Nationals” under American colonial rule, were able to travel freely throughout the United States and its territories. Filipino bodies—hands, backs, knees, minds, voices—have always been viewed as economic leverage for the United States. The U.S. government’s decision to allow an influx of Filipino workers such as my mother conveniently coincided with a nursing shortage in the United States. My mother, a graduate of the colonial education system who spoke fluent English and held a brand-new nursing degree, qualified for immigration in 1970. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” poet Rick Barot writes of his grandmother’s journey from the Philippines to the United States many years before.