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
6×9
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

Popularity: 4% [?]

A couple of weeks ago, Angela Jancius, the moderator of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA) listserv, posted a query for “a top ten list of ways to battle against the neoliberalization of university life.” Members of the URBANTH-L list replied, and four days later, this was Angie’s compilation of the answers. (I haven’t edited anything, but fixed formatting for readability).

And while some tactics are either of the hippy-dippy or Smash-the-State varieties (hope that didn’t sound too pejorative) and wouldn’t work at so-called research institutions (or so-called teaching institutions, for that matter), a good chunk of these are implementable, even on an individual basis. (I’m always shocked at the prices of textbooks in the sciences, for instance; I’m usually hesitant if my assigned books are over 30 bucks in total!)

If you ask me, it’s the size of classes that has the most direct impact on classroom quality. It’s bad for the professor, of course, who has to slog through grading all those papers and will therefore be tempted to cut corners (shorter papers, insubstantial multiple-choice exams). But it’s just as bad for the students: less time with professors, briefer comments on papers, radically decreased opportunities for participation, and a semester signposted by exams and binge-and-purge learning. (It was only a few years ago that, in an attempt to increase class size, the administration where I used to teach kept pushing more chairs inside the classrooms until the safety marshals hollered “Fire hazard!”) And don’t get me started on how criminally underpaid adjuncts and temporary lecturers are…

My former employer, an urban school by reputation, has essentially abandoned its decades-long “commitment” to the working class from its immediate surroundings, and instead has concentrated on recruiting aggressively from the O.C. to fill up their dormitories. (I have nothing against SoCal in particular, but it does raise the question of where the SF high schoolers are ending up. A year ago an overwhelming majority of the first-year students in my anthropology class were already dorm-dwellers. This is a fairly profound student demographic shift in my opinion, suggesting, perhaps erroneously, that they were relatively moneyed and that they had few ties to the local community. But that latter part can change.)

(If you want to cut and paste this and repost on your respective lists, or blogs, or whatever, please remove all the above drivel first.)

Enough chitchat; here we go:

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I don’t think I’ve seen BAE Systems advertise in the Chronicle of Higher Education before, and I may be wrong — and a quick Google search shows places like Monster.com, Job.com, and Intelligencecareers.com, all places I don’t frequent — but lo and behold, it showed up in the Anthropology listings this week (though it was on the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology job site almost a month ago):

The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a new Army program, designed to improve the military’s ability to understand the local socio-cultural environment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Knowledge of the local population provides a departure point for a military staff’s ability to plan and execute its mission more effectively using less kinetic force.

Unlike the other postings, this job description specifically mentions Iraq and Afghanistan. And despite the deliberate vagueness of “less kinetic force,” this statement is probably as close to saying (and excuse the bluntness), “Having an anthropologist or two around makes it less likely that we’ll have to waste some Iraqis.” I suppose if you put it that way, it makes the job a little more attractive. Kind of.

The whole topic has been discussed in academic circles for a while now, but has only recently hit the mainstream press (in particular, a high-profile article in the New York Times). See Savage Minds for a primer and links to other articles, dating from as early as 2005. (For something earlier, Eric Wakin’s out-of-print Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand will fit the bill.)

Popularity: 1% [?]

…so far as anthropology is concerned, it is almost more of a problem to get exhausted ideas out of the literature than it is to get productive ones in, and so a great deal more of theoretical discussion than one would prefer is critical rather than constructive, and whole careers have been devoted to hastening the demise of moribund notions. As the field advances one would hope that this sort of intellectual weed control would become a less prominent part of our activities. But, for the moment, it remains true that old theories tend less to die than to go into second editions.

- From “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”

An obituary for Clifford Geertz can be read here.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Back in my grad student days when we used to have house parties at 103 Spring Lane, Madonna was always on the dance mix tapes — that’s right, tapes — that my housemate Big J would make. (We had generally sedate parties back then; one of the few times the cops came to bust us was when the Comp Lit folks came with their own mix tape — a party no-no, if you ask me — and cranked up Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” really loud.) Madonna remained a party staple even after the house changed from its early halcyon life as a predominantly interdisciplinary Southeast Asianist pad (two historians, an anthropologist (that’s me), and the lone Comp Lit person) to a full-blown German Studies house. (At that point I was the only holdout, my German limited to the kind spoken in Jim Abrahams and David Zucker’s Top Secret!)

During one of our dance parties, “Into the Groove” came on. People rushed to the floor (mostly the Government people — they always crashed parties). My German Studies housemate, not necessarily in between vogueing moves, came up to me while we were dancing. “The great thing about Madonna,” he confided, “is that you can dance to her with a sense of irony.” I laughed, told him that I genuinely enjoyed the song, and repeated it to my anthropologist classmate at my side, who was quite offended at the suggestion. “I love Madonna!” she said.

“Even the Erotica album?” I asked skeptically.

“I love the Erotica album!” she said, in between vogueing moves now that “Vogue” had come on.

Thinking about it now, I’m interpreting my housemate’s words about dancing to Madonna with a sense of irony to be a particularly early-’90s statement — back when Seinfeld and Letterman were at the height of their ironic powers — about cultural production in the ’80s. But back then I crudely concluded that our exchange represented the difference between anthropology and comparative literature: praxis versus theory, gratification versus deferment, a joyful participation in sweaty physicality versus a constipated detachment.

Anyhow, I digress — all this was merely an unconnected excuse to present the most insane site, clothes and haircuts and production values in varying degrees of quality:
1500 videos from the ’80s (looks like they’re actually hosted on YouTube), where I threw my productivity down the toilet for an hour and gleefully watched the Eurogliders and Climie Fisher and Fiction Factory and Cyndi Lauper and the vine-swinging in Haircut 100′s “Love Plus One” and that fake telephone that John Waite smashes in “Missing You” and the Vegemite sandwich from Men At Work’s “Down Under” back to back. And without the slightest smidgen of irony.

Popularity: 1% [?]