This thesis' focus lies deep within the Filipino immigrant's "home" in the U.S. and offers an investigation of how different Filipino/Filipino-American homes in the texts examined challenge and confront the seeming viability and stability of U.S. boundaries that exclude them. Using postcolonial theory, critical scholarship on the "idea of home" and transnationalism, and guided by the metaphor of the local Philippine custom of the bayanihan, I argue that Filipino-American playwrights, rather than writing homes solely rooted either as a point of origin or relocation, activate the Filipino-American home by rendering the home as open, mobile, and unfixed and constantly enacting the process of home-making. Chapter One focuses on Chris B. Millado's PeregriNasyon, a historical drama that provides an elaboration of how Filipino domestic space was invaded and managed during the earliest stages of U.S. occupation. By looking at how Millado's dramaturgy urges for an oscillating investigation of the two foregrounded homes in his play, I focus on how the domestic space gets activated in order to evince the relationship of the Philippines and the U.S. Chapter Two of my discussion looks at how the central Filipina maternal figure in Ralph Peña's Flipzoids, opens up the Filipino-American home as a provocative site where constitutive racial dimensions of "belonging" in the U.S. for Filipino immigrants may be interrogated. I argue for the rethinking of the Filipino-American home to foreground how home-making for Filipino immigrants involves a constant process of building and rebuilding. In Chapter Two, I then examine Han Ong's play Middle Finger, a differential assessment to Flipzoids. I examine how the play entraps the Filipino-American family and de-activates the home despite its attempts to highlight the systems of social control that negatively affects its young, male Filipino-American characters. The plays discussed in my thesis re-present homes marked by their transit from the Philippines to the United States. These plays stage the challenges in rebuilding new homes caused by the immigrants' uprooting and their struggles encountered as minorities in the U.S. As I argue, not only do these plays paint a picture of home as one that is constantly harrowed by its colonial past, ultimately, they ask what lies ahead for the Filipino-American home. / A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2010. / March 29, 2010. / Filipino American Theatre, Home Philippines, Ralph Pena, Chris Millado, Han Ong, Filipino American Drama / Includes bibliographical references. / Irma Mayorga, Professor Directing Thesis; Natalya Baldyga, Committee Member; Kris Salata, Committee Member.

The current study explored factors that might be related to immigrant students’ academic achievement in the United States. To be specific, this study examined the relationships among parental involvement, students’ self-esteem and students’ academic achievement in immigrant families. In this study, I focused on the ethnicities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the United States. Furthermore, the current study investigated the extent to which Hispanic and Asian immigrant students’ self-esteem mediated the relationships between parental involvement and students’ academic achievement. Parental involvement included four dimensions: parental expectations, parental monitoring, parent-child communication, and parental participation in school activities. Using path analysis and multi-group path analysis, data were analyzed from 1,070 immigrant students, who attended 11th and 12th grades, and their parents from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (1991-2006). After removing the variable of parental monitoring from the path analysis due to no relationship with students’ self-esteem and GPA (with other variables controlled), findings showed that, parental expectations positively predicted students’ self-esteem and their academic achievement; parent-child communication positively predicted students’ self-esteem, but negatively predicted students’ academic achievement. In addition, parental participation in school activities positively predicted students’ self-esteem; however, there was no significant relationship with students’ academic achievement. Additionally, students’ self-esteem was not related to students’ academic achievement and had no mediation effect on the relationships between parental involvement and students’ academic achievement. These findings showed no differences between Hispanic and Asian immigrant families. Keywords: parental involvement, academic achievement, self-esteem, immigrant families, CILS / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 17, 2019. / academic achievement, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, CILS, immigrant families, parental involvement, self-esteem / Includes bibliographical references. / Jeannine E. Turner, Professor Directing Thesis; Alysia Roehrig, Committee Member; Yanyun Yang, Committee Member.