up the phone without bothering to say good-bye.

What was the big deal? Surely I could’ve shelled out a few bucks from my own wallet for a few drinks at happy hour. And so what if I wasn’t going to make two hundred dollars? This was my last year of grad school, and within a few months, I’d be working as an actual college professor (finally). But this wasn’t the main issue. What upset me most was that a researcher from a top university felt at liberty to exclude Filipinos from a study about Asian Americans. This researcher had no idea what she was talking about. Besides the plethora of scientific articles that have debunked the relationship between race and genetics, I also had the history books on my side. Any Asian American historian can tell you that Filipinos played a central role in the creation of the Asian American identity.² In fact, the term Asian American did not even exist until the late 1960s, when Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino activists coined the identity as an ideological strategy to advocate for their civil rights.

Although I was angry, I wasn’t entirely surprised. For all intents and purposes, there are many out there who forget that Filipinos are, in fact, Asian American.³ Most would also agree that when people hear the word Asian, Filipinos are rarely the first people that come to mind. This seems baffling considering the size of the Filipino population in America. There are more than 3.5 million Filipinos in the country, but it’s as if nobody knows we’re here.⁴ Most Americans have no clue that Filipinos are the third-largest immigrant group behind Mexicans and Chinese. In California, the nation’s leading destination state for immigrants, Filipinos outnumber every other Asian American group. Despite their size, people would be hard pressed to name anything distinctly Filipino: try naming a Filipino dish, a Filipino public figure, a Filipino musician. Most people would be stumped (interesting aside: many Filipino musicians have been marketed by record labels as Latino artists).⁵ When it comes to their place in America—and in the Asian American community—how did Filipinos become an afterthought?

This is the puzzle I hope to unravel with this book. Over the course of three years, I interviewed more than eighty Filipino American young adults living in Los Angeles. Our conversations tackled a variety of questions: What was it like growing up in an immigrant family? What was it like growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles? Who did you hang out with in your neighborhood? What were your interactions like with the people you went to school with? What was college like? Who do you feel Filipinos have most in common with?

Of course, these conversations took their fair share of twists and turns, but my aim was always central: I wanted to know how Filipinos carved out their racial place within American society. I was especially interested in studying Filipinos in Los Angeles, because the region, in many respects, foreshadows the America of tomorrow. Immigration from Latin America and Asia is reshaping the racial landscape of this country. While not discounting the continued legacy of the black-white divide, the United States is surely becoming a more multiethnic society. In Los Angeles, for instance, Latinos and Asian Americans now make up a collective majority. This book investigates how Filipinos understand their identity vis-à-vis these two fast-growing communities. In other words, I am interested in panethnic moments, or those times when Filipinos have felt a sense of collective identity with either Latinos or other Asians. That Filipinos share historical and cultural connections with both Latinos and Asians makes this an even more interesting puzzle to investigate.

Beyond the Filipino case, studying these panethnic moments reveals the constellation of institutional, social, and cultural factors needed for people from different ethnic backgrounds to develop a sense of common identity. Along the same lines, when panethnic moments don’t happen, we gain a better understanding of the conditions when identities fail to resonate. My hope is that the puzzling case of Filipino Americans provides the proverbial “black box” that can reveal the unwritten rules of race in an increasingly diverse America.

Understanding how people fit into the American racial landscape matters tremendously. Race permeates nearly every aspect of our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. It affects which neighborhood we live in, which schools we attend, our chances of finishing our education, our likelihood of getting a job, and whether we’re paid well and get promoted at our job.⁶ And these are just the socioeconomic outcomes. Race also affects who we become friends with and who we decide to marry.⁷ It influences our physical and mental health, our musical interests, and what we do in our free time.⁸ Race also affects how we judge other people—whether we think someone is a trustworthy person, a decent neighbor, an intelligent student, a hardworking employee, a capable leader, and even a great lover.⁹ In other words, race is ubiquitous.

