Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (review)

Yen Le Espiritu's past books have dealt with the history and sociology of Asian Americans (Filipino Americans in particular)—Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love (1997); Filipino American Lives (1995), and Asian American Panethnicity (1992). In her most recent book, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries, Espiritu takes the narratives she collected in Filipino American Lives and uses them to examine "how Filipino men and women—as a simultaneously colonized national, immigrant, and racialized minority—are transformed through the experience of colonialism and migration and how they in turn transform and remake the social world around them" (2). Home Bound starts with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, even though Espiritu noted in Filipino American Lives that Filipinos were in the Americas before the British colonists arrived in the New World. She does this to demonstrate how American encroachment in the Philippines affected their culture, government, and financial system and forced the citizens to emigrate to the United States. Antonio J. A. Pido describes this process as the "inoculating of Pilipinos with American values and the Coca Cola Culture" (Pido 1997, 24). America is advertised as a superior country to the Philippines in every aspect. This displacement within their motherland is important because it creates a dual sense of home for many Filipino Americans. American incursion in the Philippines gave Filipinos a sense that they were a part of America before they even emigrated. Once in America, they found that they were not necessarily allowed to participate in the American dream. Espiritu in Home Bound calls this feeling "the foreigner within" (14).

The irony, as Espiritu points out, is that Filipinos have participated in American history at all levels in occupations such as nurses, as migrant/plantation workers, and naval stewards, even though the U.S. history textbooks do not discuss them. They have created homes in the United States where they were told they did not belong, yet maintained their homeland with American earnings. Their homes have been in both countries, both physically and psychologically. This transnationalism has both positive and negative aspects—sometimes the sense of home and racial identity is lost in trying to build a life in the United States, which sees itself as white.

In the attempts of Filipino Americans to maintain their homes in the Philippines under U.S. influence and to build new ones in America, Home Bound is able to present numerous subtexts (for example, gender) that can be isolated for further scrutiny. In order to control the Philippines, the United States has depicted Filipino men as effeminate to show that they are incapable of governing themselves. In response to this racial subjugation, Filipinos uphold the morality of Filipino women (Filipinas) versus that of white women.

In Home Bound Espiritu describes the gender restrictions Filipinos faced in immigrating to the U.S. in the early 1900s. Women were restricted in order "to ensure greater profitability from immigrants' labor and to decrease the costs of reproduction—the expenses of housing, feeding, clothing, and educating the workers' dependents" (63). These rules would allow migrant/plantation workers to stay for an extended period of time, but restricting Filipinas was a deterrent for permanent settlement in the United States. The need for family and home eventually led some Filipinos to marry outside their ethnicity, adding to identity issues for their progeny. Another aspect of this migration is that some wives assumed control of the home when their husbands migrated to America. Although Espiritu discusses this subject in Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love, it is not appraised in Home Bound.

Because the home is held as the female domain, Espiritu tries to emphasize this point by offering personal accounts of Filipino American women who gave up their paid employment for their husbands and decided only to deal with housework and childcare. This is misleading because it implies that Filipino culture, like...