UCLA Center for the Study of Women

This paper considers the means through which Filipina nurses grappled with the social and political terrains of their new lives in America—as workers, women of color, and as Filipina Americans. Using the microscopic texture of one woman’s oral history—that of my mother Felilia Lanete Rosas—will hopefully elucidate the macroscopic issues of immigration, social and political resistance, and race relations within and beyond the workplace. Her narrative reveals how Filipina American nurses in states such as Alabama and Texas, negotiated multiple identities, spaces, and fields of power. On the one hand her and her fellow nurses were trained professionals armed with university degrees and medical expertise. On the other hand, they were women of color whose presence was a result of America’s colonial legacy in the Philippines.1