Immigration and the American Racial Landscape

Throughout its history, America has had an obsession with categorizing its inhabitants by race. From the early days of the republic, our nation’s founders made it clear that the constitutional rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applied only to whites, and not to African Americans and American Indians. By the nineteenth century, the US legal system had implemented the “one-drop” rule—the notion that someone with even one-sixteenth African blood was considered legally black, even if that individual appeared white to the outside world. For much of American history, race essentially determined one’s life chances.¹⁰ It determined whether one could own land, attend certain schools, live in certain areas, marry certain individuals, or vote in government elections. White Americans, in particular, have had a vested interest in maintaining these rules of race. Race has provided them with an ideological tool to systematically maintain economic, political, and cultural privileges at the expense of blacks and other nonwhites.¹¹

Immigration has historically complicated American racial paradigms. How did immigrants fit themselves into America’s racial classification system? At times, this choice was out of their hands. Many of the early European immigrants who made the trek across the Atlantic during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were poor and uneducated. They spoke different languages, practiced different religions, and had distinct ethnic traditions. Although they were European and legally categorized as white, they weren’t always treated as white. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant descendants of the early colonial settlers saw new European immigrants as “social and cultural threats to the American way of life.”¹² In their eyes, these newcomers, who were mainly from southern, central, and eastern Europe, threatened American job security, public health, and patriotism.¹³ European immigrants were even likened to African Americans, who occupied the bottom rung of the racial hierarchy. For example, there was once a time when Irish Americans were commonly referred to as “[negroes] turned inside out.”¹⁴

Over time, however, Europeans eventually “became” white. The industrial economy allowed even the most poorly educated of European immigrants to achieve middle-class status within a generation.¹⁵ When the United States closed its borders to immigrants in the 1920s, it became more difficult for European immigrants to maintain the languages and cultures that distinguished them from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant groups that once discriminated against them.¹⁶ Without a continuing influx of Europeans coming to the United States, the ethnic markers that once triggered their racial otherness were no longer being replenished.¹⁷ European immigrants were also asserting their whiteness by actively distancing themselves from African Americans. By the middle of the twentieth century, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of early European immigrants blended seamlessly into the white middle-class mainstream.¹⁸ Since then, they have continued to embrace their whiteness as a marker of privilege and status within their workplaces, neighborhoods, and everyday interactions.¹⁹ Sociologists cited these experiences as proof that immigrants and their children would “acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes” of native-born white Americans.²⁰ They argued that assimilation was “inevitable.”²¹

Unfortunately, claiming whiteness was never a viable strategy of social mobility for non-European immigrants who arrived during this period. In the same historical moment that Europeans’ status as whites went from probationary to full-fledged, immigrants from Mexico, Japan, and India had also attempted to legally argue that they too were white.²² Whether they were trying to gain American citizenship or attend desegregated schools, their attempts were usually denied. Judges cited everything from phenotype to commonsense understandings of whiteness to connections with the home country as reasons to deny their requests.²³ Immigrants from Mexico and Asia were never seen as white, and for most of the twentieth century, they were not granted the same basic privileges as their European-descent counterparts.²⁴

By the 1960s, America had entered a new era of immigration. Part of the change had to do with the transformation of the American economy. With the postwar period came the end of American industrialism, which for decades had served as the economic stepping-stone for newcomers to this country. The industrial and factory jobs that had catapulted Europeans from poor to professional within a generation were rapidly disappearing. The US government decided to reopen its borders to immigration in 1965, but the collapse of American industry meant that the opportunities for upward mobility were severely compromised.²⁵ The American labor market became an hourglass economy—there were jobs in the professional ranks and low-wage service sector, but fewer and fewer in the middle. As a result, millions of immigrants who arrived after 1965 had to settle for jobs with essentially no chance for occupational mobility. The majority of occupations available to immigrants after 1965 had no built-in opportunity structures. Low-wage service jobs, hard physical labor, and domestic work provided little chance for millions of immigrants and their children to move up in society.²⁶

The literal face of immigration today has changed. Immigrants who have arrived since 1965 are generally not coming from European societies. The overwhelming majority of them are from Latin America and Asia. Unlike their European counterparts of yesteryear, most of these immigrants do not have the privilege of white skin. For them and their children, assimilation into the mainstream is not a given. No matter how middle class they become, how well they speak English, and how familiar they are with American ways of life, race marks them as foreign.²⁷ Sociologists now believe that the continual arrival of immigrants from these regions means that even the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of today’s newcomers could be subject to immigrant backlash, which is unlike the case of later-generation Europeans.²⁸ In short, immigrants today may become Americans, but they almost certainly will never become white.

