I have been working on mapping out the routes of a few of the women whose lives I have been researching on for my dissertation. I will be presenting at the International Conference on Geographical Studies 2021 later this week, in Panel Session 3C: “Place-Based & Emotion-based Care and Care-Giving.”
The conference is open to all. Non-presenters who wish to join should register here.: Registration and payment for the conference fee should be sent on or before 2 November 2021.
Conventional Filipino migration histories usually trace their beginnings with “bachelor
societies” of restless migrant laborers, perhaps best exemplified in Carlos Bulosan’s
book, America is in the Heart 1946 Though a smaller percentage of these intra
imperial migrants were women, they played an outsized role in the burgeoning Filipino
communities in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere in the continental U S amidst the state and
sexual violence they encountered They married, re married, worked in the
plantations and canneries while maintaining households, raised their own children
and other people’s children They were culture bearers that innovated and adapted in
the face of migration and displacement By mapping out the trajectories of where
they and their children lived, worked, and had families based on their own testimonies
and life stories, this study attempts to reframe the Filipino diasporic community of the
early 20 th century beyond racial, ethnic, national and imperial borders and towards
matrifocal, affective archipelagos of care and kinship.
Adrian Alarilla 