UCLA

This dissertation is concerned with the multiple valences of Pina/oy cultural meaning-making from 1920 to 1941. It focuses on alternative practices of labor and leisure in California, where multiple Pina/oy ethnic enclaves throughout the state underscored the critical role that travel, mobility, and inter-dependent community infrastructures played in sustaining the transpacific lifeways of the Filipina/o diaspora during the interwar period. It will examine Pina/oys’ historical negotiations over space, power, and autonomy that occurred on the terrain of several Pina/oy popular cultures. These cultural spaces created the context for alternative modes of work, survival, community-making, and freedom to emerge under U.S. racial regimes.