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Examining the double lives of Filipino American immigrants
Pinoy Capital
The Filipino Nation in Daly City
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Benito M. Vergara, Jr.
"Pinoy Capital is a colorful and nuanced ethnographic foray into the social institutions and quotidian lives of Filipino Americans living in Daly City. Vergara is a gifted writer and his work delves closely on the affective and reciprocal relationships and practices of Filipino Americans as immigrants. This is a welcome and important study, and Vergara puts forward important and innovative assertions and arguments that will have repercussions on debates about Filipinos in the United States."
—Martin Manalansan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and editor of Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America
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.
Excerpt
Reviews
"Pinoy Capital is a landmark text—an exciting, refreshing, and critical ethnography that continues, but revitalizes, ongoing conversations regarding Filipino immigrant/transnational life in the United States. There have been very few ethnographies of this group, and I think this one not only offers a much-needed and provocative study, it complicates arguments and discussions about the specificities of Filipino immigration to the U.S. Vergara provides solid and rigorous engagement with his objects of study, and he is especially attuned to the clarities and complexities of everyday life in a particular site that is touted as a quintessential one for Filipino American settlement."
—Rick Bonus, Associate Professor, Department of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington
"[A] dynamic and thought-provoking study on the lives and history of Filipino immigrants in America, specifically in what is known as the 'Pinoy capital of the United States.'... Pinoy Capital is far from being a colorless, skin-deep examination of the Filipino immigrant experience. It is rich and meticulous in its presentation of statistics and historical material, and constructively elaborate and diverse in its dissection of its subject matter. What's more, Vergara propounds the topic of Daly City's Filipino community by effectively combining journalist immediacy with academic rigor. His analytical skills and profound insight on Daly City's Filipinos are fused with the overwhelming need to understand a topic that has rarely been studied to this extent....Vergara's book...sets a new standard for analyzing Daly City's pervasive sense of 'Filipinoness' and for keenly observing the impact that Filipinos in the Philippines have had on their expatriate countrymen and women in America."
— Filipinas
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Contents
1. A Repeated Turning
2. Little Manila
3. Looking Forward: Narratives of Obligation
4. Spreading the News: Newspapers and Transnational Belongings
5. Looking Back: Indifference, Responsibility, and the Anti-Marcos Movement in the United States
6. Betrayal and Belonging
7. Citizenship and Nostalgia
8. Pinoy Capital
Bibliography
Index
About the Author(s)
Benito M. Vergara, Jr. is the author of Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
Asian Studies
Anthropology
In the series
Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
The "standard" written histories of Asian immigrants to the United States have been imbued with Western cultural biases. As a critique and corrective to earlier work, Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ, aims to develop a history of Asian Americans that is compatible with their own experience, that treats Asian Americans as agents of historical change and as creators of a new culture. In addition, this series intends to focus on the groups that are flourishing in the contemporary U.S.—Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese—about whom little has been written as well as to add to the substantial work done on the Chinese and Japanese in this country.