Intimate Invasions

This thesis' focus lies deep within the Filipino immigrant's "home" in the U.S. and offers an investigation of how different Filipino/Filipino-American homes in the texts examined challenge and confront the seeming viability and stability of U.S. boundaries that exclude them. Using postcolonial theory, critical scholarship on the "idea of home" and transnationalism, and guided by the metaphor of the local Philippine custom of the bayanihan, I argue that Filipino-American playwrights, rather than writing homes solely rooted either as a point of origin or relocation, activate the Filipino-American home by rendering the home as open, mobile, and unfixed and constantly enacting the process of home-making. Chapter One focuses on Chris B. Millado's PeregriNasyon, a historical drama that provides an elaboration of how Filipino domestic space was invaded and managed during the earliest stages of U.S. occupation. By looking at how Millado's dramaturgy urges for an oscillating investigation of the two foregrounded homes in his play, I focus on how the domestic space gets activated in order to evince the relationship of the Philippines and the U.S. Chapter Two of my discussion looks at how the central Filipina maternal figure in Ralph Peña's Flipzoids, opens up the Filipino-American home as a provocative site where constitutive racial dimensions of "belonging" in the U.S. for Filipino immigrants may be interrogated. I argue for the rethinking of the Filipino-American home to foreground how home-making for Filipino immigrants involves a constant process of building and rebuilding. In Chapter Two, I then examine Han Ong's play Middle Finger, a differential assessment to Flipzoids. I examine how the play entraps the Filipino-American family and de-activates the home despite its attempts to highlight the systems of social control that negatively affects its young, male Filipino-American characters. The plays discussed in my thesis re-present homes marked by their transit from the Philippines to the United States. These plays stage the challenges in rebuilding new homes caused by the immigrants' uprooting and their struggles encountered as minorities in the U.S. As I argue, not only do these plays paint a picture of home as one that is constantly harrowed by its colonial past, ultimately, they ask what lies ahead for the Filipino-American home.