Humanities Forum: Adrian De Leon

Adrian De Leon, New York University 

How were the native people from the margins of empire, from Christianized lowlands peasants to sovereign indigenous people in the mountainous highlands, thrust into the center of late Spanish and American imperial projects of race-making across the Pacific? In this talk, Adrian De Leon re-routes the history of Filipino American migration to its indigenous roots in the bundok (Tagalog: the hinterland) of Northern Luzon. Beginning from the early modern history of uplands Southeast Asia, through the shifts in global imperialism after the Seven Years War and the opening of the Suez Canal, De Leon traces the emergence of “the Filipino” from the racial archives of Spanish plantations. Through their agricultural labor, Ilokano lowlands peoples shaped the racialization of the migrant peasant. Likewise, through the recording of their anti-colonial insurgency and Indigenous economies, Igorot highlands peoples shaped transpacific formations of the “savage.” Through the mutual study of indigeneity and migrant labor, this talk places colonized people at the heart of race-making across the Pacific, and the anticolonial struggles of the Asian migrant and Indigenous people that seek to dismantle them.