I am a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, with minors in Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (RIDGS) and American Indian and Indigenous Studies.

"Messin’ Wid Paradise: The Kalihi-verse as Oceanic Homeplace In and Beyond the City with No Pity" is my dissertation, based on five years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research with young adults from Kalihi—many of whom, like me, came of age in the 1990s and 2000s amid post-plantation restructuring, racialized policing, and education systems shaped by settler and carceral logics. The everyday cultural practices of my interlocutors and I are central to my work, highlighting stories of belonging amid intersecting oppressions in Hawaiʻi. From Kalihi’s streets to theatre stages, pau hana talk stories, and Kakaʻako co-working sessions, I have listened to immigrant, second-generation, and Kānaka Maoli voices—many now navigating adulthood in a Hawaiʻi marked by housing crises and soaring living costs. As a second-generation Filipina returning to Kalihi, my research is a critical reckoning with my own place within these stories and structures. Framed by Critical Youth Studies, Women of Color and Indigenous Feminisms, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Asian Settler Colonialism Studies, I position the Kalihi-verse as an Oceanic multiverse where my interlocutors and I forge belonging and resist erasure across both our youth and young adulthood.