"The Heartland of U.S. Empire is a wonder. There is nothing else like it out there. Braiding personal history with piercing analyses, Thomas Xavier Sarmiento makes a stunningly original contribution to our understanding of Filipinx communities within the U.S. Midwest. From start to finish, this book proves to be an absolute gift to scholars committed to entwined interdisciplinary projects in queer studies, Asian American studies, and place-based critique.

" - Scott Herring, Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism "Productively vertiginous, The Heartland of U.S. Empire tilts the axis of Filipinx American studies away from the West Coast and the dominance of demographic argumentation to the Midwest. At once a place and a no-place, the Midwest is the heart of empire, maintained by colonial technocrats, soldiers, and educators. And in their displacement, disorientation, and dissatisfaction, Filipinxs located in so-called 'flyover' country forge a queer relation to this well of loneliness--now opened to racial and colonial critique--that is the Midwest. Sarmiento's book persuasively reorients Filipinx American studies to America's heartland, revealing how quietly, centrally, and brutally formative it has been to the Filipinx experience in general." - Sarita Echavez See, Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum.