Stacey Salinas
Ethnic Studies Professor, College of the Redwoods, Eureka (California)
Eureka, California, United States
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Dr. Stacey Anne Baterina Salinas holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a co-founder and former Senior Historian of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies at UC Davis. Salinas' research focuses on the roles of Filipinas in the Fil-Am towns of the Central Coast during the interwar period with an emphasis on gender, activism, and labor. Her recent publications highlight Filipina resistance fighters in the Philippines, called guerrilleras, during WWII and their eventual migration stories as part of the manang and manong generation. Salinas volunteers and researches for other Asian-American led coalitions like Chinatown’s Pacific Atrocities Education, the Filipino American National Historical Society, & The Filipino American Woman Project Podcast. Currently, Salinas is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California.
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The State of Collective Resistance in Filipinx American Studies: Reports From the Field
In light of the current violence happening inside and outside of our classrooms, scholarly/pedagogical erasure and censorship, and the looming effects of an increasingly oppressive regime, it is important to protect all centers of knowledge production. Focusing on our conference theme of creating a radical collective future, it is important to use spaces such as AAAS as a site of not just camaraderie, but as a place of knowledge sharing and strategic planning for our survival. This roundtable will have its participants discuss how Filipinx American scholars deal with escalating anti-intellectualism through the practice of liberation pedagogy using Filipinx American Studies for such practice. Participants will draw from their own journey as faculty to respond to a rapidly changing environment. In doing so, we will explore how we all work to fight not just individual scholars but as a collective resistance. As part of the roundtable, we will also work in collaboration with attendees to further build solidarity across disciplines, our fields, and the larger diaspora.
Our roundtable plans to engage with the audience on practices, critical reflection, and the decentering of essentialist notions of scholar activism. Led by Reuben Deleon as chair and Dr. Rick Bonus as discussant, this roundtable will include Dr. Wayne Jopanda who will speak on the tensions of practicing a liberation-centered Ethnic Studies pedagogy amidst the constraints of the campus “Time, Place, and Manner” policies (TPM) regarding community organizing. These spaces examined range from student organized spaces, cross community collaboration, and opportunities for community engaged scholar activism/artivism grounded in critical hope. This contribution engages the concept of students and faculty critical hope within the university, one that is grounded in shared struggle, collective action, and liberatory resistance within and outside the campus. Dr. Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castaneda will draw upon his research on a praxis of labor solidarity, co-constructed by Filipinx cannery workers and Black construction workers in the Pacific Northwest, "no separate peace," to make a case for the political possibilities of engaging with scholar-activist traditions that develop outside of academia. No separate peace, as a praxis of solidarity that worked across a range of political contexts geographic scales - from urban multiracial coalition politics to the development of international networks between U.S. workers and those in the Global South - evolved parallel to the Ethnic Studies' institutionalization within the academy and anticipated multiple debates within the field of Ethnic Studies, from the study of labor diasporas, racial capitalism, and relational racialization. Castaneda, by using "no separate peace" as a case study, will stress the importance of engaging with community-based scholar-activist tradition, especially in a political climate where institutionalized forms of Ethnic Studies are under attack. Camille Ungo-Santos will draw from her experience as a Filipina American teacher educator, drawing learnings from her Asian American Studies background, a group of grad students and alumni who center Asian Critical Race Theory in their work, and relations with the Filipino diaspora to support current elementary science teachers in various classroom settings that range from supportive school and district DEI commitments to outspoken parent and family anxieties regarding the current political climate. In our work together, we take up multilingual pedagogies, critical disability justice frameworks, and meaningful family engagement. She hopes to share how teacher education becomes a site of collective resistance when grounded in Filipino American Studies, building upon anti-colonial praxis that extends from university spaces to K-12 classrooms. Dr. Dina Maramba will discuss the role of advocacy as it relates to Filipinx Americans in higher education. In particular, she will draw upon her experiences as both a Professor and former student affairs practitioner whose research praxis intersects higher education, Filipinx studies and critical qualitative methodology. Lastly, she will revisit The “Other” Students: Filipino Americans, Education and Power as a focal point to further engage and re-engage us in the possibilities of transformative change in our educational spaces. Dr. Stacey Anne Salinas will discuss her experiences as an Ethnic Studies faculty in a community college environment and the various barriers she has experienced as an Ethnic Studies professor, focusing on topics such as the larger institutional and statewide struggle in drafting Ethnic Studies curriculum, advocating for Asian American students’ needs in a rural county, and her attempts at preserving her own peace in the classroom and the workplace as a woman of color. Lastly, Salinas will conclude with how a pinayist pedagogical approach in teaching American history has helped her affect her classroom spaces to reflect her community goals and intentions informed by Kapwa.
The Manang Generation:Post War Pinays Question Filipina Domesticity In the Diaspora, 1930-1950
The history of Filipina immigrants and Filipina American women prior to World War II has received less attention compared to their male counterparts, the Manong Generation. The gender imbalance of Filipinas to Filipinos in America (1 : 20) during the early twentieth century makes for a difficult but not impossible task to locate Filipina American history in the archives. Primary sources like Filipino American and local Euro-American newspapers from the Depression Era such as The Philippines Mail and the San Luis Obispo Tribune describe Filipinas who lived and worked in rural farm towns like Salinas and Santa Maria as largely supportive maternal figures dedicated to their community’s social prosperity. Despite their status as a minority within a minority and their absence in the archives, my research uncovers narratives of Filipina Americans that have not yet been adequately highlighted in Asian American Studies scholarship, delves deeper into the agency of pioneer immigrant Filipinas during the first half of the twentieth century beyond the Maria Clara archetype and “maternal figures,” and explores how Filipinas navigated around patriarchal barriers found in both their Filipino immigrant communities and the surrounding segregated white American landscape in order to secure the survival of their families and cultural heritage. By considering a pinayist and peminist framework to recover Filipina/Pinay narratives, my paper addresses the complicated cultural kinship politics and politics of respectability that the Manang Generation utilized to take on leadership positions as they navigated, challenged, and resisted a racially intolerant landscape; one riddled with white-heterocispatriarchies and machismo cultural misogyny in a post war era.