But maybe that’s OK. Given the dramatic changes in the demographic composition and political climate of the United States, immigrants and their children have had less of a need to become white to thrive in this society. Undoubtedly, whiteness brings privileges across nearly every political, cultural, and economic arena of American life.²⁹ All anyone needs to do is look at the racial composition of Congress, American television shows, and Fortune 500 CEOs (which are, by the way, 85, 84, and 97 percent white, respectively).³⁰ Even so, communities of color in the United States have asserted their economic and political autonomy in unprecedented ways. Whiteness is not always necessary for upward mobility in the same way it once was. For example, when post-1965 immigrants could not find work in the mainstream labor market, they developed thriving ethnic economies.³¹ They established businesses and community organizations that provided not only jobs but also the infrastructure of support to help them get on their feet in their adopted country. In these spaces, ethnicity was an asset, not a liability. Immigrants came to rely on their cultural sensibilities and ethnic networks to achieve middle-class status.³²

Undoubtedly, the 1960s civil rights movement also reshaped how people came to value minority identities. The 1960s gave rise to race-based social activism. Drawing inspiration from African American civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, other people of color in the United States began using their minority identity as a strategy to galvanize their communities to fight for equal rights. Ethnic groups that once considered themselves separate came together under panethnic identities.³³ For the first time in American history, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos began identifying as “Asian Americans.” Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans began seeing themselves as “Hispanic,” and a few years later, as “Latino.”³⁴ In the decades since the civil rights movement, these new panethnic identities crystallized and became part of the American racial imaginary. This was largely a result of the efforts of political activists, cultural institutions, media organizations, and ethnic studies departments, which collectively cultivated a sense of shared peoplehood among groups that might otherwise have seen themselves as culturally distinct. Today, people take terms like Asian American and Latino for granted, but the reality is that these identities only came into being within the past half century. The additions of these new panethnic categories are evidence of the increasing racial heterogeneity of the United States. As such, sociologists today are less concerned about whether immigrants and their children will become American and more interested in understanding which “segment” of society they will assimilate into.³⁵

Ever since Asian American and Latino have become part of our everyday vernacular, there have been debates about where Filipinos fit in. For the past fifty years, Filipinos have been part of the Asian American community. In the late 1960s, Filipino activists worked alongside Chinese and Japanese Americans to establish Asian American organizations, publications, and cultural groups.³⁶ However, the political implications of Asian American identity have given way to more cultural meanings. Most people do not think of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s when they hear the term Asian American. They tend to associate Asian American identity with East Asian cultures, which have historically been portrayed as inherently foreign to Western culture.³⁷ Many Filipinos in turn have internalized this Orientalist understanding of Asian American identity. While this is obviously problematic, Filipinos nonetheless have juxtaposed their culture to those of other Asians.³⁸ Filipinos understand that nearly four centuries of Western colonization (by the Spanish and the Americans) have influenced their country in ways unparalleled in other Asian societies. And because race is often a matter of culture in most people’s minds, some Filipinos feel that their categorization as Asian American is little more than a “geographical accident.”³⁹ At the moment, though, the presence of Filipinos within Asian American organizations remains strong. Filipinos are active members of Asian American political organizations, academic associations, and cultural performance groups throughout the country.⁴⁰

