Balikbayan

How migrants imagined a country through their acts of return
What does it mean to go back home, especially when "home" is shaped by conquest, labor, and longing? This question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism, capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. Through vivid storytelling, Adrian De Leon traces how Filipinos, both at home and overseas, have both shaped the societies they've settled in and transformed the very idea of the Philippines itself.
By following the emergence of the Filipino return migrant (balikbayan), De Leon explores how statecraft in the Philippines--from the late Spanish period through the post-1946 independent state--attempted to co-opt value from migrant communities. Balikbayan shows how diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations were central to the development of a modern Philippine nation-state, through enabling the continued conquest of the islands' frontiers, and sustaining the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands were reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearned to connect with their roots.
Compiled through deep and thoughtful research in community archives, the itinerant histories brought to life in Balikbayan coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland.

Adrian De Leon is assistant professor of history and co-chair of Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at New York University. He is the author of Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association and received honorable mentions for both the John Hope Franklin and Lora Romero Prizes from the American Studies Association.
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is series editor for the Critical Filipinx Studies series. She is author of In Lady Liberty's Shadow: Race and Immigration in New Jersey (Rutgers University Press, 2017) and Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She is also editor of Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation (with Diane Fujino; UW Press, 2022), Asian America, 2nd Edition (with Pawan Dhingra; Wiley, 2021), and Filipino American Transnational Activism: Diasporic Politics among the Second Generation (Brill, 2019).