Homebound : Filipino American lives across cultures, communities, and countries / Yen Le Espiritu.

Reprint. Originally published. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003.

Migration is significant in the reconstitution of identities because it allows migrants partially to escape from subject identity(ies) constructed and contained by the laws and cultures of any single nation-state. As a multiply constituted people, Filipino American identities and lives are formed and informed by different notions of "home," by the struggles to be "at home," in multiple locations, and by overlapping and competing loyalties to various causes in all these homes. The stresses of migration-the struggles against xenophobia, cultural racism, and economic discrimination-have intensified considerably Filipino immigrants' identification with their place of origin. At the same time, they have also firmly rooted Filipinos in joined struggles with each other and with other kin communities to define and claim their place in the United States. In their struggles for a place to be, Filipino immigrants have shifted between multiple and dynamic identities, simultaneously narrowing and enlarging their scope of affiliations.