Part 1, “Class Identity and Marital Intimacy”

Vol. 60, no. 2 (June 2012) carries ethnographies focusing on issues of social class and marital intimacies in Canada, Japan, the Ilocos, and Metro Manila. Here the contributors take the vantage point of either the origin or destination of migrants. At the origin, one author examines the tension felt by middle-class citizens of Metro Manila between desiring to emigrate and wanting to stay, while another probes seafarers’ wives in Ilocos Norte and how they deal with their husbands’ absence, particularly through fleeting but intimate modes of overseas communication.

At the destination, one author interrogates the various dimensions of social class as these pertain to Filipino migrants in Canada, while another investigates marital intimacy and how religion becomes a motif in marriages between Japanese men and Filipina migrants in Japan. In all cases, the dynamics are embedded in transnational networks of social ties that traverse state and geographic borders, connecting migrants and nonmigrants in both origin and destination.

Part 2, “Imperial and Personal Histories”

In vol. 60, no. 3 (Sept 2012), one author explores the transnational history behind the complex anti-Filipino riots in the US in the 1930s and its relationship to the Philippine independence movement. Another author analyzes the type of conventional history that is told in the homes of Filipino migrants to the US, which raises questions as to how Filipino American performance poets acquired the alternative history that is critical of the official narrative. A comparison with Puerto Rican homes in the US is made.

One author focuses on a group of migrants who were born in Okinawa of Filipino-Japanese parentage soon after the Second World War. Their families then moved to the Philippines where they were raised, but as adults they moved back to Okinawa. They have acquired Japanese citizenship but cannot speak the Japanese language, only English and Tagalog. Some were anti-Marcos activists who have found a haven in the US military bases in Okinawa.

Why did it take a dictator like Ferdinand Marcos to grant Philippine citizenship to ethnic Chinese in the Philippines? The history behind this complex development in the 1970s is revealed in an interview with Benito O. Lim, whose personal history intersects with the broad currents of history.

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Feel free to visit the website at www.philippinstudies.net for the issues’ table of contents and other information. While on the Ateneo campus, these articles may be freely downloaded through the Rizal
Library’s subscription to Project Muse at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philippine_studies/#.

Thank you, and have a good read!