ABSTRACT
The ethnographic moments discussed throughout this book draw on years of interaction, observation and conversations with the participants in this study. The Filipinas’ stories reveal that personal biographies, personality, intentions and goals intertwine with their dislocations. Dislocation is a state of feeling out of place, misplaced or disrupted, due to micro, meso or macro processes of migration and diaspora. Dislocations ‘are the stumbling blocks and sources of pain engendered within social processes of migration’ (Parreñas, 2001b, p. 31). They can be physical, psychic, cultural and emotional. They can be immediate, delayed and residual. Dislocations sit within multiple sites of social relations, within the destination country, the home country, the spaces in between, historical specificity and power struggles and across axes of differentiation. This calls attention to borderland identities, ‘a state of psychic unrest’ (Anzaldúa, 2007, p. 95), whereby one negotiates uneven and contradictory processes that shape the day-to-day. In this chapter, I first discuss how home in a migration context is a dynamic journey amidst dislocations. I consider the role of the homing desire and diasporic consciousness in shaping enactments of belonging. Second, I provide an overview of home and identity in the Filipino diaspora. Third, I offer the analytical concept of ‘connecting sites’ as a term to examine their social practices among individual, community and global level dynamics.
