Becoming Filipino

Abstract

This article examines how Filipino Americans variably constructed the meaning of “heritage” in an online Tagalog class offered by a Filipino cultural institute in the greater New York City area. Using ethnographic data collected from September-December 2021, the article combines theories and methods in postcolonial semiotics with narrative analysis to examine the emergent production of chronotopes, or time-space narratives of language and personhood, in and across the language learning narratives of three individuals. While these participants variously navigated community-internal discourses of Filipino Americans having lost their language and culture due to the embodied experience of colonization, they commonly invoked racializing logics of liberal multiculturalism to construct heritage as follows: (1) as a set of historically transmitted linguistic and cultural practices, (2) as an emblem of ethnoracial difference. By attending to the everyday narrative practices through which Filipino Americans situate their narratives in lived experiences of coloniality and multiculturalism, this article contributes a new theoretical and methodological perspective on how diasporic people participate in the reconstruction and management of “heritage.” Finally, given that Filipino Americans experience racialization as institutionalized invisibility, this article also challenges theories of racial difference as predicated on an institutional positionality of markedness and visibility.