Filipinos are a community nearly 2.5-million strong in the United States in 2007. At the turn of the 20th century, the first wave of Filipino migration began, continuing until the start of World War II. During this time span, sponsored students, veterans of the Philippine-American War and their families, and young men recruited in the Philippines to serve in the U.S. military or work in California and Hawaii's expanding agricultural industries would all arrive in the United States. On the San Francisco Bay Area's eastern shore, Filipino presence in the labor force transitioned with the region's economic and social evolution from mainly farm and service laborers to industrial workers to professional, administrative, and service workers. Today the East Bay is a vibrant center of the Filipino community's deeply rooted and rich cultural, political, and economic life.

One of Carson's most distinct features is its diversity. The city is roughly one-quarter each Hispanic, African American, white, and Asian/ Pacific Islander. This last group's vast majority are Filipinos who settled as early as the 1920s as farmworkers, U.S. military recruits, entrepreneurs, medical professionals, and other laborers, filling the economic needs of the Los Angeles region. This vibrant community hosts fiestas like the Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture and has produced local community heroes, including "Uncle Roy" Morales and "Auntie Helen" Summers Brown. Filipino students of the 1970s organized to gain college admissions, establish ethnic studies, and foster civic leadership, while Filipino businesses have flourished in Carson, San Pedro, Wilmington, Long Beach, and the surrounding communities. Carson is recognized nationally as a Filipino American destination for families and businesses, very much connected to the island homeland.

The first Filipino settlers arrived in Stockton, California, around 1898, and through most of the 20th century, this city was home to the largest community of Filipinos outside the Philippines. Because countless Filipinos worked in, passed through, and settled here, it became the crossroads of Filipino America. Yet immigrants were greeted with signs that read "Positively No Filipinos Allowed" and were segregated to a four-block area centered on Lafayette and El Dorado Streets, which they called "Little Manila." In the 1970s, redevelopment and the Crosstown Freeway decimated the Little Manila neighborhood. Despite these barriers, Filipino Americans have created a vibrant ethnic community and a rich cultural legacy. Filipino immigrants and their descendants have shaped the history, culture, and economy of the San Joaquin Delta area.

Nearly one in four persons in Hawai'i is of Filipino heritage. Representing one-fifth of the state's workforce, Filipinos have been in Hawai'i for more than a century, turning the rough and raw materials of sugar and pineapple into billion-dollar commodities. This book traces a history from 1946--the last year that sakadas (plantation workers) were imported from the Philippines--to the centennial year of their settlement in Hawai'i. Filipinos are central to much that has been built and cherished in the state, including the agricultural industry, tourism, military presence, labor movements, community activism, politics, education, entertainment, and sports.

Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases—or multi-crew performances—which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.

San Francisco's International Hotel is part history and part memoir. It presents the struggle to save the International Hotel in the San Francisco neighborhood known as Manilatown, which culminated in 1977 with the eviction of elderly tenant activists. In telling this compelling story, Estella Habal features her own memories of the antieviction movement, focusing on the roles of Filipino Americans and their participation in both the anti-eviction protests and the nascent Asian American movement. Book jacket.