"A place to call home" : the rhetoric of Filipinx-American place-making / by Stephanie Mahnke.

In this dissertation, I analyze the place-making efforts of the Philippine American Cultural Center of Michigan, a space for Detroit's Filipinx community. By looking at the place-making process from the center's earliest conception to later development, this study aims to determine the negotiations and factors that influence the production and sustainment of space based on the group's cultural ideology. To gather and analyze data, I coded the center's planning minutes from 1980 to 2001, followed by interviews with members of the original planning committee and center's leaders. All findings are validated by the community through the Filipinx indigenous interviewing method of pagtatanung-tanung. Through analysis of the documents and interviews, I conclude the distinct rhetoric of this center's Filipinx-American place-making is a result of negotiated Filipinx values to prioritize beliefs in unity and reciprocity, creating a materially and symbolically malleable cultural center to accommodate different forms of members' "giving back". Results of the study may inform cultural rhetoricians' methodology and fuller treatment of place-making as a rhetorical process, and community organizers of the importance of accounting for distinct cultural ideologies which influence place-making efforts.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on April 13, 2020)