The Filipino Migration Experience - by Mina Roces (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the New South Wales Premier's History Awards, General History Prize (2022)

The Filipino Migration Experience introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. Mina Roces suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing Filipino migrants as critics of the family and cultural constructions of sexuality, as consumers and investors, as philanthropists, as activists, and as historians. They have been able to transform fundamental social institutions and well-entrenched traditional norms, as well as alter the business, economic, and cultural landscapes of both the homeland and the host countries to which they have migrated.

Roces tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, drawing on underused primary sources from the "migrant archives" and more than seventy interviews. Bringing together migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies, The Filipino Migration Experience explores how these migrants have profoundly reshaped the status quo.

Review Quotes

The Filipino Migration Experience was refreshing to read, and a much-needed intervention in the academic literature that overwhelmingly sees migrants as victims of the global system that exploits their labour and entails high social costs for them and their families.

-- "International Quarterly for Asian Studies"

This is multi-sited, comparative history at its best, where social history meets human geography. Roces gives voice to multiple migrant communities, thereby transforming our understanding of how we move about and resettle--indeed, of how we globalise, and how we might do better.

-- "New South Wales Premier's General History Awards"

The Filipino Migration Experience is important reading for scholars interested in migration research from a historical perspective.

-- "Gender in Southeast Asia"

The Filipino Migration Experience offers a refreshing take on how we can begin to veer away from the heroic migrant model. Overall, the book's important contribution to migration studies lies in its ability to surface migrants' agency and empowerment in the best and the worst of times.

-- "Asian and Pacific Migration Journal"

Especially poignant and insightful are personal narratives that challenge the traditional ideal family model and gender and sexuality norms, which are inevitably disrupted by the migration experience. A comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources accompanies the many rich and diverse migrant voices, making this a key new text for students and scholars alike.

-- "Choice"

Migrants, Roces argues, want to tell their stories, and be heard. Throughout the volume care is taken to insert numerous examples of migrant voices and experiences drawn from multiple sites where records have been kept of migrant experiences, often in their own voices.

-- "The University of British Columbia"

Roces archived Filipino migrants' 'agendas, achievements, and aspirations, ' inspiring 'major evolutionary changes' by offering an alternative 'new history from below', sensitive to temporality, life histories, and narratives. Written at a global scale, Roces' book adds to recent waves of painful-but-celebratory mutligenerational histories of Filipinos in the United States and Canada.

-- "The Developing Economies"

Roces's book provides intimate details and insights about the experiences, challenges and successes of Filipino migrants around the world since the early 1970s. The Filipino Migration Experience is a noteworthy contribution to the literature on Filipino migration.

-- "Contemporary Southeast Asia"

The book presents exceptionally rich empirical material drawn from what Roces refers to as 'migrant archives', or data collected, disseminated and published by migrants themselves, such as memoirs, diaries, short life stories, scrapbooks, journals, private archives, performances, self-produced films, festivals and art, and her ethnographic research in multiple destination countries and the Philippines. [T]he book provides a powerful reframing of common assumptions about migrants' relationships with their families and communities.Overall, the book generates useful directions in migration scholarship in South East Asian studies. It provides an innovative methodological approach that taps into rich primary sources from the 'migrant archives'

-- "South East Asia Research"

This book marks the beginning of writing a 'Filipino migrant 2.0.' It offers a fresh outlook on Filipino migrants. Scholars, policy makers, and international and civic organizations concerning the Philippines and other migration streams should be encouraged to read the book because it promotes understanding of the multiple and profound effects migrants can introduce in both their destination and home countries.

-- "International Journal of Asian Studies"

About the Author

Mina Roces is Professor of History at University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is author of Gender in Southeast Asia.