Pressed into Starched Whites: Nursing Identity in Filipino American History

As Filipino nurses remain an elusive subject of history, their present-day hypervisibility casts a ghostly shadow­ haunting the legacy of United States imperialism. My project, therefore, examines the historical formation of the racialized Filipino nurse identity as corporealized between the professionalization of nursing, economic globalization, and subjectivity. To emphasize the diachronic agency of the subaltern, I will exhume primary source material via archival research, oral history, and ethnography in the Philippines. Source material will form a subset of my Filipino nurse archive spanning the Greater U.S. and collectively undergo historical interpretation that includes methods of digital prosopography and mapping.