Diasporic Struggle: Transnational Activism, Migration, and Anti-Imperialism in Filipino America, 1964-1991

Sales, Joy Nicolas

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-53mq-jx75

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Diasporic Struggle: Transnational Activism, Migration, and Anti-Imperialism in Filipino America, 1964-1991

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This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists in the Filipino diaspora, and how these actors learned about, critiqued, and sought to dismantle neocolonial relations between the United States and the Philippines. In this era of burgeoning social movements and increased mass migration from the Global South to the Global North, many Filipino Americans centered the Philippines in their political consciousness and intentionally created grassroots networks with activists in the homeland. While building transnational movements was difficult, activism illuminated the persistent military, economic, political, and cultural ties between the United States and its former colony, and called into question Filipino Americans’ involvement in their homeland’s decolonization process. I argue that, even when transnational relationships and organizations failed, faltered, or changed, Filipino Americans’ local/global political consciousness evolved and endured because of the Philippines' “special” relationship with the United States. Regardless of political affiliation, generational differences, and citizenship status, Filipinos in diaspora struggled through identity formation, complex relationships with the U.S. and Philippine left, and grassroots campaigns to change U.S. foreign policy. In working towards empowerment, domestic rights, and national democracy in the homeland, activists developed anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics that tested and tapped into the revolutionary potential of the Filipino diaspora.

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