CONCEPCION

Samaha, a reporter and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News, offers an expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipinx immigrants, who, with their American-born descendants, comprise the fourth-largest diaspora in the U.S. For his maternal grandparents, Manuel and Rizalina Concepcion, America was the land of opportunity. Although the family was prosperous (maids, private schools), beginning in 1965, when the U.S. dropped its immigration quotas, various relatives began leaving, and others followed as economic and political conditions deteriorated under the military rule of Ferdinand Marcos. Samaha and his mother came in 1995; his Lebanese father stayed behind, and his parents divorced a few years later. Drawing on more than 100 interviews as well as oral histories, court cases, and immigration records, Samaha creates a vivid sense of the reality immigrants encountered in a country they believed would offer “dreams and stability.” Even with evidence of dysfunction and decline, they never lost their faith in American greatness. The author interweaves stories of family and friends with a wide-ranging history of exploitation, oppression, and violence that shaped Filipino society and culture as Spain, Japan, and the U.S. took over the islands. “The colonizers,” he writes, “trained us with single-minded rigor to devote ourselves to their well-being.” Even after the U.S. granted the Philippines independence in 1946, the CIA “kept a guiding hand on the country’s leaders,” including Marcos. Samaha's identity as Filipinx was in flux throughout his childhood and adulthood as he moved between the White world his mother venerated and his self-identification as “a kid who wanted to be Black.” He came to realize that Filipinx immigrants “weren’t merely new arrivals to a nation, but to a longstanding system of racial oppression, suspended somewhere between those who conquered the land by blood and those whose blood built the empire."

An edifying, well-written narrative that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism.