Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s

Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s. By Linda España-Maram. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. xvi, 252 pp. Cloth, $69.50, ISBN 0-231-11592-X. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-231-11593-8.)

Much recent writing on the history of Asian Americans before 1965 has challenged the traditional image of Asian American bachelor communities. Madeline Y. Hsu, Xiaojian Zhao, Dorothy Fujita-Rony, and this reviewer have all emphasized the role of women and families, either on-site or across the Pacific, among Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans. By contrast, Linda España-Maram returns the story to the bachelors-Filipinos in Los Angeles between the 1920s and 1950s. She thus extends and deepens Carlos Bulosan's semiautobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946), which sketched the lives of young, Depression-era Filipino agricultural workers along...