Balikbayan by Adrian De Leon

Balikbayan by Adrian De Leon

How migrants imagined a country through their acts of returnWhat 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.

Adrian De Leon is a writer and assistant professor of history at New York University. He is author of Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America.