American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, and: Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture in the United States, 1920s–1950s, and: Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse (review)

Minding Ps and Fs has long been a motif in Filipino American Studies. Fittingly, the very first endnote of Linda España-Maram's lucid and well-researched new book, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila, describes how "a debate rages over which term, 'Filipino' or 'Pilipino,' should be used to designate people from the Philippines" (171). She dutifully and succinctly explains the main reasons for the debate—mostly relating to contested ideas about "indigenous vocabulary"—and chooses, with all due respect to the various sides of the unresolved controversy, to use F instead of P consistently.¹ The idea that a debate can rage over the choice of a single letter points to the power of language and discourse in the formation of communities. This is hardly an isolated example of liberation or colonization being pegged to an act of naming. Such an act may seem and indeed be quite small, but it can viably be ridden down a slippery slope that leads to, among other places, founding impulses of Asian American Studies. That is, a constituency recognizably emerged not necessarily from a new name itself—after all, an F or a P does not itself redistribute power and wealth—but from a recognition of the possibilities that may come from a previously unrecognized appellative controversy. And so, diverse populations demand, and if necessary, supply relevant educations literally in the name of, in this case, Asian America or Filipino America or other constituencies that might genuinely fall under the category "the community." Importantly, this refashioned relationship between a field of study and its object emerges: scholarship is acknowledged as not only reflecting the larger world but also shaping it. Here then are three new and welcome books that embrace the opportunity to contribute to the way that Filipino America is understood and therefore practiced.

"Articulating," "creating," and "building" are resonant words in the titles of these books on Filipino America that, in their way, themselves articulate, create, and build Filipino America. They each offer nuanced and politically committed approaches to apprehending Filipino America, in history, in theory, and in practice. That is, rather than presuming the objective existence of Filipino America waiting to be revealed, each of these works is cognizant of a process of making, defining, and constructing Filipino America. With this awareness of process in mind, we can then consider the phrase "Building Communities and Discourse" (the subtitle of Positively No Filipinos Allowed) and appreciate how that phrase expresses the symbiotic relationship of community and discourse. That is to say, to grasp Filipino America one must have not only an appreciation of how communities and discourses are built, but also an understanding of how communities generate discourses and discourses make communities.

This dialectical embrace of both discourse and community marks a noteworthy constellation of politicized intellectual work, for we are encouraged to see how the terms "discourse" and "community" need not be—and indeed should not be—antagonistic terms. Conventionally, the pairing of these concepts taps into a long tradition of similarly oppositional terms, such as theory vs. practice or cultural superstructure vs. economic infrastructure or even humanities vs. social science. In this tradition, "community" connotes grounding in empirical reality while "discourse" leads us to considerations of epistemology, of grasping the way we think and make sense...