Books
One Tribe (2006)
One Tribe
In One Tribe, the death of Isabel Manalo’s unborn child stirs wide spread speculation in her small Midwestern suburb. Fed up with the noise of local tsismosas , she moves to Virginia Beach to teach myth and history to Filipino American youth. Isa Manalo walks into the chaos of drive by shootings, beauty pageants, and community politicking. At every turn she runs up against youth gangs who distrust her, community elders who disapprove of her loose outsider ways, and a Filipino boyfriend who accuses her of acting too white. Eventually Isa fights back. As Hurricane Emilia brews at the edge of the east coast, Isa opens her house to a local girl gang and nourishes their troubled spirits, instigating change sudden as the shift of tropical winds.
2006 Global Filipino Literature Award in Fiction.
2004 AWP Prize in the Novel.
New Issues Press
Read reviews and order on New Issues Press website
PrAise For
One Tribe
“Galang infuses her novel about Filipino Americans with a sense of urgency by crafting it around the lives of a group of troubled teenagers struggling to find their way in both their ethnic and geographic communities.”
“M. Evelina Galang weaves a strange world in One Tribe which is at once alarming and familiar in its juxtaposition of languages and the undertow of cultural mayhem: Filipino “colonial mentality” versus Filipino claimants of island heritage; packs of hip hop upstarts who intermingle Tagalog and Black street lingo versus staid advocates of proper assimilation into white mainstream society.”
“ONE TRIBE is political without being preachy, and in the end is a layered story about survival, especially for the young women caught up in this violent struggle (a veritable culture war) over affirmations of power and territory—a paradigm that mirrors the conflicted history of the Philippines.”
“This novel deftly navigates the tension over being American and yet not quite so; the conflict between race and personal relations; and the contradiction between the reality of history and that of the present. It adds to the growing body of literature about Filipino presence and experience on this continent.”
“M. Evelina Galang’s ONE TRIBE is a bold, ambitious, moving, and deeply surprising novel about the necessity and dangers of the human need to belong to other people.”
“ONE TRIBE is ambitious, beautifully paced, ingeniously constructed, a multi-layered novel in which virtuosity is a vehicle for wise, deeply compassionate storytelling. ”