Abstract
Migrant politics has come into sharper focus in a world marked by authoritarian resurgence, hardened borders, racialized exclusion, wars, genocide, and other crises. Research on migrant transnationalism has long shown that migrants maintain ties across borders. Yet scholarship often separates migrant politics into immigrant-rights struggles, racial justice, labor organizing, and diaspora politics oriented toward the homeland. Sharon Quinsaat's Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora challenges this separation. Rather than treating diaspora as an already existing community that later becomes politically active, Quinsaat asks how migrants come to understand themselves as a diaspora. Her central argument is simple but powerful: protests do not merely express diasporic identity; they help create it.
For Quinsaat, the Filipino diaspora is not produced by one homeland narrative, event, or form of mobilization. It is made through multiple struggles: anti-dictatorship activism against Ferdinand Marcos, migrants’ rights organizing in host societies, and collective memory work against historical revisionism. Diaspora is therefore not a demographic or cultural category based only on shared origin. It is a relational and contentious formation produced through collective action, debate, organizational labor, public claims-making, and the narration of shared history.
The book draws on fieldwork in the United States, the Netherlands, and the Philippines, as well as interviews, archives, ethnographic observations, memoirs, and historical accounts. This multi-method approach supports Quinsaat's meso-level analysis of the organizations, networks, narratives, and relationships through which migrants become collective actors. The United States and the Netherlands are not treated as neatly comparable cases, but as linked sites in a transnational field. The United States has a large Filipino community shaped by U.S. colonialism and racial formation, while the Netherlands has a smaller population that includes migrants in precarious legal and labor conditions. Yet both sites become connected through transnational movements.
One of the book's most convincing contributions concerns second-generation Filipino Americans. Quinsaat shows that their diasporic consciousness did not simply emerge from inherited ethnicity or family memory. Many came to Philippine politics through domestic racial struggles, antiwar activism, student organizing, Asian American movements, and encounters with earlier Filipino labor activists. These experiences gave them a vocabulary for linking racism in the United States to imperialism abroad. Homeland-oriented activism was therefore not simply imported from the Philippines; it was produced through hostland racial politics, intergenerational storytelling, and local community organizing.
At the same time, Quinsaat avoids romanticizing transnational connection. For example, in the case of Maria, an undocumented Filipina domestic worker in the Netherlands, is particularly moving because it shows the difficulty of sustaining solidarity under legal precarity and political disagreement. Maria organizes around migrants’ rights and the vulnerabilities of Filipina domestic workers, yet homeland politics enters this field in complicated ways. Duterte's War on Drugs and the possible return of the Marcos family to power push Maria toward anti-authoritarian critique, but she deletes social media posts criticizing Marcos supporters because she fears alienating the migrants she hopes to organize. This episode captures one of the book's strongest insights: transnationalism is not only about connection, but also about contradiction, silence, compromise, and navigation of the changing political landscapes.
The book also contributes through its analysis of collective memory activism. The struggle against Ferdinand Marcos's burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani becomes a transnational contest over memory narratives, legitimacy, and national belonging. Former anti-dictatorship activists use testimonies, demonstrations, stories, and intergenerational dialogue to resist the rehabilitation of Marcos and the revision of martial law history. Quinsaat shows that shared history is not simply inherited; it must be constantly negotiated and contested. This speaks to diaspora studies by showing how difference becomes politically meaningful through movement work.
Insurgent Communities is written primarily for scholars and advanced students in migration studies, diaspora studies, sociology, Asian American studies, Philippine studies, and social movement theory. It would be useful in courses on international migration because it shows how migrants’ political lives cross the boundaries of host state, homeland, workplace, community, and memory. The book also raises important questions for future research. Most notably, how far does its argument travel beyond progressive or anti-authoritarian movements? If social movements create diaspora, then pro-regime, conservative, religious, or authoritarian migrant formations may also create competing diaspora projects. Quinsaat's framework is well equipped to address this issue, though the book's main emphasis remains on movements that challenge dictatorship, exploitation, and historical revisionism.
Overall, Insurgent Communities is a timely and theoretically ambitious contribution to international migration studies. Its importance lies in explaining how activism produces the very collectivity called diaspora. The book should influence research by encouraging scholars to study migrant politics relationally rather than dividing it into fixed categories. It can also shape teaching by showing how migration, race, labor, empire, authoritarianism, and memory intersect. For policy and advocacy debates, Quinsaat's work offers a powerful reminder that migrants are political actors who create communities through struggle, even when those communities remain unfinished, divided, and contested.