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Chapter 1 1. To honor and reflect the language of those in my study, throughout this book I use the term quinceañera to describe both the event and the celebrant. I also follow the study participants by referring to the event as a “quince,” a “fifteen,” and a “quince años.” 2. Again, as is customary, and out of respect for my subjects’ language, throughout this book I use the term debutante to describe both the event and the celebrant. 3. In 2008, USA Today reporter Eric Gorski reported that “a $400 million-a-year industry has sprouted up catering to Hispanic immigrants seeking to maintain cultural traditions while showing they’ve made it in their new countries, offering everything for Quinceañera planners and cruises to professional ballroom dancers to teach the ceremonial waltz.” 4. Much of the historical narrative in this section was first published in “Primerang Bituin: Philippines-Mexico Relations at the Dawn of the Pacific Rim Century,” an article I published in Asia Pacific: Perspectives 6, no. 1 (May 2006): 4–12. “Magkasama ,” the title of this section is a synonym for “interconnected.” It is Tagalog/ Filipino for “together” or “in the company of.” 5. Mexica is the Nahuatl term for what we refer to today as Aztec. 6. Spain was quite successful at doing so in the Philippines; the only reason the destruction was less extensive in Mexico is that during the demolition of precolonial Mexica cities and temples, the Spaniards left various places and objects only “superficially ” ruined so that they could find, steal, and hoard indigenous “treasures.” Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla writes, “The colonial enterprise engaged in destroying Mesoamerican civilization and stopped only where self-interest intervened ” (1975: 29). 7. The uniqueness is a result of the persistence of indigenous folk beliefs and practices. Notes 186 Notes to chapter 1 8. In exchange, the United States paid Mexico $15 million to compensate for warrelated damage to Mexican land. 9. The Treaty of Paris was signed on December 10, 1898, and went into effect on April 11, 1899. Under its provisions, Spain surrendered the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the United States and gave up all rights to Cuba. 10. This is because, although the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo specified that legitimate Mexican land titles would be recognized by the United States, the 1851 Land Act declared that Spanish-speaking citizens of the Southwest had to prove their property rights in court, which was difficult, because “Mexican[s] usually had not kept adequate records for their grants” (Quinn 1994: 104). As a result, “many of them lost their land. They could not prove they owned it—even though they had lived on the land for years” (Starr 1980: 83). 11. In addition to the country’s war for independence and the Mexican War, the Mexican Revolution, a ten-year civil war, wreaked chaos on Mexico’s people and economy and fostered the “second wave” of Mexican American migration between 1910 and 1920. 12. A pensionado is a Philippine scholar whose expenses are paid by the government while he or she studies aboard. 13. Ilustrado is the Spanish word for “learned,” the term used for members of the Filipino educated class during the Spanish colonial period. 14. Mexicans and Filipinos working lado a lado as farmhands on the West Coast formed the UFW/AFL-CIO (United Farm Workers/American Federation of Labor– Congress of Industrial Organizations) to help American farmworkers protest inadequate wages and working conditions and to “achieve an ideal: mutual understanding, sincere cooperation and true brotherhood” (Scharlin and Villanueva 2000: 112). The UFW/AFL-CIO was essentially the union of the primarily Chicano National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) and the Filipino-formed Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). 15. The Tydings-McDuffie Act guaranteed the Philippines independence after a ten-year “transitional period” and reclassified Filipinos as aliens so that an annual quota of fifty immigrants from the Philippines to the United States could be instituted. 16. Before World War I, Filipino enlistees served “in a range of occupational ratings ,” but after the war, “the Navy issued a new ruling restricting Filipinos . . . to the ratings of officers’ stewards and mess attendants” (Espiritu 1995: 29). 17. About sixty-five thousand Filipino “war veterans, war brides, and male and female students, workers, and their dependents” (Bonus 2000: 42) were allowed to enter the United States during the second wave, after the Filipino Naturalization Act enabled Filipino Americans to petition family members to immigrate. 18...

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