Community Event - Micronesian Research Talk by Alfred Flores

Alfred Peredo Flores, an award-winning Chamoru/Korean scholar, will be giving an open talk about his research on Chamoru and Marshallese nuclear justice and redress. Listen or attend his lecture on Tuesday, April 29 2025 through Zoom or at UC Davis (details below).

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Hart Hall 3201 - 4-5:30 pm

Zoom registration:

https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/XtQqiDDvRUmIlJFglTYkAQ

Transoceanic Micronesians: Chamoru and Marshallese Nuclear Justice and Redress

Speaker Bio:

Alfred Peredo Flores (Chamoru and Korean) is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at Harvey Mudd College. His research focuses on diaspora, labor, indigeneity, militarism, oral history, and settler colonialism in Micronesia, greater Oceania, and California. Dr. Flores's first book, Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944-1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023) received honorable mention from

the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association for the Best First Book Award and honorable mention from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association for Best Adult Non-Fiction. His previous work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History.

Abstract: From 1946 to 1958, the US military detonated approximately 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands. The largest of these bombs was code named Operation Castle Bravo, which is still the largest atomic bomb the US government, has ever tested. The mass destruction that these tests left behind includes the spatial displacement of several Marshallese communities from their home atolls and alarming cancer and reproductive illnesses, that still continues today. What is less known is that these nuclear tests reverberated throughout all of Micronesia and reached places such as distant as the Mariana Islands. This presentation will examine the ways that Chamorus and Marshallese have engaged in transoceanic community organizing as acts of refusal and redress to US militarism. It is this shared colonial past, coupled with their Indigenous values and notions of service that motivate their work.