On Becoming Filipino

"[P]resents an excellent selection of the work of this 20th-century Filipino writer... Editor San Juan has provided an erudite 42-page discussion of Bulosan's work and life as well as a history of Filipinos in America." --Library Journal "Though written in the 1940s and 1950s, Bulosan's work has particular relevance in today's racially charged political debates." --Asian Week "On Becoming Filipino marks a decisive moment in our estimation of Carlos Bulosan's inexhaustible legacy for Asian American and twentieth-century U.S. literatures. This anthology amply captures the startling contemporaneity and political resonance of Bulosan's achievement, and dares us to push the exhausted debates over literary ethnicity and multiculturalism beyond their impoverished terms of bourgeois identity, cultural nationalism, and pluralist representation. This is a remarkably accomplished effort to frame and allegorize Bulosan's writing in terms of a Filipino nomadism ('becoming') and its uneasy displacements across the terrains of U.S.-Philippine colonial and postcolonial relations." --Oscar V. Campomanes, University of California, Berkeley "In this book, Bulosan's political views--Marxist, anticapitalist, antiracist, and anticolonialist--are explored as they evolve, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s... On Becoming Filipino is often a stark testimony to the lives of Filipino migrants: 'I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit,' Bulosan writes. 'And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America.' Bulosan's letters and essays reveal that...America would always be in his heart--as dream, as ideal, as object of a double-edged love which hurt as it both soothed and savaged." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, A.MAGAZINE