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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland

Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland

de Leon, Adrian
Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit

Paperback

Series: Critical Filipinx Studies

20th Century United States HistoryAsian American StudiesImmigration & Refugees

ISBN10: 029575432X
ISBN13: 9780295754321
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Mar 24 2026
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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.

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