Book recommendations for 2020 Filipino American History Month
/Barbara Jane Reyes, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, BOA Editions, Ltd, 2020
Barbara Jane Reyes’s sixth collection of poems, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, is fire – in the colloquial and primordial sense—life-giving, path-lighting. This is a book I know I needed as a young brown girl; it’s a book I didn’t know I needed, still. Reyes’ collection is a gathering place, a site of survival. Part interrogation, part epistle and chronicle, part soundtrack and roadmap, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, weaves together songs of experience and wisdom, songs of kapwa and loób, connecting the voices of a lineage of power—from Sugar Pie De Santo to Ruby Ibarra—to create a resounding, multitudinous chorus of young brown women transforming shame into dignity. This book makes me want to throw on my pambahay, raise my glass, and sing!
— Michelle Peñaloza, author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire
Lysley Tenorio, The Son of Good Fortune, Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2020.
“This story is bursting with heart and wisdom, humor and hope. Tenorio's gifts as a writer are on display in this expertly constructed, gorgeously written tale of a family haunted by past mistakes, struggling toward the future. Immersive in its rich detail, it gathers momentum to its affecting and powerful conclusion. A remarkable novel by an author I plan to follow for years to come.”
-Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown and How To Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe
Dawn Mabalon, Gayle Romasanta, Journey for Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong, Bridge and Delta Publishing, 2018
“Often we seek ourselves in books and can't find us in them, especially when we seek our own history within this nation…But we shouldn't stop at our history, we need to learn more and create visibility for those who did the work before us, who claimed the dirt paths and streets, chanted in their own words along our side, and sacrificed their own existence beyond their culture. Journey For Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong is not only a Filipino American narrative, it is also Chicanx history, it is the foundation of the UFW, and an essential story about an immigrant who fought for civil rights and contributed to U.S. history. It is important to share this story all year round,”
Sarah Rafael Garcia, author of SanTana’s Fairy Tales, LibroMobile founder, & grandaughter of a Bracero farm worker.
Malaka Gharib, I Was Their American Dream: AGraphic Memoir, Penguin Random House, 2019.
A heartwarming tribute to immigrant families and their descendants trying to live the American dream.
Kirkus Reviews.
I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents’ ideals, learning to code-switch between her family’s Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.
From the publisher.
Damon L. Woods, The Myth of the Barangay and Other Silences Histories, The University of the Philippines Press, 2017.
The Myth of the Barangay and Other Silenced Histories provides important incisive analyses of several primary documents that point to a rich and largely dismissed narrative of early written Philippine history. Damon Woods has done tremendous and painstaking work to seek out hidden Filipino transcripts found among Spanish documents scattered all over the world. In doing so, his work calls for an enriched, critical, and continuing dialogue on the bayan and its relationship to Filipinos in the Philippines as well as the growing Filipino diaspora. Woods’s voice in this work also provides insight into how research can and should be practiced from an appropriate and respectful cultural context, always presented with humility and gratitude.
—Lily Ann B. Villaraza
Chair, Philippine Studies Department
City College of San Francisco
All books are available from Arkipelago Books.
https://www.arkipelagobooks.com/
Abraham Ignacio Jr.
Abraham Ignacio, Jr. is the librarian for the Filipino American Center at the San Francisco Public Library. He also co-authored of “The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War through Political Cartoons” along with Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio.
More from Abraham Ignacio, Jr.
