Refashioning the Intimate: Race and Personal Relationships in Contemporary Multiracial Filipino America.

Abstract

In the last quarter-century, immigration from Asia and Latin America has brought tremendous changes to the American racial landscape, most especially a rise in the U.S.’s multiracial population – those born to parents of two or more different races. Most studies on multiracial individuals have focused on their racial identities, yet few have examined their personal relationships (e.g. families, friends, romantic partners), the most racially segregated of social interactions. This dissertation utilizes the exemplar case of Filipinos in the U.S. to examine whether multiracial individuals, as products of interracial relations, perceive racial difference as a fading or enduring impediment in their familial, friendship, and romantic relations.

Through focused, life story interviews with over 60 multiracial adults born to Filipino/non-Filipino relationships in two U.S. regions, this dissertation reveals that multiracial respondents expressed two primary narrative orientations toward racial difference in their personal relationships: 1) reconciliation and 2) discordance. First, approximately three-quarters of respondents saw racial difference as not an impediment that fades or endures but as a compatible part of their closest relationships. They “presented” this seemingly counter-intuitive claim through telling reconciliation narratives, in which racial difference transformed from a liability to an asset. Second, roughly one-quarter of respondents held more ambivalent stances. These respondents were exposed to counter-narratives in college (e.g. courses) that highlighted enduring gender and racial inequalities (e.g. sex work industry) and led them to tell discordant narratives, in which they felt they could neither fully embrace nor entirely reject the possibility of close, interracial relationships. Finally, three male respondents saw race as not playing a significant role in their closest relations. These outlier respondents denied race’s significance through gendered negation strategies that enabled them to present their personal lives as stable and changeless.

This dissertation illustrates that, while racial difference still persists as an obstacle in many multiracial individuals’ closest relations, members of a growing subset of the U.S. multiracial population – those born to Filipino/non-Filipino relationships – are refashioning traditional understandings of racial difference in their personal relationships beyond only an obstacle that endures or fades but also something that can serve a valuable, compatible role.