Balikbayan
Homelands, Repatriates, and Other Philippine Revenants
University of Washington Press, Spring 2026.

What does it mean to go back home? This axiomatic, even innocuous question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism and capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. By following the emergence of the return migrant (Tagalog: balikbayan) in the 20th century, Adrian De Leon follows how statecraft in the Philippines – from the late Spanish period through the American and Japanese occupations, and the post-1946 independent state – attempted to co-opt value from transpacific migrant communities. Through a sweeping history of Filipino lives and political imaginations across a hundred years, Balikbayan demonstrates that diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations set the grounds for the continued conquest of the islands’ native frontiers and the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands are reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearn to connect with their roots.

In Balikbayan, Adrian De Leon repatriates the histories of Filipino America to the home country of the Philippines, a place and people for whom political sovereignty had long been deferred and jeopardized by economic dependency on American imperialism. From nationalist movements and counterinsurgency efforts, to intellectual and juridical struggles among Filipino migrant communities, and to World War II soldiers and the postcolonial state, De Leon argues that diasporas matter not just in the making of the host country of settlement, but are constitutive parts of what makes the source country a “home”—and a nation—in the first place. Compiled through deep research and stewardship in Filipino community archives, these itinerant histories coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland.