UC San Diego

In this study, I aim to make sense of an emergent form of youth expression that has come to be associated with Filipino youth and in many ways, a constitutive element of Filipino youth identities. I'm particularly interested in those complex forms of identification taking place among Filipino youth which revolve around questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and generation and what they reveal about the racialization of Filipinos in the U.S. and contours of the Filipino diaspora. This study employs multiple methods including an analysis of interviewed conducted with Filipino DJs, observation of DJ events, as well as a wide range of secondary sources including historical and popular accounts of hip hop and magazine interviews with Filipino DJs. The objective is to develop insights into the ways Filipino youth go about contesting the terms by which they are inserted into the racial hierarchies and economic structures of the U.S. and imagining new ways of being Filipino that both accommodate and challenge the normative boundaries of Filipinoness