[URBANTH-L]BOOK: Vergara, Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City

[Benito Vergara]

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1920_reg.html

Pinoy Capital
The Filipino Nation in Daly City
Benito M. Vergara, Jr.

Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California,
located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed "the Pinoy
Capital of the United States." In this fascinating ethnographic study
of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly
City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community.

Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the
immigrants' identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of
transnationalism, he looks at the "double lives" of both recent and
established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation
Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled
with reminders of their homeland's culture, like newspapers, shops and
festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings
these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and
the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a
thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and
people they left behind.

Reviews

"Pinoy Capital is a colorful and nuanced ethnographic foray into the
social institutions and quotidian lives of Filipino Americans living
in Daly City. Vergara is a gifted writer and his work delves closely
on the affective and reciprocal relationships and practices of
Filipino Americans as immigrants. This is a welcome and important
study, and Vergara puts forward important and innovative assertions
and arguments that will have repercussions on debates about Filipinos
in the United States."
    —Martin Manalansan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and
editor of Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America

"Pinoy Capital is a landmark text—an exciting, refreshing, and
critical ethnography that continues, but revitalizes, ongoing
conversations regarding Filipino immigrant/transnational life in the
United States. There have been very few ethnographies of this group,
and I think this one not only offers a much-needed and provocative
study, it complicates arguments and discussions about the
specificities of Filipino immigration to the U.S. Vergara provides
solid and rigorous engagement with his objects of study, and he is
especially attuned to the clarities and complexities of everyday life
in a particular site that is touted as a quintessential one for
Filipino American settlement."
—Rick Bonus, Associate Professor, Department of American Ethnic
Studies, University of Washington

About the Author

Benito M. Vergara, Jr. is the author of Displaying Filipinos:
Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines. He
lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

232 pp
6x9
3 tables 2 map(s)

paper: $25.95, Jan 09
EAN: 978-1-59213-665-0
ISBN: 1-59213-665-6


cloth: $74.50, Jan 09
EAN: 978-1-59213-664-3
ISBN: 1-59213-664-8