by Randy Gonzales (Author)
Settling St. Malo brings readers back to a time when Louisiana had the largest Filipino population in the United States--when Filipinos fished out of St. Malo, dried shrimp on Barataria Bay, and designed Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans. Poet Randy Gonzales explores the history of Louisiana's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Filipino communities and his family's story of migration and assimilation through a blend of documentary and lyrical poetry. Settling St. Malo is a history of Filipino Louisiana in verse and an ode to the struggles of our immigrant ancestors, a collection of poems whose substance, language, and rhythms are informed by oral histories, diaries, letters, and government documents--poems infused with cultural and visual landscapes and driven by a poet's desire to account for a lost heritage.