This project examines two key areas regarding the migration, labor, disability, and caregiving experiences of Myanmar diaspora in the United States. First, this project asks how various forms of migration stress and labor exploitation contribute to the social construction of disability, the development of chronic injury, and the disabling of caregivers for Myanmar diaspora living in the United States. Second, this project also interrogates how Myanmar diaspora community members develop care networks, especially as they exist beyond non-profit organizations, welfare programs, and medical systems. Through interviews, oral histories, and community engagements, this project aims to highlight stories from members of the Myanmar diaspora, especially those of taingyinthar, “ethnic minority,” or “Indigenous” identities, refugee or asylee status, and working-class backgrounds. By analyzing differences and similarities in care receiving and caregiving experiences for an extremely heterogeneous community, this project amplifies current areas of needs of disabled migrants and migrant, informal caregivers. Following the stories of participant-collaborators, this project traces how violence follows Myanmar diaspora community members transnationally and intergenerationally to the United States, where it is often rendered legible as disability. Finally, this project hopes to demonstrate the Myanmar diaspora’s existing capacities and strategies for cultivating dynamic systems of mutual care that extend beyond mainstream humanitarian savior-victim complexes.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Elena Shih

Filbert ‘24 is a first-generation immigrant of Tai/Shan and Chinese Burmese descent born in Japan to a Myanmar diaspora family and raised on occupied Tongva territory, also known as the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Filbert’s work is deeply intertwined with their personal, inherited, and communal histories with militarized violence, displacement, ethnic erasure, childhood trauma, labor exploitation, gender-based violence, and ableism in transnational contexts. Learning intergenerationally from all of the lives and communities who have cared for them, Filbert hopes to return the love that has been imbued in them through care work, mutual aid, and organizing towards a more liberatory world. Should all else fail, Filbert finds joy in cooking family recipes, learning ancestral languages, playing taiko, acting a fool, telling stories, and building altars.