Biography
Michael Salgarolo is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at New York University and a Global South Fellow at the New Orleans Center for the Gulf Coast. His dissertation project, Manila Bayou: Race, Property, and Empire in Filipino Louisiana tells the story of Filipino communities in Louisiana from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. He has received research grants from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and the Asian/Pacific/American Insitute at NYU. In 2018, he received the NYU History Department’s Bessie and George Levy Prize for Excellence in American History. His first paper, "First as Farce, Then as Farce: The Sultan of Sulu's Second Tour of America" won the department’s Howard Reese Prize for Best Paper in Diplomatic History. He received his B.A. from the George Washington University with Honors in History in 2013.
Research
My dissertation project, Manila Bayou: Race, Property, and Empire in Filipino Louisiana, traces the migration and settlement of Filipinos in southern Louisiana, beginning in the 1850s and ending with the period of Philippine independence in 1946. In the late 1850s, Louisiana newspapermen first began to publish reports about ex-sailors from the Philippine Islands who had deserted Spanish merchant vessels in the port of New Orleans. From the 1850s to the 1890s, several hundred of these “Manillamen” lived in a fishing village on the remote island of St. Maló. By the 1880s, many of these men had moved to nearby Jefferson Parish, where they founded Manila Village, a bayou settlement that contained one of the region’s first commercial shrimp-drying platforms. Later generations settled in New Orleans, and descendants of these initial generations of Filipino immigrants remain in Louisiana to this day. In tracing the social, political, and commercial relationships that created and sustained Filipino communities in lower Louisiana over nearly a century, I will reveal a powerful and significant connection between the Gulf Coast and the Global South. As a Global South Fellow at the New Orleans Center for the Gulf Coast, I will consult archival sources at Hill Memorial Library and the Special Collections at Louisiana State University and conduct oral histories with members of Louisiana’s Filipino communities.
