Reviewed by: Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora: Transnational Relations, Identities, and Communities, and: Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs Rick Bonus Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora: Transnational Relations, Identities, and Communities. By Jonathan Y. Okamura. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs. By Cathy A. Small. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Jonathan Y. Okamura’s Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora and Cathy A. Small’s Voyages are two recent books that illuminate in specific ways a thorough understanding of the concepts and processes of diaspora and transnationalism. Not only are they valuable in expanding the breadth of analytic scholarship devoted to addressing late-twentieth century population movements and unstable moorings; they also offer much needed depth to the localized specificities of the transnational experience with all its complex textures, patterns, and consequences. Okamura begins with a thesis that argues for the use of the term diaspora to explain Filipino American history and contemporary experience “because of their significant transnational relations with their homeland that differentiate them from other ethnic minorities in the United States.” (p. ix) He then proceeds to unpack diaspora to suggest that one may not necessarily explain people’s movements only from the purview of departures and dispersals from their original homelands, but to account instead for the perpetuation of linkages between origins and settlements that characterize the phenomenon of transnationalism. Applied specifically to the conditions of Filipino population movements and multi-directional connections occurring worldwide (in particular, between the United States and the Philippines), the logic that Okamura proposes is that such a phenomenon changes the terms of engagement and expectations of conventional social analysis which bind immigration strictly [End Page 207] with settlement. That is, given the high figures of money remittances and delivery of goods in balikbayan (return to the “nation”) boxes (mostly to the Philippines) sent by Filipino labor in the United States and other parts of the world, the huge volume of interaction across national boundaries made possible by modern communication technology, the regularity of physical travel to and from the homeland, and so forth, how can one remain committed to the seemingly stable connections among identity, community, and nationality? Okamura addresses this question by first providing a set of analytical tools that uses “diaspora as transnational social construction” to highlight the scope of a range of transnational arrangements the make possible a multi-directionality of travels and connections. In chapter two, he carefully moves his levels of analysis from the confines of diaspora studies to a more transnational framework, and within this, from the generalized approach of macro-economic scholarship on global capitalism and labor flows to a concrete specificity of agency-centered experience of mobility and unfixed settlement. The next two chapters move into further detail by outlining the particularities of U.S.-Philippines transnational experiences. Chapter three provides a substantial overview of the history and present realities of Filipino life in the United States and outlines the range of struggles to “define the local” (p. 9) in the form of collective challenges to marginalization as experienced by Filipino, diasporic transnationals based in the U.S. In localizing the tenor by which diasporic/transnational conditions are experienced by Filipinos, Okamura carefully makes the implicit argument that to be transnational does not necessarily amount to losing interest in “the national” (in this case, the U.S.). Rather, it has meant focusing on the significance of the U.S. nation-state as a space where the tensions of the global and the local, the here and there, and imaginings of the “homeland” and the “adopted” nation, are played out in complex ways. Chapter four crucially marks one such complexity in the case of Filipinos in Hawai’i as objects of social analyses. Okamura traces the ways in which traditional social science scholarship has utilized the lens of “adaptation” to describe patterns of settlement of Filipinos in the islands. Marshalling a pointed critique of the inadequacies and inappropriateness of such a perspective, he brings to light the creative and empowering set of social practices Filipinos in Hawai’i have deployed to challenge their exclusion and marginalization that, on the surface, have been regarded as unacceptable within the...