Circling Back: Reconstituting Ethnic Community Networks among Aging Filipino Americans

Although there is an expansive literature on the assimilation and transnational experiences of middle-aged immigrants and their second-generation children, little work examines the experiences of immigrant elderly, particularly Asian Americans. Existing scholarship on segmented assimilation has generally assumed that elderly immigrant experiences continue the trajectories of middle age. Drawing on in-depth interviews with elderly Filipino American immigrants, the author finds a shift from the white middle-class mainstream path to an ethnic networks path of incorporation. Although middle-class immigrants may exhibit patterns and living situations similar to native whites throughout most of their lives, their experiences as racialized Americans may prompt desires to reconnect with ethnic networks in later life. This pattern, in which groups that have ostensibly assimilated throughout their life course recreate ethnic communities near the end of it, is rendered visible through a framework the author terms life course assimilation, which emphasizes the need to study assimilation processes at all life stages.