New Filam book Up Brown captures the second-generation experience The Filipino immigrant’s experience already has been the subject of a classic memoir with Seattle connections-Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, first published in 1946 and still in print in a paperback edition that sells a remarkable 5,000 copies every year for the University of Washington Press. That same local publisher now has released a fine new memoir that complements Bulosan’s classic. Peter Jamero’s Growing Up Brown: Memoirs of a Filipino American (UW Press, 318 pages, $24.95) recounts experiences common to second-generation Filipinos in this country, those in the so-called bridge generation who followed such
first-generation pioneers as Bulosan.Jamero, a 75-year-old former UW professor of rehabilitative medicine who lives near Modesto, Calif., grew up among 80 to 100 children in a Filipino farm-labor camp in that state. Being a “campo boy” had a profound impact on his character.
As Jamero writes, “It was as a ‘campo
boy’ that I first learned of my ancestral roots and the sometimes tortuous path
that Filipinos took in sailing halfway around the world to the promise of
America. It was as a campo boy that I first learned the values of family,
community, hard work and education. ”As a campo boy, I also began to see the
two faces of America, a place where Filipinos were at once welcomed and
excluded, were considered equal and were discriminated against. It was a place
where the values of fairness and freedom often fell short when Filipinos put
them to the test."
