Finding Home: Exploring Pilipinx Americans' Experience of Belonging and Kapwa in the Diaspora

Background and Purpose: A long history of colonization and assimilation impact Pilipinx Americans’ (PAs) wellbeing, including worse mental health due to acculturative stress and colonial mentality. Cultural factors and a sense of belonging to one’s racial-ethnic-cultural group are conceptualized as buffers against the effects of historical trauma and assimilation on health. As such, kapwa, a fundamental Pilipinx cultural value emphasizing the oneness between self and others, has the potential to act as a protective factor for PA mental health. However, as the third largest Asian American subgroup, PAs have long been understudied in the social sciences. Consequently, studies on PAs’ experience of kapwa and its connection to wellbeing remain scattered and not yet well understood. In this study, I present preliminary qualitative findings to address the questions, “How do PAs experience belonging and kapwa in the diaspora?

Methods: 20 PAs and immigrants from the Philippines participated in 90-minute semi-structured focus groups and interviews via Zoom. Participants were recruited via PA organization listservs, social media, and professional networks. Data were examined using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.

Results: The preliminary findings revealed two themes.

• Theme 1: Simultaneity – Participants described their experiences of belonging in diaspora as paradoxical, ambiguous, and conflicting. For example, a sense of displacement in the US existing in parallel with a sense of estrangement from the “motherland.”
• Theme 2: Liminality – Participants described kapwa geographically, as both physical and emotional interstitial places, where new meanings and experiences of belonging are co-created with others. Physical interstitial places include Pilipinx restaurants and affinity groups at workplaces, whereas emotional interstitial places include intimate sharing in discussions conducted among other PAs.

Based on these themes, kapwa is conceptualized as 1) a processual cultural healing function that promotes collective metabolizing of challenges in belonging and trauma from assimilation, and 2) a cultural healing location, or a “third place,” critical to continually shaping PAs’ sense of belonging and vitalizing their wellbeing.

Conclusions and Implications:

Findings from this study offer nuanced understanding of colonialism and assimilation’s impact on PAs’ wellbeing and suggest new insights to boost help seeking behavior. As an understudied population in social sciences, this study challenges previous conceptualizations of place-based social work research to include imagined and emotional geography. This study’s new conceptualization of kapwa may strengthen future theories and practices for cultural healing and enrich decolonial anti-oppressive social work practice.