Michael DeMattos

Michael C. DeMattos is an Assistant Specialist with the Myron B. Thompson School of Social Work here at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa.  He started taking American Studies classes years ago as a form of intellectual renewal and in the hopes of both broadening and deepening his theoretical base to better inform both his practice and his teaching.  Michael chose American Studies for the rich conversations and the acclaimed faculty.  Those same faculty pushed, prodded, and provoked Michael in the best ways, supporting his efforts to develop a research agenda informed by his own experiences growing up in the Islands.  Michael recently passed both his qualifying and comprehensive exams and is busy researching and writing about Portuguese Race and Class Formation in Hawaiʻi.

Michael notes that the Portuguese in Hawaiʻi are an understudied population despite their numerous contributions to the sociocultural, political, and economic fabric of the islands.  What makes the Portuguese in Hawaiʻi particularly fascinating was their fluid and flexibly racial and ethnic identity relative to the largely Asian laboring class and the haole economic elite at the turn of the 20th century.  At times white, never haole, and always local, the Portuguese provide an excellent case for the various ways that class produces race and in response race changes meaning to maintain class status.  More importantly, class also produces an alternative transracial identity that is historically anchored in the fields of the plantations, yet continue to inform the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural milieu of Hawaiʻi.