1 Illusions of Mobility in Elaine Castillo’s America is not the Heart and Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister by Hope Sabanpan-Yu Many diasporic stories of Filipino origin represent migrants as people whose mobility is restricted because they are subjected to processes of othering in host countries. America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan and The Bamboo Dancers by NVM Gonzalez are such examples. There are other narratives that show Filipino characters who have assimilated and are considered mobile such as found in The Gangster of Love by Jessica Hagedorn and Cebu by Peter Bacho. The complexity of people’s decisions to leave the Philippines cannot be captured so easily and the mobilities paradigm allows us to grasp the fine line between an economically motivated move abroad and one that is an involuntary condition such as exile. This paper will first elucidate some facts about the mobilities paradigm and its relevance with respect to Philippine migration in a postcolonial context then offer a reading of the illusions of mobility in the narratives of Elaine Castillo and Jose Dalisay. Mobility has become a well-known model in the social sciences centering on the movements of people, ideas, objects, and information, as well as the mobility systems that shape our daily social life and relations. 1 John Urry writes that “[I]t sometimes seems as if all the world is on the move.” 2 And yet, this “mobility turn” is not about being more mobile in the global age of rapid movements and ultra-fast technological advancements. It is also about the ambiguity of the idea: “issues of movement and non-movement, of forced movement and of chosen fixity.” 3 This ambiguity is even more important when we consider mobility in a postcolonial context of global migration where the freedom of movement is still taken as a privilege. Migrants can be seen as a source of cheap labor regardless of training or education.