Beyond its glitz and tawdry glamour, Las Vegas is a real place with real people--it is also a veritable Filipino Town. Of the 2.6 million people building lives and communities in Vegas, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have helped to infuse the city with dynamic cultures, perspectives, languages, lifeways, and ideals. Filipinos are, by far, the largest AAPI group in Las Vegas. And thanks to Vegas, Filipinos are the largest growing minority population in Nevada, and make up more than half of all the Asians in the state.

But what does it mean to think of Vegas as a “Filipino Town”? Karen Tongson’s lecture, “Mamang: Death in Vegas,” will explore Las Vegas as a site where entertainment and hospitality cultures collide with the smaller, everyday experiences of life and death, specifically in the Filipino American community. Embracing the memory of her grandmother, Mamang, as pivotal in her own self-formation, Tongson will offer a personal and scholarly reflection of how the city nurtures the lives and careers of the Philippines’ diasporic empires of care and domestic labor, as well as entertainment. “Mamang: Death in Vegas” presents a queer of color vantage that reimagines the city as a place of Asian diaspora, global connections, precarity, mourning, and the future.

Co-Sponsored by Asian and Asian American Studies, Sociology Department, English Department, IGES Department