The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Prof. Catherine Ceniza Choy will present a book chapter-in-progress that seeks to illuminate the less studied experiences of Filipino women's migration and labor through the life history of Apolonia Dangzalan. Her life story exemplifies both the constraints and possibilities of socio-economic mobility for Filipino women in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. This presentation will also highlight primary source material. It is largely based on the oral interview conducted in 1977 by Meri Knaster for the UCSC Library's Regional History Project series focusing on the ethnic and agricultural history of Santa Cruz County. 

Catherine Ceniza Choy is a professor and a former chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is a CSEAS core faculty member and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Race and Gender. Her major research interests focus on the U.S. global presence in Asian countries, Asian migrations to the United States, and the impact of trans-Pacific migration on American and Asian societies.  She is the author of the award-winning book, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History, which explored how and why the Philippines became the leading exporter of professional nurses to the United States.  Her second book, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America, unearths the little-known historical origins of Asian international adoption in the United States beginning with the post-World War II presence of the U.S. military in Asia. Prof. Choy is the co-editor of a new Brill book series, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race. She is currently working on four book projects that feature gender and the trans-Pacific world; biographies of Filipino American women; cultural productions about Asian international adoption; and the writing of ethnic studies scholar and historian Ronald Takaki.