Recipients

Student Awardees
The following is the list of fellowships and grants awarded to students, 2006-2023:

Belinda A. Aquino Philippine Studies Award

  • J. P. Alonzo, Public Administration, 2017
  • Jake Atienza, Sociology, 2022
  • Marie Jocelyn Marfil, Music, 2019
  • Jeannie Magdua, Asian Studies, 2019
  • Jayson Parba, Languages, 2016

Ligaya Fruto Award

  • Stephen Acabado, Anthropology, 2008
  • Elena Clariza, Asian Studies, 2007
  • Paul Cosme, Music, 2023
  • Bernard Ellorin, Music, 2008
  • Charissa Fabia, Religion, 2011
  • Froilan Fabro, Music, 2012
  • Miguel Llora, American Studies, 2011
  • Jonathan Sawyer, Urban Planning. 2014

Corky Trinidad Scholarship Award

  • Adrian Alarilla, History, 2021
  • Dylan Beatty, Geography, 2014
  • Isabel Chew, Asian Studies, 2014
  • Sharon Estioca, Linguistics, 2019
  • Rusyan Mamiit, Environment Management. 2014
  • Aaron Rom Moralina, History, 2014
  • Marie Antonette A. Ramos, Ethnic Studies, 2012
  • Angela Sebastian, Fine Arts, 2019

Alfonso Yuchengco Award

  • Michael Abrigo, Economics, 2016
  • Michael Garner, Asian Studies, 2006
  • Mathew Nelson, Language, 2011
  • Cecilia Noble, Sociology, 2008, 2012
  • Jan Vincent Toledo Evangelista, Asian Studies, 2007
  • Louward Allen Zubiri, Demography, 2023

In 2014, five UH students were awarded grants for their projects. This is by far the most productive year in the scholarship competition. For details, please click this link.

Selected Information about the Student Recipients

Photo shows Antonette Ramos during a ceremony on May 2012 (in between Dean Ned Shultz and Mrs. Hana Trinidad, widow of Corky Trinidad, Dr. Belinda Aquino, former CPS Director, UH Foundation CEO Donna Vucinich, Chancellor Virginia Shaw, and CPS Director Vina Lanzona.

Antonette Ramos

Antonette (see above picture) is the first student to be granted the Corky Trinidad Endowment Scholarship. She is an undergraduate student majoring in Ethnic Studies, and is leaving for Washington, D.C. for an internship at the Smithsonian Museum. While there, she intends to conduct research on the BIMAK community as a site for identity construction, or multiple identities as “Filipinos” and “Filipino-Americans.” She has since graduated from UH.

Marie Jocelyn Marfil

Another grantee is Marie Jocelyn “Joy” Marfil, a Ph. D student in Music Composition at the University of Hawaii. Joy as she is known to her friends received a $2,000 grant from the Belinda A. Aquino International Philippine Studies Endowment in summer 2013. She went to Davao to study the indigenous music of the Mansaka. Joy obtained her Bachelor of Music (Cum Laude) and Master of Music in Composition at the University of the Philippines. As a recipient of Fulbright Scholarship, she graduated with a Master of Arts in Music Theory at the State University of New York. See Joy’s field report here. She graduated in 2016 from UH.

Adrian Alarilla

Adrian Alarilla
PhD Student, Department of History

A more recent research is done by Adrian Alarilla, PhD in Southeast Asian History, who was awarded a $2,000 grant from the Corky Trinidad Endowment Scholarship. That grant enabled him to conduct archival work toward his dissertation (“Filipino Labor, Gender, and Kinship across Empire and Nation”) that interrogated the impact of U.S. imperialism, particularly in the issues of migration, labor, religion and identity in Hawai’i and Mindanao, through the perspectives of gender and geography. In his own words, Adrian used “multi-sited archival work in different collections that privileged the perspective of the migrant in motion by looking at their own writings, oral histories, and testimonies across time and space.”

In 2022, Adrian completed his research work from different libraries in the USA amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic, as shown in this Report. He has since graduated from his PhD program.

Jake Atienza

Anthony “Jake” Atienza, MA Sociology, also received a grant from the Corky Trinidad Endowment Scholarship in 2022 to research mining in Cebu. He investigated residents’ responses to the intrusive effect of mining in their lives as part of his masteral thesis at UH. Jake collected court documents involving a conflict arising from damage and loss of lives caused by a landslide to residents’ property. He lectured about his research to American teachers participating in the Fulbright seminar (Project Magsayod) at the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, on July 14, 2022.

Above map: Apo Cement Corporation’s quarry, Naga City (2019). Hulagway 7.

In his report, Jake says:

“At the center of my research is a deadly landslide in Naga City on September 20, 2018, which claimed the lives of over 70 people and displaced more than 8,000. Following this incident, residents filed a lawsuit against mining companies and municipal and provincial government stakeholders. Despite making claims around their experiences of death, bodily injury, dispossession, and damage to their homes, the court dismissed the case on the grounds that it was not a class action suit and the plaintiffs’ failure to cite a cause of action. Moving away from quarries as sites of violence, I applied an epistemological lens to frame the rule of law as a site of mining violence.”

For his report click Summary.