Introduction

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

Filipinos have a history of presence and settlement in the United States that goes back several centuries. Every October, Filipino community-based as well as youth and student groups organize activities across the United States to cel- ebrate and commemorate that history. The month of October was designated “Filipino American History Month” by its originator, the Filipino American National Historical Society (fanhs), not only because it is the birth month of Filipino American labor leader, Larry Itliong1 (Itliong was born on October 25th), but because October 18, 1587 marks the first known landing of Filipinos on the shores of (what is now) the continental United States at Morro Bay, Cali- fornia. Filipinos at the time were Spanish colonial subjects and some com- prised the landing party of the Nuestra Señora de Buena Esperanza galleon. One Filipino American commentator notes that the landing was thirty-three years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth rock. This narrative along with the fact that groups like fanhs worked to ensure the marking of the site with a commemorative plaque and struggled for the recognition of Filipino American History Month more broadly are but a few examples of the kinds of invest- ments Filipino Americans have in staking a claim to Americanness and belonging in America.2 Other historiographical and place-making practices and strategies that Fili- pino Americans engage in include texts like the now-classic, Filipinos: Forgot- ten Asian Americans by fahns founder Fred Cordova and similar books, often authored by fahns members, such as those published through Arcadia Press, which document Filipino community formation in places like the East (San Francisco) Bay or Jersey City through pictorial essays.3 Other examples include the historic preservation campaigns Filipino Americans have led in communities like Stockton or Los Angeles.4 Fights to establish Historic Filipinotowns,

1 Itliong was one of the co-founders of the United Farm Workers (ufw), the formation of which is often attributed primarily to Chicanx labor leaders, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. 2 Emil Guillermo, “Filipinos were first-to America,” Inquiret.net, October 18, 2017, https://usa .inquirer.net/7369/filipinos-first-america. 3 Eric Reyes, “Fictions of Return in Filipino America,” Social Text 29, no. 2 (2011): 99–117. 4 Cindy I-Fen Cheng, “Identities and Places: On Writing the History of Filipinotown, Los Ange- les,” Journal of Asian American Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–33. Also see,Michelle G. Magalong and Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, “Cultural Preservation Policy and Asian Americans and Pacific

2 Rodriguez

Little Manilas and other “P-towns” are significant to Filipino Americans because, “places function as historical representations to shape identity formations.”5 Furthermore, they become a means by which communities, “re- ceive official recognition of civic contributions” and by extension, these campaigns become a means by which communities civically engage in local and ultimately national political life in the United States.6 Yet what is striking about the essays that comprise Filipino American Trans- national Activism is that many Filipino Americans, those who were born and/ or raised for a great majority of their lives in the United States, forge and sus- tain multiple sets of connections—imaginative, emotional, cultural and per- haps most significantly, political connections—with the Philippines. Though they may have been born in the United States and rarely (if at all) traveled to the Philippines or may have come to the United States as children or youth and spent most of their upbringing in the United States (i.e. they are members of the 1.5 generation), or their parents were actually born in the United States (making them third or later generation Filipino Americans), the “homeland” figures as an important site for identity formation and subjectivity for Filipino Americans—a site through which they make sense of themselves and even orient their politics. The scholars who have contributed to this anthology track Filipino Ameri- cans’ transnational and diasporic identities. This anthology is especially fo- cused on Filipino Americans’ transnational and diasporic activism. According to the research detailed in the chapters that follow, some Filipino Americans are engaged in political projects aimed at transforming both American and Philippine society simultaneously. In other cases, Filipino Americans espouse a politics that outright rejects conventional terms of belonging in the United States and alternatively stake a claim of belonging in the Philippines, albeit a Philippines disentangled and ultimately severed from its neocolonial roots.

Islanders: Reimagining Historic Preservation in Asian American and Pacific Islander Com- munities,” aapi Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community 14, no. 2 (2016): 105–116. 5 Cheng, “Identities and Places,” 28. 6 Magalong and Mabalon, “Cultural Preservation Policy,” 105. Even when Filipino Americans are not necessarily engaged in historic preservation campaigns, as Rick Bonus argues, “public constructions of Filipino American identities are negotiated in spaces,” see Rick Bonus, Lo- cating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 9. Another scholar who examines the space-claiming and place- making strategies of Filipino Americans is Rod Labrador in Building Filipino Hawai’i (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2015).