Asian American Workers and Community Activism in UCLA’s Foundations and Futures
In this roundtable, authors of selected chapters from UCLA’s forthcoming Foundations and Futures, the first open source Asian American and Pacific Islander digital multimedia textbook for high school and college students, will share their research on Asian American workers in sweatshops, fields, and canneries as well as their research on contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander community activism in urban settings. Participants in this roundtable will discuss how the chapters they have written for the textbook foreground workers’ perspectives and why it is important to have students learn about Asian American and Pacific Islander workers’ experiences and resistance through the multiple lenses of labor struggles, community organizing, and Asian American Studies,. The conversation in this roundtable will explore Asian American & Pacific Islander workers’ and communities' resistance and reciprocity as they mobilize for change, often despite anti-Asian hate and violence. Roundtable participants will discuss both the urgency and challenges of teaching and learning about these issues within a contemporary context. Historically and now, Asian American & Pacific Islander workers’ resistance has contributed to worker power and solidarity, and their resistance to occupation, gentrification, and repression by the U.S. government are models that can help us now more than ever.
Carrying the Torch Without Burnout: Imagining a Sustainable Future for Asian American Studies
Our roundtable discussion centers on the reality of work life immediately after the PhD. As 1st generation scholar-activists, who feel lucky enough to find a home in the community college system, we nonetheless have felt that our training, and time with the university, did not prepare us to navigate our new terrain. This liminal period of transitioning from the environment of a graduate student to full time professor, on many occasions is jarring. Without practice, mentorship, or simple conversations within the ivory tower on how to manage our time and responsibilities to our communities, while trying to survive our new workloads (of anywhere from 3-6 classes on diverse subjects that do not always align with our fields, but with the needs of the college), such discussions in our training would have better eased us into the workflow of life outside of the academy.
Other tasks within the community college system as new professors include building new curriculum for new divisions and departments in Ethnic Studies, participating and collaborating with local community organizations and student clubs and outreach are a number of the additional tasks we scholars of color have taken on. This cultural taxation, to serve as diversity representatives on multiple committees, who bring with them new literature, pedagogy, and social justice praxis into our decolonial curriculum, are also still expected to remain moored to research and contemporary literature in their respective fields. We barely were able to survive the university as first generation scholars. We feel that we have been thrown into yet another environment of scarcity where we continue to advocate and maintain our departments that intersect or house branches of Ethnic Studies. How do we as new Asian American Studies scholar-activists maintain our momentum and drive to preserve and teach the many lessons of social justice, community building, and abolition that is inherent to the formation and initial purpose of Asian American Studies?
Our papers and reflections ask this question to fellow Asian American scholar activists, both long tenured in their fields and those who are also just entering and settling into the academic workforce: How is this workload sustainable?
Mopping Floors While Talking Stories: Reinventing Kagiwada Library
George Kagiwada Library was first established in the early 1990s. The library namesake was chosen in honor of George Kagiwada’s legacy as the first director of UC Davis’ Asian American Studies department in 1970 as well as a testament to their tireless dedication to student and community activism. A year prior to the pandemic, Department Chair and founder of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, had begun the process of re-organizing, archiving, and re-imagining the library into a digital media lab and research room. During the Spring of 2022, a proposal to continue the renovation of Kagiwada library at UC Davis was submitted. Stacey Salinas, a Cultural Studies PhD Candidate and Bulosan Center’s Senior Historian, along with the Asian American Studies Coordinator, Angel Truong, were approved in continuing the project of renovating the Kagiwada Library in Dr. Rodriguez’s vision.
Upon reviewing the immense untouched collections of Asian American Studies material (books, periodicals, bibliographies, and more) that previous faculty had accumulated, along with fifty years worth of material donations from local Asian American community organizations and students (including papers, research, and club paraphernalia), both Salinas and Truong came to the revelation that renovating the library was not simply a task of cleaning, sorting, and updating. To their surprise, Salinas and Truong found the department’s late professors’ (George Kagiwada, Isao Fujimoto, Peter Leung, and Steffi San Buenaventura) papers, research, and lecture material that they had left behind in unlabeled boxes and bins in the library space. Thus the summer long project of renovating the library also became a student-activist endeavor to recollect and reflect on the thoughts, unpublished writings, and research of past community professors and students who helped to establish and grow Asian American Studies at UC Davis.
Our paper will discuss the renovation of the Kagiwada Library and the motions and emotions of the process of archiving student-activism and the intentional cleaning to make a welcoming space for future students. Most importantly of course, this paper will also discuss our work in documenting the personal histories and talk stories that have informed the community and student oriented space that is Asian American Studies at UC Davis. Furthermore, we discuss our findings and reflections on the archival material we stumbled upon and the talk stories we conducted with the first cohort to graduate from the Asian American Studies department in the 1970s during the turbulent years of the student and civil rights movements. Lastly, we conclude our paper with a reflection on Asian American women’s affective labor in preserving student spaces within the university for the sake of cultivating community space for future generations of Asian American student-activists.
AAAS Annual Conference 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Stacey Salinas
Ethnic Studies Professor, College of the Redwoods, Eureka (California)
Eureka, California, United States
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