Because of the history of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, there are some who believe that Filipinos should realign their panethnic allegiances toward Latinos. As a result of their shared colonial past, Filipinos and Latinos have cultural commonalities that would enhance such a coalition.⁴¹ Throughout the twentieth century, there have been hints that Filipinos could, under the right circumstances, function within Latino panethnic coalitions. When Latino activists and American bureaucrats became invested in promoting Hispanic panethnic identity, there were debates about who should be included. Some suggested that Spanish surnames or Spanish colonial history should determine panethnic membership,⁴² a litmus test that Filipinos would handily pass. Historically, Filipinos have played key roles in some of the most notable Latino social movements in American history. During the same era that Filipino activists were building the foundations of an Asian American coalition, Filipino laborers were helping to establish the United Farmworkers with Chicano civil rights leader César Chávez and other Mexican American agricultural workers.⁴³ The League of United Latin American Citizens, a national organization dedicated to fighting anti-Hispanic discrimination, at one point had all-Filipino chapters in different parts of the country.⁴⁴

Even before the rise of panethnic social movements, Filipinos were linked in with Mexican Americans and other Latinos. One of the first sociological studies to look at Latino immigration experiences from a comparative perspective, Spanish-Speaking Groups in the United States, included a chapter specifically on Filipinos. Filipinos also became part of Latino communities through intermarriage. Because the earliest waves of Filipino immigrants were overwhelmingly male, many ended up marrying Mexican women and forming “Mexipino” families and communities.⁴⁵ These historical and cultural overlaps have prompted many to develop a shared sense of commonality with Latinos in this country.⁴⁶ Despite their shared history, Filipinos generally do not identify as Hispanic or Latino. Nonetheless, history tells us that this possibility cannot necessarily be ruled out.

Notes

1. Bliss, Catherine. Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012, 1. The first quote is from a speech by former President Bill Clinton in which he is reiterating the findings of Craig Venter, an American biochemist and geneticist, and Francis Collins, an American geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health. The second is from Francis Collins from his 2001 publication in the journal Cancer, which he coauthored with Monique Mansoura. Collins, Francis S., and Monique K. Mansoura. 2001. “The Human Genome Project: Revealing the Shared Inheritance of All Humankind.” Cancer 91.1: 221–25.

2. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

3. Bonus, Rick, and Dina Maramba. The “Other” Students: Filipino Americans, Education, and Power. Scottsdale, AZ: Information Age Publishing, 2013; Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: New York University Press, 2009; Ocampo, Anthony C. “Are Second Generation Filipinos ‘Becoming’ Asian American or Latino? Historical Colonialism, Culture, and Panethnic Identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37.3 (2014): 425–45; Rondilla, Joanne. “The Filipino Question in Asia and the Pacific: Rethinking Regional Origins in Diaspora,” in Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific, ed. Paul Spickard, Joanne Rondilla, and Debbie Wright, 56–66. Manoa: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002.

4. This figure includes both legal residents (approximately 3.5 million) and undocumented immigrants (approximately 300,000). US Census 2010; Golash Boza, Tanya. Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

5. Pisares, Elizabeth. “Do You (Mis)Recognize Me?” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, ed. A. Tiongson, E. Gutierrez, and R. Gutierrez, 172–98. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

6. Hayward, Mark D., Samantha Friedman, and Hsinmu Chen. “Career Trajectories and Older Men’s Retirement.” Journal of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 53B.2 (1998): S91–S103; Lareau, Annette. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben Rumbaut. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001; Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben Rumbaut. Immigrant America. Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006; Zhou, Min, and Yang Sao Xiong. “The Multifaceted American Experiences of the Children of Asian Immigrants: Lessons for Segmented Assimilation.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.6 (2005): 1119–52.

7. Bulanda, Jennifer R., and Susan L. Brown. “Race-Ethnic Differences in Marital Quality and Divorce.” Social Science Research 36 (2007): 945–67; Carter, Prudence. Keepin’ It Real: School Success in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Waters, Mary, and Tomás Jiménez. “Immigrant Assimilation: Current Trends and Directions for Future Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 105–25.

8. Block, Jason P., Richard A. Scribner, and Karen B. DeSalvo. “Fast Food, Race/Ethnicity, and Income: A Geographical Analysis.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 27 (2004): 211–17; Kao, Grace. “Asian Americans as Model Minorities? A Look at Their Academic Performance.” American Journal of Education 103.2 (1995): 121–59; Kao, Grace, and Marta Tienda. “Educational Aspirations of Minority Youth.” American Journal of Education 106.3 (1998): 349–84; Leonard, David J., and C. Richard King. Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Warikoo, Natasha. Balancing Acts: Youth Culture in the Global City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; Wolf, Diane. “Family Secrets: Transnational Struggles Among Children of Filipino Immigrants.” Sociological Perspectives 40.3 (1997): 457–82.

