Ronald Takaki’s chapter in his sweeping 1989 text, Strangers from a Different Shore, “Dollar a Day, Dime a Dance: The Forgotten Filipinos”, outlines the experiences of primarily male Filipino immigrants to the U.S in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The author did a good job showing what the Filipino went through. Like many immigrants before them, Filipino immigrants came seeking work and a better livelihood, The American Dream. Filipinos faced backbreaking work, low wages, and at time, extreme racism. On the other hand, in many ways the Filipino immigrant experiences were extremely different from that of other ethnic groups, the Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
To start with, the author highlights a primary difference as the fact that Filipinos “were not foreigners” because they were from a territory acquired by America; hence, they were “American nationals” (but not citizens)(Takai, 314). Immigration is defined as the process of relocating permanently to a foreign country. So this didn’t apply to the Filipino at that time because they were just moving to a different state in the U.S.; and they wanted to just make enough money so they could return home to their family. Whereas, …show more content…
after the Spanish-American War, Philippine Could freely enter the country. Recruited by the thousands as cheap labor to work the Hawaiian sugar plantation and “the fisheries of the Northwest and Alaska” (Takai, 314). They quickly began to migrate to the U.S mainland. They were agricultural workers and domestic service workers, which is what the economy needed a that time. In contrast, the first Chinese immigration to North America began with the California Gold Rush and the first railroad project across America. Following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants were increasingly as their success in the farming industry. Therefore, the way they came to America makes Filipino quite distinct from the Chinese and