Current Projects

 

Balikbayan: The Invention of the Filipino Homeland
University of Washington Press, forthcoming

What does it mean to go back home? This axiomatic, even innocuous question has a brief but engaged body of literature in the field of US immigration history. But the idea of a migrant’s home country, however, is as old as the field itself. Balikbayan enters into this vibrant conversation by way of a methodological declaration: 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. By following the emergence of the return migrant (Tagalog: balikbayan) in the 20th century, this book follows how U.S. statecraft in the Philippines (and the post-1946 independent state that inherited colonial-era policies) attempted to co-opt value from transpacific migrant communities. In turn, diasporic capital sets the grounds for the continued conquest of the islands’ native frontiers; these lands are reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearn to connect with their roots. These stories of migrant capture and settler colonialism coalesced around a new cultural-economic form that defines 20th-century nationhood: the homeland.

 

Not Too Sweet: Essays on Eating (While) Filipino
Rutgers University Press, under contract

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” the oft-quoted gourmand Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote in his 1825 classic, The Physiology of Taste. While this is a beloved and even celebrated quote, for Asian migrants to North America, it suggests something darker and more sinister. Since the arrival of Asian cooks in the 19th century, Asian foods have been imagined as both exotic curiosities and dangerous to the American gut. One only needs to look at the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Chinese restaurants were the first businesses to suffer, out of racist fears around the safety of their foods. And for migrant communities from the Philippines in particular, their cuisines have been made invisible like their home country’s brutal histories of colonization and subjugation by the United States, and their kinfolk’s experiences as precarious migrant workers around the world. At once analytical and intimate, Not Too Sweet paints a picture of how that most vulnerable act, sharing food, is also embroiled with the violent histories that Asian migrants have faced across the Pacific for the last two hundred years. Through these stories of everyday food cultures in the Filipino diaspora, I make a case for “lunchbox politics”: that food isn’t just a frivolous topic, but is at the heart and center of how we can imagine a world beyond the racisms of our imperial present.

 

Janky Theory: Race and the Aesthetic Work of the Inchoate
In progress

Jankiness is a capacious judgment, and can be applied to all manners of things: janky people, janky objects, janky vehicles, janky basketball plays, janky food, janky establishments, janky cities, janky lifeworlds. To call something janky is at once an aesthetic judgment and a remark on the work behind assembling the thing itself. It is a commentary on a form that barely comes together into something aesthetically coherent – it is something inchoate, meaning rudimentary and emergent – and yet, despite that, still stubbornly comes together. Janky things shouldn’t work, but they do; they shouldn’t make sense, but they do. But to pass a judgment of something as janky indexes something specific to the everyday labors of racialized migrant people in an anglophone North American context, and to the matrix of everyday Black life and language that undergirds the possibilities of the aesthetic work of the inchoate.

Co-authored with Jonathan Leal (English, University of Southern California).

Journal Articles

 

Book Chapters

2026 — The Double Exclusion of Cecelia Navarro: A Microhistory of Diasporic Punishment and Provisional Sovereignty. (Forthcoming.)
2025 — Uproot: Towards a Political Ecology of the Filipino Diaspora. Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, edited by Alyssa Paredes and Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio. University of Hawai‘i Press. (Forthcoming.)
2025 — A Visceral Archive of Survival: Doreen Fernandez’s Sarap (1988) and the ‘Crisis-Ethos’ of Philippine Cuisine. Eating More Asian America, edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur. NYU Press. (Forthcoming.)

 

Book Reviews

2024 — Kim A. Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History. Journal of Military History, forthcoming.
2024 — Alvita Akiboh, Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire. H-Net Reviews.
2023 — Whose homeland? Whose security? Public Books.
2020 — Jane Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion. Western History Quarterly.
2016 — Yong Chen, Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America. Journal of Asian American Studies.