In the early twentieth century—not long after 1898, when the United States claimed the Philippines as an American colony—Filipinas/os became a vital part of the agricultural economy of California's fertile San Joaquin Delta. In downtown Stockton, they created Little Manila, a vibrant community of hotels, pool halls, dance halls, restaurants, grocery stores, churches, union halls, and barbershops. Little Manila was home to the largest community of Filipinas/os outside of the Philippines until the neighborhood was decimated by urban redevelopment in the 1960s. Narrating a history spanning much of the twentieth century, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon traces the growth of Stockton's Filipina/o American community, the birth and eventual destruction of Little Manila, and recent efforts to remember and preserve it. Mabalon draws on oral histories, newspapers, photographs, personal archives, and her own family's history in Stockton. She reveals how Filipina/o immigrants created a community and ethnic culture shaped by their identities as colonial subjects of the United States, their racialization in Stockton as brown people, and their collective experiences in the fields and in the Little Manila neighborhood. In the process, Mabalon places Filipinas/os at the center of the development of California agriculture and the urban West.

Drawing from personal and institutional archives and the oral histories of Estrella Alamar (one of the few remaining Filipinas born and raised in mid-century Chicago) I interrogate the ways in which one’s location, gender, socio-economic status, and generational positioning shape the contours of Filipina American diasporas. This interdisciplinary study combines ethnography with cultural and social history as I trace major moments in Estrella’s life: living in tenement housing on the West side during the 1930s and 1940s; moving to the South and Southwest sides of Chicago during Urban Renewal; becoming the first ever Filipino American teacher in Chicago and first person of color at McKay Elementary during the 1960’s; and lastly, her establishment as the first second-generation community leader in Chicago-based Filipino American organizations and founding president of the Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago. While earlier studies on Filipino Americans reveal important insight on how immigrant families create transnational homes (Espiritu 2003) and the ways in which geographical location plays a determining role in the shaping of Filipino diasporic communities (Bonus 2000), they are told almost exclusively through immigrant narratives, often uphold heteropatriarchal cultural norms, and are predominantly limited to cities in the west coast where easily locatable ethnic enclaves exist, such as Manila Towns. As the daughter of immigrants who were amongst the fist to settle in Chicago during the 1920’s and 1930’s, Estrella’s stories of growing up in between two major eras of twentieth century Asian migration and growing White/Black racial tensions provides a history that is at once unique to Estrella and illustrative of how Filipina American history in Chicago emerges out of legacies of colonialism and slavery in gender and class-specific ways

From the perspectives of ethnic studies, history, literary criticism, and legal studies, the original essays in this volume examine the ways in which the colonial history of the Philippines has shaped Filipino American identity, culture, and community formation. The contributors address the dearth of scholarship in the field as well as show how an understanding of this complex history provides a foundation for new theoretical frameworks for Filipino American studies.

Emily Noelle Ignacio explores how Filipinos have used the Internet's subtle, cyber, but very real social connections to construct and reinforce a sense of national, ethnic, and racial identity with distant others.