Chosen Pamilya: Student-Based Retention Programming for Queer Pilipinx American College Students at UC Berkeley

This paper is concerned with the experiences of  LGBTQ Pilipinx American undergraduate leaders who are in charge of developing retention programs and resources for fellow queer Pilipinx American students at UC Berkeley. Using semi-structured interviews, this research draws upon the personal experiences of queer Pilipinx American undergraduate at UC Berkeley who  been involved in student organizing and retention event planning. As descendants of immigrants, uprooted and diasporically displaced by centuries of colonial and imperial regimes, and as members of the pan-ethnic “Asian American” category, observing the existence of queer Filipinx Americans may allow us to further unpack and disaggregate underlooked AAPI experiences. Thus, I interrogate how queerness, gender, and sexuality inform the ways queer Pilipinx Americans navigate higher education, how the experiences they faced as queer subjects growing up, be it positive, negative, or somewhere in between, affected their path to college, and the factors that led them to do the work they are currently doing. This work will allow me to develop a theoretical framework that destabilizes, complicates, and expands our current understandings of queer Asian diasporic experience within educational research.