HistoryBooks@UNSW returns in 2022 with a QandA discussion on Mina Roces' new book, The Filipino Migration Experience: Global Agents of Change.
Join us on Friday, 25 February @ 10am AEDT for an interview between Professor Mina Roces (UNSW) and Professor Rick Bonus (University of Washington, Seattle). For our US-based participants, this event will take place 3-4pm Thurs 24th Feb (Seattle) or 1-2pm Thurs 24 Feb (Hawaii).
About the Book:
The Filipino Migration Experience introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. Mina Roces suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing Filipino migrantsas critics of the family and cultural constructions of sexuality, as consumers and investors, as philanthropists, as activists, and, as historians. They have been able to transform fundamental social institutions and well-entrenched traditional norms, as well as alter the business, economic and cultural landscapes of both the homeland and the host countries to which they have migrated.
Mina Roces tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, tapping into hitherto underused primary sources from the "migrant archives" and more than 70 interviews. Bringing the fields of Filipino migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies together, this book analyzes some of the areas where Filipino migrants have forever changed the status quo.
A PhD graduate from the University of Michigan, Mina Roces is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of five monographs: Women, Power and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-war Philippines (Praeger, 1998), Kinship Politics in Post-war Philippines: The Lopez Family, 1946-2000 (de la Salle University Press 2001), Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), The Filipino Migration Experience: Global Agents of Change (Cornell University Press, 2021), and Gender in Southeast Asia, (Cambridge University Press, February 2022). She is the recipient of the 2019 Grant Goodman Prize for Excellence in Philippine Historical Studies given by the Philippine Studies Group, Association for Asian Studies, USA. In 2016 she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Rick Bonus is professor and chair of American ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He writes on Filipino American migration, Asian American transnationalism, and multicultural education. His first book Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Temple University Press, 2000) is a study of transnational Filipino experiences in the U.S. within the contexts of U.S. imperial histories, labor recruitment, and ethnic community formations. His most recent book, The Ocean in the School (Duke, 2020), is based on an ethnography of Pacific Islander and other underrepresented students whose college experiences became generative sites for transforming university schooling. He is currently editor-in-chief of ALON: Journal of Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies, as well as co-editor of the Asian American History and Culture Series at Temple University Press.
