3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful, Informative, Needed, but Asexual, August 10, 2006
This review is from: Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives) (Paperback)
LEM looks at the employment, gambling, sports-watching, dancing, and veterans' activities of Pilipino men who lived in the United States from the 1920s to the 1940s. Though the subtitle mentions "popular culture," this book is not about music, art, poetry, or the mediums one usually finds in cultural studies. This was a rigorous history text. I usually dislike when authors juggle too many balls, but here LEM does it with ease. She fleshes out issues in many informative ways. She interviews some of the men still alive, but this is not cutesy nostalgia. She backs memories up with police reports, community news articles, census information, and other items.
Pilipinos have been described as "the forgotten Asian Americans" because few scholars have written on them even though they make up a huge percentage of this racial group. Also, few Asians lived in American until laws were changed in the 1960s. Thus, LEM is studying a much-understudied and deserving group.
Unlike many scholars that will only compare their studied group with the white majority, LEM mentions Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other Asian Americans frequently. She does a great job in showing how communities can be mobile. She shows how a group of color can be ridiculed by the majority one year and then praised the next. She points out that Pilipinos may have exploited other Pilipinos. She notes anti-black racism from Pilipinos, unlike the book "Global Divas" where such racism is left uncritiqued and thus supported.
My BIG problem with this book is the asexuality of the text. Yes, Pilipino men didn't have Pilipinas in the US to marry. However, no interviewee said they went without sex, but LEM doesn't discuss that. These men danced with white and Mexican-American women, but the author never answers whether these men took their dance partners to the boudoir or to the altar. Other Asian-American scholars have said that South Asian men without same-ethnicity females married Mexican-American women. Why didn't these Pilipinos do the same? Why didn't they try to marry black women? According to Rachel Moran in "Interracial Intimacy," Pilipino men fought hard against anti-miscegenation laws, but LEM never brings that up. LEM notes that dance halls promoted a strict heterosexuality, but she never ever asks or answers whether these men without female partners ever got down with each other. The chapter on the dance halls was very asexual, Kevin Mumford's "Interzones," which focused on black-white mixing said more about Pilipino-white mixing than this book. I am disappointed that this outstanding book could be so prudish and uncritical of its prudishness.
It may surprise readers that a woman has produced this men's studies text. However, the exclusion of Pilipinas in early immigration laws is what makes this subject men's studies by default. Nevertheless, men's studies expert Michael Messner admitted that usually women are more interested in men's studies than men. There seemed to be nothing lost by having a person of one gender writing on another gender. This book does interview many people who earned Master's and undergraduate degrees in a time when few people, of any ethnic background, went to college. I am worried this may have skewed past realities and may re-establish stereotypes of Asian Americans as model minorities.
Harvard's ex-president's disrespectful comments about Dr. Cornel West actually highlighted how in demand African-American studies professors are. I imagine that Pilipino students would also clamor for Pilipino professors and mentors. LEM works at a CSU. Not to be snobby, but UCLA or Stanford should do whatever is in their power to get this rigorous and thought-provoking scholar on their faculty.
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