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.