Balikbayan Configurations and a U.S.-Philippine Politics of Modernization

This essay explores the advent of the balikbayan as it came to name a group of post-1965 Filipino immigrants to the United States, many of whom emigrated from an educated, professional class in the Philippines and also those who were part of such a class but who immigrated through the allowances afforded by the Hart-Celler amendments of 1965. I describe the balikbayan as a transnational figure that gained coherence through U.S. civil reform and international diplomacy and Philippine neoliberal policies and authoritarian nationalism. The confluence of these U.S. and Philippine governmentalities invested in the configuration of the balikbayan as a modality for shaping the contours of Filipino subjectivity through the framework of international development and global modernization.