As part of the Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Class of 1956 Distinguished Speaker Series, Dr. Christine Peralta, Assistant Professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, will examine Filipino migrant labor in Hawaii (1909-1938) from the perspective of disability and health. To better illustrate the unique historical intersection of Filipino labor and disability, she offers the concept of “mobile precarity.”

 

Dr. Peralta argues that “mobile precarity” highlights the multiple health risks that migration within U.S. empire posed for Filipino laborers, as inadequate health care, hazardous work environments and ableist exclusionary policies hindered the opportunities of Filipino migration. Therefore, Filipino workers illuminate how labor was contingent on the relationship between sugarcane and sight, and the duress suffered through injury forced planters to reveal their contradictory uses of the language of fitness and the technology of medical science to engender the precarity of Filipinos as the ongoing reality of colonial labor in Hawaiʻi.

 

 

This event is co-sponsored by: The Faculty Group on the North American West, Environmental Studies, Women's & Gender Studies, and American Studies.