Racism And Resistance Among The Filipino Diaspora

Filipino migrants constitute one of the largest global diasporas today. In Australia, Filipino settlement is markedly framed by the country’s on-going nation-building project that continues to racialise immigrants and delineate the possibilities and limits of belonging to the national community. This book explores the ways in which Filipino migrants in Australia experience, understand and negotiate racism in their everyday lives. In particular, it explores the notion of everyday anti-racism – the strategies individuals deploy to manage racism in their day to day lives. Through case studies based on extensive fieldwork the author shares ethnographic observation and interview material that demonstrate the ways in which Filipinos are racially constituted in Australian society and are subject to everyday racisms that criss-cross different modes of power and domination. Drawing on theoretical approaches in critical race scholarship and the sociology of everyday life, this book illuminates the operation of racism in a multicultural society that persists insidiously in exchanges across a range of public and private spaces. More importantly, it explores the quotidian ways in which ‘victims’ of racism cope with routine racialised domination, an area underdeveloped in anti-racism research that has tended to focus on institutional anti-racism politics. Shedding light on a neglected corner of the global Filipino diaspora and highlighting the complexity of lived experiences in translocal and transnational social fields, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of diaspora and migration studies, the study of race and racism and ethnic minorities, with particular reference to the Asian diaspora.

This book includes essays of the narrative of Filipino lives in the United States to provoke interrogation of the conventional wisdom and a critique of the global system of capital. It helps in constituting the Filipino community as an agent of historic change in a racist society.

The unique relationship to colonization for Filipinos has challenged Filipino Americans in their identity development and understanding of Philippine history. Although American exceptionalism has been heavily indoctrinated into the Filipino diaspora due to the colonial education system in the Philippines, Filipino American youth have been able to still recognize themselves as a marginalized community in the U.S. due to their lower socioeconomic status and interactions with racism. By focusing specifically on Filipino Americans and the ways in which hip hop culture has been a site for expressing resistance through identity, my work will expose why hip hop culture has appealed to many Filipino Americans as a tool to resist and subvert oppression.

Over the last few decades, the over theorisation of racism has lost connection with political struggles to end racism. To better understand why racism continues to endure, more research needs to be undertaken to make concrete our abstract ideas of race and the taken for granted ways of thinking about how racism operates. But more importantly, there is much to learn about how racialised individuals resist ongoing racist marginalisation,subjugation, and humiliation in their ordinary day to day lives. This thesis investigates how Filipino migrants living in Australia experience, understand, and manage racism in their everyday lived experiences. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Filipinos living in Sydney, the study explores how 'race' is produced and racism is experienced ineveryday routine situations across diverse social spaces; and, moreover, unearths the quotidian tactics of resistance - material and subjective that Filipino migrants deploy to cope with everyday racism.The analysis is themed broadly around the complex intersection of race, class, and gender;the transnational nature of Filipino lives; and the struggle for respect and recognition. Race,class, and gender, intersect in intricate ways to shape the content of racisms experienced by Filipino migrants and the kinds of cultural and economic resources they mobilise as tactics of resistance. Such junctures also shape the varied ways in which Filipinos understand these experiences and generate ways of being in the world. In addition to this, the findings suggest that the regimes of power that structure experiences of everyday racism and antiracism for Filipino migrants can have a transnational nature. The transnational character of racial systems, racist practice, and acts of resistance is yet to be fully elaborated in racism literature which has a tendency to fix migrant experiences within local nation-state frameworks. Lastly, central to the findings is the idea that amongst other things, racism is a mode of misrecognition which compels Filipino migrants to redeem respect in varying ways in the face of the constant denial of dignity.This thesis essentially aims to reconnect theory and politics with empirically grounded research to reconnect the abstract notions of race and racism with the lives that racismcontinues to distress in both violent and measured ways. Moreover, it attempts to contribute to research on antiracism by expanding on the micro struggles people undertake to counteract racism. Such infrapolitics have the potential to change the often limited scope in which existing notions of antiracism is conceived.

First published in 1998. The Philippines play a major role in expanding the international Filipino community through its promotion of international labor migration-Filipinos can currently be found in over 130 countries throughout the world. As the first major work to conceive of Filipino immigration as a diaspora, this study analyses the diasporic nature of Filipino relations, identities, and communities and shows how these transnational phenomena are socially constructed by the everyday actions and activities of Filipino Americans. Instead of focusing on an ethnic minority and its relation to its host society, a diasporic perspective places emphasis on the transnational relations created and maintained among that minority, its homeland, and other diasporic communities. Transnational ties are evident in the movement of people, money, consumer goods, information, and ideas. Diaspora represents a new and fluid conceptual image quite apart from the usual coordinates based on physical location, territory, and distance. Transnational relations and practices will continue to be an increasingly important dimension of the Filipino American community because of the ongoing family-based immigration from the Philippines, further technological advances in communication and transportation, the expansion of transnational capital, and continuing racism and discrimination, all of which have made it necessary for Filipinos in the United States, the Philippines, and throughout the world to create and maintain diasporic lives and culture.

As the largest contingent of Asian-Pacific islanders in the United States, Filipinos are perceived by some as invisible, forgotten, marginal others and, on the whole, inconsequential. Presenting a challenge to these stereotypes, this book argues that Filipinos are actively reassessing their colonial past and engaging in projects of popular-democratic resistance to the transnational system of global commodification. In establishing a new framework for charting Filipino agency within the constraints of late capitalism, the author addresses the question of racial justice and equality.

Filipino migrants are the fifth largest migrant group in Australia. Despite this significant presence, their experiences have rarely received the 'mainstream' spotlight, and their stories are seldom told through their own voices. This community-led publication brings together life histories and personal migration experiences of everyday first and second-generation Filipino migrants. It highlights their spirit, strength, resilience, and important social and economic contributions to Australia. Uniquely, these stories are told through encounters with calamansi - a small, sour and sweet lime, indigenous to the Philippines. The Calamansi Story invites readers to use food as an everyday lens to understand the experience of Filipinos as migrants in Australia. Focusing creative stories, poetry, essays, songs, recipes and artwork on the humble calamansi, the writers and artists featured in this book use food, explicitly and inexplicitly, as a vehicle to navigate settlement, forge senses of belonging, and interrogate the role food plays in the politics of race and multiculturalism in Australia. Maasim (sour) or matamis (sweet), these stories offer a taste of hope, possibility, and action.thecalamansistory.com