9. Alim, H. Samy. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; Baugh, John. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Feliciano, Cynthia, Rennie Lee, and Belinda Robnett. “Racial Boundaries Among Latinos: Evidence from Internet Daters’ Racial Preferences” Social Problems 58.2 (2011): 189–212; Ochoa, Gilda L. Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; Robnett, Belinda, and Cynthia Feliciano. “Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters.” Social Forces 89.3 (2011): 807–28; Pager, Devah. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Waldinger, Roger, and Michael Lichter. How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

10. Wilson, William Julius. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

11. McDermott, Monica. Working Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

12. Jaret, Charles. “Troubled by Newcomers: Anti-Immigration Attitudes and Action During Two Eras of Mass Immigration to the United States.” Journal of American Ethnic History 18.3 (1999): 9–39, at 28.

13. Foner, Nancy. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

14. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1997, 49.

15. Ignatiev 1997; Roediger, David. Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic Books, 2005; Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore. New York: Back Bay, 1998.

16. Jiménez, Tomás. Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; Warner, Lloyd W., and Leo Srole. The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1945.

17. Jiménez 2010.

18. Alba, Richard. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990; Waters, Mary. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

19. McDermott 2006.

20. Park, Robert, and E. W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. 1921. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, 735.

21. Park, Robert. Race and Culture. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950.

22. Haney-Lopez, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996; Wilson, Steven. “Brown over ‘Other White’: Mexican Americans’ Legal Litigation Strategy in School Desegregation Lawsuits.” Law and History Review 21.1 (2003): 145–94.

23. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

24. Baldoz, Rick. The Third Asiatic Invasion: Migration and Empire in Filipino America, 1898–1946. New York: New York University Press, 2011; Ngai 2004.

25. Baldoz 2011. Restrictive immigration laws mainly applied to Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans; however, immigration from other parts of Europe and the Western Hemisphere was still permitted. The Hart-Celler Act eliminated the restrictions targeted against the former. It should be noted that while the 1924 Immigration Act did not technically restrict immigrants from Mexico and Latin America, there were numerous other measures aimed at keeping them out, such as literacy tests.

26. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; Portes, Alejandro, and Min Zhou. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74–96; Waldinger and Lichter 2002.

27. Ochoa 2004; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Tuan, Mia. Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

28. Jiménez 2010; Tuan 1998.

29. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001; McDermott 2006.

30. Covert, Bryce. “Only White, Male CEOs Make the Big Bucks.” Think Progress, http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/10/22/2816041/white-men-ceos/; Jha, Rega. “Race and Gender Diversity on Television vs. in the United States.” BuzzFeed, http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/race-and-gender-diversity-on-television-vs-in-the-united-sta#2p11587; Murse, Tom. “113th Congress: Information and Details About the 2013–14 Session.” U.S. Politics, http://uspolitics.about.com/od/thecongress/a/113th-Congress.htm.

31. Zhou, Min. Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998; Portes and Rumbaut 2006.

32. Zhou, Min. “How Neighborhoods Matter for Immigrant Children: The Formation of Educational Resources in Chinatown, Koreatown, and Pico Union, Los Angeles.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35.7 (2009): 1153–79.

33. Espiritu 1992.

34. Espiritu 1992; Mora, G. Cristina. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

35. Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993.

36. Espiritu 1992.

37. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978; Tuan 1998.

38. Espiritu 1992.

39. Ibid., 107.

40. Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

41. Ibid., 172.

42. Mora 2014.

43. Mabalon, Dawn. Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013; Scharlin, Craig, and Lilia Villanueva. Phillip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

44. “LULAC Ranks Grow, Yet Gains Superficial.” Houston Chronicle, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/704840/posts.

45. Guevarra, Rudy. Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

46. Ocampo 2014.