ISLANDS, CHAINED
A Filipino History of the World

Pantheon Books, under contract

Islands, Chained is about seven thousand islands whose stories are as global as those who call them home, and whose freedom dreamers indelibly shaped the distant lands around the world. It proceeds from two truisms. First, the Philippines exists because of colonization. And second, the Filipino exists because of revolution. Native peoples expressed their dissent against Spanish and American imperialisms through myriad responses, including revolutionary activity and guerrilla warfare. But most commonly, they fled to better pastures and found solace in their elusiveness, whether it be amongst radical thinkers and fellow workers in the imperial metropoles, or in the natural havens of the forests and the mountains. Forced displacement and fugitive flight alike – not to mention intrepid adventuring or self-imposed rootedness – shaped a long tradition of freedom dreaming that imagined a world beyond empire, even as they took flight along its cruel currents.

MAHARLIKA IN MANHATTAN
Dining, Dictatorship & the Struggle for Filipino New York

Rutgers University Press, under contract

Maharlika in Manhattan tells a story of how nation-building and migration during the Cold War collided in a little-known but veritable food war in New York City. Against the contemporary narratives of an ascendant global Filipino food renaissance – from television personalities and tourism boosters, to Trader Joe’s aisles and Starbucks menus – this book turns instead to the longue durée of local history, revealing how a marginalized migrant community attuned the United States’ financial and cultural center to the tumultuous conditions of a postcolony lobotomized from the country’s public memory. It is, in short, at once an Asian American food history of Cold War U.S. empire, a migrant community history of the People Power Revolution, and the first scholarly history to be written about New York’s Filipino community.

JANKY THEORY
Race and the Aesthetic Work of the Inchoate

In progress

Jankiness is a capacious judgment, and can be applied to all manners of things: janky people, janky objects, janky vehicles, janky basketball plays, janky food, janky establishments, janky cities, janky lifeworlds. To call something janky is at once an aesthetic judgment and a remark on the work behind assembling the thing itself. It is a commentary on a form that barely comes together into something aesthetically coherent – it is something inchoate, meaning rudimentary and emergent – and yet, despite that, still stubbornly comes together. Janky things shouldn’t work, but they do; they shouldn’t make sense, but they do. But to pass a judgment of something as janky indexes something specific to the everyday labors of racialized migrant people in an anglophone North American context, and to the matrix of everyday Black life and language that undergirds the possibilities of the aesthetic work of the inchoate.

Co-authored with Jonathan Leal (English, University of Southern California).

Journal Articles

2024 — The Settler Homeland: Racial Violence, Frontier Colonialism, and Filipino Repatriation. Settler Colonial Studies.
2024 — Brown Gathering: Archive, Refuse, and Baduy Worldmaking. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences.
2023 — The Filipino National Anthem. Journal of Popular Music Studies.
2023 — Introduction: Conservatisms and Fascisms in Asian America. (Co-authored with Jane Hong.) Amerasia Journal.
2022 — Frank Mancao’s ‘Pinoy Image’: Photography, Masculinity, and Respectability in Depression-Era California. Journal of American Ethnic History. (Winner of the 2023 Carlton C. Qualey Memorial Article Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society.)
2021 — Transpacific Rizalistas: Portrait Photography and the Filipino Becoming-Subject. Trans Asia Photography.
2019 — Sugarcane Sakadas: The Corporate Production of the Filipino on a Hawai‘i Plantation. Amerasia Journal.
2018 — Working the Kodak Zone: The Labor Relations of Race and Photography in the Philippine Cordilleras, 1887-1914. Radical History Review.
2017 — Everybody Was Boodle Fighting: Military Histories, Culinary Tourism, and Diasporic Dining. Food, Culture & Society.
2016 — Siopao and Power: The Place of Pork Buns in Manila’s Chinese History. Gastronomica.

Book Chapters

2026 — The Double Exclusion of Cecelia Navarro: A Microhistory of Diasporic Punishment and Provisional Sovereignty. (Forthcoming.)
2025 — Uproot: Towards a Political Ecology of the Filipino Diaspora. Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, edited by Alyssa Paredes and Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio. University of Hawai‘i Press.
2025 — A Visceral Archive of Survival: Doreen Fernandez’s Sarap (1988) and the ‘Crisis-Ethos’ of Philippine Cuisine. Eating More Asian America, edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur. NYU Press.

Book Reviews

2024 — Kim A. Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History. Journal of Military History.
2024 — Alvita Akiboh, Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire. H-Net Reviews.
2023 — Whose homeland? Whose security? Public Books.
2020 — Jane Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion. Western History Quarterly.
2016 — Yong Chen, Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America. Journal of Asian American Studies.