Examining Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century, Thomas Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. The Heartland of U.S. Empire offers a cogent analysis of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and its infamous Philippine Exhibit alongside minor museum displays and archives of Midwesterners in the Philippines. Sarmiento also considers the "exile literature" of Filipino/American writer Bienvenido Santos as well as the TV shows Glee and Superstore , which provide mainstream visibility of the queer Filipinx Midwest.

He employs a queer, decolonial Filipinx methodology that traces how narratives of America's heartland position Filipinxs in the region as nonnormative due to their racial, gender, sexual, and national statuses. The Heartland of U.S. Empire locates queer Filipinxs in the geographic center of the nation and at the center of cultural narratives, thereby mapping alternative images of diasporic Filipinx identity and experience alongside U.S. regional and national identities, histories, and realities. In the series Asian American History and Culture.