How migrants imagined a country through their acts of return What does it mean to go back home, especially when “home” is shaped by conquest, labor, and longing? This question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism, capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. Through vivid storytelling, Adrian De Leon traces how Filipinos, both at home and overseas, have both shaped the societies they’ve settled in and transformed the very idea of the Philippines itself. By following the emergence of the Filipino return migrant (balikbayan), De Leon explores how statecraft in the Philippines―from the late Spanish period through the post-1946 independent state―attempted to co-opt value from migrant communities. Balikbayan shows how diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations were central to the development of a modern Philippine nation-state, through enabling the continued conquest of the islands’ frontiers, and sustaining the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands were reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearned to connect with their roots. Compiled through deep and thoughtful research in community archives, the itinerant histories brought to life in Balikbayan coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland. "Written with vitality and cleverly engaged with the politics of diaspora and transnational race making, Balikbayan marks a distinct achievement that links Philippine studies and Filipino American studies in dialogic conversation. De Leon traces the history of Filipinos and their turbulent transit across different nodes of the US empire and crafts a compelling case for deeper consideration of how colonial histories shape the past and the present. Balikbayan offers penetrating insights into limits and possibilities of anticolonial solidarities and citizenship."―Rick Baldoz, author of The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 " Balikbayan is a dizzyingly creative and thought-provoking work, crossing disciplines to explore the relationship between migration, diaspora, and the nation-state in the construction of the 'Filipino homeland.' De Leon pushes for a more honest reckoning of US empire, one which also offers striking insights about the subimperial dynamics of class, gender, nationalism, and settler colonialism within diasporic and transnational Filipino communities, both in the homeland and abroad. The book not only potentially reframes conversations for scholars of the Philippines and Filipino-American studies, but also serves as a transpacific and diasporic model for anyone studying immigration, empire, and nation-state formation."―Julian Lim, author of Porous Borders: Multiracial Migration and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands "Crossing disciplinary boundaries and geopolitical borders, Balikbayan brings to light transpacific movements of capital and labor that made the Philippine nation-state and the Filipino national subject imaginable. It traces the contradictory processes behind those nationalist imaginings to advance an incisive critique of history, subjectivity, and empire."―Moon-Ho Jung, author of Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State Adrian De Leon is a writer and assistant professor of history at New York University. He is author of Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America .