Announcements

+Announcements Candlelight Vigil –

Tomorrow! 6pm 4855 Seminole Drive

Last class: T 12/10: Homebound,

Ch 9 Last opportunity to

submit extra credit paper

Final Exam: Tues 12/17, 10:30 to 12:30am in this classroom questions?

+

Becoming FilipinoIntergenerational Conflicts & Ethnic Identity

+Questions How is cultural identity “a

matter of ‘becoming’” (179)?

How do second-generation Filipina/o Americans both resist & embrace assimilation into America?

How is the home-making of second-generation Fil Ams different from the home-making of their first generation parents?

+ The Process of Identity

Defining a pure Filipino identity can be just as divisive as defining who counts as American Ex: Filipino daughters Ex: mixed race children Ex: FOB versus 2nd generation Ex: class divisions

“Filipinoness is defined as the exclusive domain of monoracial, heterosexual, and English-speaking Filipinos; all others, by definition, are constructed to be outside these carefully drawn and maintained boundaries” (184)

“Cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists…” (Stuart Hall from Espiritu

179)

+Internalized Racism “young Filipinos live within and in

tension with a racist system that defines white middle-class culture as the norm” (192)

in the face of enforced homelessness, “some Filipinos adopt anti-black and anti-Latino racism in an effort to secure ethnic inclusion for themselves” (187) Ex: tension between figure of FOB &

“the coconut” Ex: Filipinos are most highly

assimilated in terms of English language – 96% prefer English as primary language (194)

+Racial Consciousness “The ability to name racism

provides young Filipinos with a frame of reference…” (200)

Cross-racial alliances and solidarity potentially emerge from racial consciousness (201) Ex: politics of identity Precursors: Third World Liberation

Front

Politicization can be both empowering and divisive Ex: creation of another definition of

Filipinoness as radicalism/activism

+Becoming Filipino “The multiple subject positions of

second-generation Filipino Americans remind us that identities are not fixed or singular, but multiple, overlapping, and simultaneous and that they reflect events both in the United States as well as in the ‘home country.’ Filipino immigrant children thus live with paradoxes” (204)

Identity itself is a paradox never fully Filipino, never fully

American always arriving, never arrived resisting, creating, acting