An Introduction

At about three and a half million people, Filipinos are the second-largest Asian population in the United States behind the Chinese. In California, the state with the highest population of U.S. immigrants, the Filipino population is second only to Mexican Americans. Despite their numbers, Filipinos fly well below the radar of most Americans, who have little to no knowledge of neither the group nor their home country of the Philippines. The invisibility of Filipinos has largely to do with the confusion they bring to the American system of race. Though classified as Asian by the U.S. Census, Filipinos have Spanish last names, are predominantly Catholic, and frequently encounter racial miscategorization. In other words, Filipinos do not map onto the American racial landscape very neatly, which in turn affects how they experience race in everyday life.

In response to their invisibility, Filipinos have jokingly dubbed themselves the “Mexicans of Asia.” Joking aside, this racial descriptor signals a major departure from the black-white racial binary that was once commonplace in American history. Rather than seeing themselves in relation to African Americans and whites—a practice that was once standard among immigrant groups—Filipinos negotiate their race along a Latino-Asian racial spectrum, a demographic backdrop firmly established in states like California and slowly emerging in other parts of the country. Inspired by cultural capital theory, an analytic framework made famous by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the narratives of Filipinos demonstrate how race is commodity and culture is currency. Racial identification with Latinos and Asians are symbolic commodities that facilitate important social and educational outcomes for Filipinos, and given the colonial influence on their ethnic culture (from Spain and the United States), they have access to both racial groups.

Do Filipinos align themselves to Latinos, who are quickly emerging as a dominant population in the United States? Or do they assert themselves to be Asian American, considering the rapid upward mobility of this group as a whole? The answer is not so straightforward, especially for Filipinos themselves, who navigate between both Latino and Asian identity, and do so differently depending on their social and institutional environment.

In the end, the narratives of Filipinos in Los Angeles illustrate important lessons about the changing dynamics of race relations in an increasingly multiethnic society, how racial barriers persist, and most importantly, how we can break barriers if we more deeply understand the rules of race in everyday life.