Event Date
Law School - AOKI Center/History Department colloquium on Free People of Color: Race, Law and Freedom in the 19th and 20th Century U.S.
Professor Jane Hong, Occidental College
Manila Prepares for Independence: Filipina/o Campaigns for U.S. Citizenship on the Eve of Philippine Decolonization
This book chapter explores the Philippine Commonwealth Government’s role in the success of the 1946 Luce-Celler Act’s provisions making Filipina/os eligible for U.S. citizenship for the first time. Drawing from U.S. and Philippine archives, it charts how Philippine officials championed the legislation as part of their preparations for Philippine independence after World War II. They recognized the importance of Filipina/o communities in the United States—and their remittances—to Philippine state-building after independence and sought to cultivate strong diasporic ties that transcended the limits of formal citizenship. As part of the longer transpacific movement to repeal Asian exclusion, the Philippine campaign speaks to the ambivalent relationship between Asian and Asian American freedom struggles, and exclusion and empire, in the postwar period.
Jane Hong is a historian of U.S. immigration and engagement with the world, with a focus on Asia after World War II.
Hong’s first book, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), situates the transnational movement to repeal America’s Asian exclusion laws in the context of black civil rights struggles at home and U.S. military intervention in a decolonizing Asia. It argues that repeal was part of the price of America’s postwar empire in Asia. Even as the United States expanded its power over Asian peoples, the demands of building and sustaining this imperial reach compelled U.S. officials to respond to the antiracist and anticolonial demands of nonwhite peoples—if only in the most symbolic and performative ways.
Hong is committed to making U.S. history scholarship accessible outside the college classroom. A former high school teacher, she has led immigration-themed workshops and seminars for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute (GLI) of American History. In June 2018, she worked with thirty-three California public school teachers as lead instructor for a GLI seminar titled, “U.S. Immigration through a California Lens.” She has written for news outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and consulted for television shows including Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (PBS) and American Idol (ABC). Most recently, she was featured in episodes 2 and 3 of the PBS docuseries, Asian Americans, which the New York Times called “the most ambitious documentary project ever to chronicle the history of the Asian-American community.” She currently serves on the executive board of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS), which promotes the study of the history of immigration to the United States and Canada from all parts of the world.