Barbara Posadas Professor Dept. of History bposadas@niu.edu

My research examines Filipino immigration to the United States, especially with regard to race, gender, community, and transnationalism. I am the author of The Filipino Americans (1999) and articles on Filipino American history, particularly in the Midwest, that have appeared in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Labor History, Amerasia, and the Journal of American Ethnic History, as well as in various scholarly collections. I have held a Fulbright Research Award at the Asia Center of the University of the Philippines, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, and an NEH Summer Research Grant. I am a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of American Ethnic History and the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, and have previously served on the editorial boards of Amerasia and The Journal of Women’s History. Most recently, I was elected vice president/president elect of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (2006-09), and will subsequently become IEHS president (2009-12). From 1999-2001, I served as president of the Illinois State Historical Society. In addition, I have been a director of the Urban History Association and a member of the Organization of American Historians' Committee on the Status of Minority History and Minority Historians from 1996-1999, serving as chair in 1998.  I have served on various prize and fellowship committee for the organizations to which I belong and for the NEH. I teach courses on Asian American history, U.S. immigration and ethnic history, and the history of Chicago.

Current Research Interests

“Filipino Chicagoans, 1898-1965,” University of Illinois Press, under
contract

This book examines Filipino migration to and settlement in the Chicago area between approximately 1900 and 1965. U.S. immigration policy formally divides these years and, to some extent, the parameters of Filipino community formation in the nation’s Second City into three time periods: first, the expansive years of
restricted migration between U.S. acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 and passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act in 1935, the years when young Filipinos came to Chicago seeking education and employment - some to sojourn and some to settle; second, the static years between 1935 and 1946 during which migration from the Philippines came to a virtual standstill and left Chicago’s approximately 2,000 Filipinos to focus on family, work, and community as the Great Depression continued and as World War II in the Pacific temporarily severed connections with their homeland; and finally, the years of consolidation between 1946, the year when Filipinos living in the United States became eligible for naturalized citizenship and, ultimately, to bring wives from the Philippines, and 1965, the year when a major revision of U.S. immigration law set in motion a far more massive and unanticipated migration from the Philippines.

Within the chronological framework, the narrative interweaves three themes broadly defined as community, transnationalism, and race.  Community encompasses the various factors that structured Filipino lives in Chicago over time - education; gendered associations, interracial marriage and family life; employment; housing; and clubs and organizations. Viewing Filipinos through the prism of community establishes their agency in utilizing the bonds of nationality to create a hybrid Filipino American ethnicity. Race places Chicago Filipinos and their families within the broader context of a major metropolis increasingly polarized between white and black and informs their conscious construction of themselves as Filipinos and neither white nor black. Scrutinizing Filipinos through the window of race places Chicago’s Filipinos within a racial environment far different from that experienced by their more numerous compatriots who lived in the Pacific states. In the Midwest, Filipinos were not, as Asians, at the bottom of the hierarchy of color. Transnationalism locates Chicago’s Filipinos within a mental and physical world encompassing both the United States and the Philippines. Looking at these Filipinos through the lens of transnationalism clarifies the nature, intensity, and the limits of transnationalism, as well as how the concept is bounded in practice by social and governmental constraints.


“Strategic Citizenship: The State and Immigration”

This book examines the ongoing importance of state policy in immigration and the political processes by which immigrants and their supporters seek to influence policy. Case studies include: 1) the campaign for citizenship and veterans benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II; 2) the campaign for citizenship and welfare benefits for Hmong veterans of the Vietnam War; 3) the familial strategies of Filipina “mail order brides;” and 4) the quest for separate immigration status for abused spouses of H1-B temporary visa holders.

“The Making of Filipino America: Ethnicity and Assimilation in the Twentieth Century”

This book examines the twentieth-century history of Filipino Americans and explores the dialectical processes of ethnic identification and assimilation in the lives of new arrivals from the Philippines and their offspring in subsequent generations. It will, in addition, address fundamental questions concerning immigration, transnationalism, and race.


Courses regularly taught

Spring 2007:
History 378T * Asian American History
History 610: Research Seminar on Migration, Community, and
Transnationalism

Fall 2007:
History 260 * American History to 1865
History 369 * History of U.S. Women

Spring 2008:
History 368 * History of Chicago
History 378T * Asian American History

Fall 2008:
History 260 * American History to 1865
History 474 * U.S. Immigration and Ethnicity

Spring 2009:
History 378T * Asian American History
History 510 * Reading Seminar on U.S. Immigration and Ethnicity