Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America

2. Emotions, Sex, and Money: The Lives of Filipino Children of Immigrants

47 2 Emotions, Sex, and Money The Lives of Filipino Children of Immigrants Yen Le Espiritu Focusing on emotions, sex and money, this chapter calls attention to the ways in which the lives of Filipino children of immigrants pivot around rigid and often contradictory expectations over the meaning of sexuality and success. This is not news: many scholars have detailed the tensions between immigrant parents and their children over perceived (im)proper sexual behaviors and (in)appropriate achievement standards.1 However, unlike most previous works, this chapter does not approach emotions, sex, and money as mere objects of study, but rather as sources of knowledge that elucidate not only the conditions of immigrant life, but also the conditions under which the “immigrant,” as a racialized and gendered subject , was produced in the first place. As such, it conceptualizes intergenerational strain not only as a private matter between immigrant parents and their children, but as a social, historical, and transnational affair that exposes multiple and interrelated forms of power relations. In the same way, it deprivatizes and denaturalizes “emotions,” “sex,” and “money” and emphasizes instead the ways in which they are constituted by and constitutive of gendered, sexualized, and racialized discourses and practices that circulate between the Philippines and the United States. The data for this chapter come from in-depth interviews conducted between 1992 and 2002 with young Filipinos who lived in San Diego County.2 It is not coincidental that Filipinos comprise the largest Asian American 48 Yen Le Espiritu group in San Diego. Until 1998, San Diego was the site of the largest U.S. naval base and the Navy’s primary West Coast training facility, the Naval Training Center (NTC). The Navy turned San Diego into a prominent area of resettlement for Filipino Navy personnel and their families beginning in the early 1900s. During the ninety-four years of U.S. military presence in the Philippines, U.S. bases doubled as recruiting stations for the U.S. Navy. For the majority of Filipino Navy men, San Diego was their first U.S. destination, where they received their basic training at the NTC. Filipino Navy families thus formed the cornerstone of San Diego’s Filipino American community and provided the impetus for and sponsorship of subsequent chain migration.3 As in other Filipino communities along the Pacific Coast, the San Diego community grew dramatically in the decades following passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. New immigration contributed greatly to the tripling of the county’s Filipino American population from 1970 to 1980 and its doubling from 1980 to 1990. In 1990, there were close to 96,000 Filipinos in San Diego County; by 2000, the population had risen to over 120,000. According to 2004 American Community Survey Census Bureau data,4 in San Diego County more than 135,000 people, or about one in twenty, are Filipino. Filipino Americans in the county live in relatively comfortable economic circumstances: they enjoy a median family income of $80,772; close to 70 percent own their own homes; and only about 4 percent live in poverty.5 “Structure of Feeling”: Immigrant Lives through the Lens of Emotions Like other immigrant groups, young Filipino American women and men identify the family (sa pamilya) as a tremendous source of cultural pride.6 In focus groups with Filipino children of immigrants in northern California , Diane Wolf noted the “strong, spontaneous and emotional statements about family as the center of what it means to be Filipino.”7 Similarly, in my interviews with Filipino American families in San Diego County, I found that most Filipinos believed themselves to be superior to white Americans because they are more family-oriented and more willing to sacrifice for one another. However, this ideology of family cohesion contrasted sharply with many of the same subjects’ experiences of pressure and conflict within their own families.8 In the same way, the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), a longitudinal quantitative study Emotions, Sex, and Money 49 of Filipino American high school students in San Diego,9 found that while the great majority of the respondents indicated that the ideology of family togetherness and cohesion is extremely important to them, few actually experienced this cohesion in their family. In light of the importance of family ideology for these young Filipinos, the CILS project reported that parent-child conflict was the strongest predictor of young people’s selfesteem and depression...