FRONTIERS (UNIVERSITY OF UTAH) -- Celine Parreñas Shimizu is professor and director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. The award-winning documentary “The Celine Archive screens at CAAMFest across California on October 14 – 18, internationally at the LA Femme International Film Festival on October 15 – 16, and nationally at the San Diego Asian Film Festival on October 23 – 31, 2020. It will also screen at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora: Women of Color Film Festival, among many other national and international film festivals.
“When we were undergraduates at Berkeley in the 1990s, my sister Rhacel Parreñas, now a renowned sociologist, found Celine’s story in the Bancroft Library archives while researching white women considered ‘trash’ and Filipinx men regarded as ‘brown monkeys’ in the earlier 20th century,” Shimizu wrote. “These two marginalized groups forged alliance in the taxi dance halls when Filipinx were lynched and their rooming houses torched in towns like Stockton, where they were segregated from whites. Eugenics and anti-miscegenation laws meant their interracial ties could lead to death. Filipinx American history, dominated by men, meant finding Celine in the archives was rare, particularly a Filipinx immigrant woman with the French name we share.”