Suggested Reading for October in Honor of Filipino American History Month
Fiction
Leaving Yesler: A novel by Peter Bach
“Leaving Yesler features a sensitive, mixed race (Puerto Rican and black) protagonist (Bobby). Bobby’s life is difficult – in short order, he lost his mom to cancer and his older protective brother to Vietnam. His Filipino stepfather is old and not long for the world. The plot, which takes place in the politically tumultuous year of 1968, follows him from his last days in the Yesler Terrace housing project in Seattle to just short of his first day in college.
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn
“A wildly disparate group of characters—including movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines—becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth.”
Blame This on The Boogie by Rina Ayuyang
“The true story of how Hollywood musicals got one person through school, depression, and the challenges of parenthood. Inspired by the visual richness and cinematic structure of the Hollywood musical, Blame This on the Boogie chronicles the adventures of a Filipino American girl born in the decade of disco who escapes life's hardships and mundanity through the genre's feel-good song-and-dance numbers.
Nonfiction
Brown Skin, White Minds: Filipino - American Postcolonial Psychology by E.J.R. David
“This book is a peer-reviewed publication that integrates knowledge from multiple scholarly and scientific disciplines to identify the past and current catalysts for such self-denigrating attitudes and behaviors. It takes the reader from indigenous Tao culture, Spanish and American colonialism, colonial mentality or internalized oppression along with its implications on Kapwa, identity, and mental health, to decolonization in the clinical, community, and research settings.
Filipinos in Puget Sound by Dorothy Laigo Cordova
“Since the 19th century, Filipinos have immigrated to the Puget Sound region, which contains a deep inland sea once surrounded by forests and waters teeming with salmon. Seattle was the closest mainland American port to the Far East. In 1909, the "Igorotte Village" was the most popular venue at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Expostion. With the 1965 revision of U.S. immigration laws, the Filipino population in Puget Sound cities, towns, and farm areas grew rapidly and changed dramatically -- as did all of Puget Sound."
Films
Call her Ganda
“When Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman, is brutally murdered by a U.S. Marine, three women intimately invested in the case–an activist attorney (Virgie Suarez), a transgender journalist (Meredith Talusan) and Jennifer’s mother (Julita “Nanay” Laude)–galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of US imperialism."
Island Roots (2007 film) - Lucy Ostrander & Don Sellers
“When the Filipino pioneers of the 1920’s and 30’s settled on Bainbridge Island, Washington they were hired by Japanese-American landowners to tend their renowned strawberry farms. The bombing of Pearl Harbor turned this relationship upside down when the Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the Island and incarcerated during WWII. The Japanese American community left Bainbridge Island on March 30th, 1942, just a few months before the strawberry harvest. The Japanese American farmers needed stewards and their Filipino farmhands brought in the harvest, paid the taxes and saved the farms.
