Demiliza Saramosing

Demiliza Sagaral Saramosing is an educator, scholar, and teaching artist of Bisayan descent with ancestral ties to the seas between the Visayas and Mindanao. In the 1970s, her paternal family returned to Hawaiʻi, fleeing state-sanctioned war and land dispossession in Iligan City through their sakada labor ties to the Ewa plantation. Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, Demiliza grew up in Kalihi—an ahupua‘a and urban neighborhood of Honolulu that is home to Kānaka Maoli and diasporic communities, largely from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. There, she witnessed firsthand the intersecting forces of racial capitalism, (settler) colonialism(s), and transnational migration.

Demiliza graduated from W.R. Farrington High School in 2010, becoming the first in her family to attend college. She earned a B.A. in Ethnic Studies and Journalism from the University of Oregon in 2016, followed by an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, with graduate minors in Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality (RIDGS) and American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS). She also co-edited a special issue of Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diaspora Studies titled “Towards an Oceanic Filipinx Studies.”

Her dissertation, Messin’ Wid Paradise: The Kalihi-verse as Oceanic Homeplace In & Beyond the City With No Pity, examines the experiences of immigrant, second-generation, and Kānaka Maoli youth who have come of age in Kalihi over the past three decades. Through an autoethnographic and ethnographic approach, she explores how young adults from Kalihi—both those who remain and those who have left—navigate structures of racism, classism, inter-residential conflict, and gendered and sexual violence in the occupying settler state of Hawaiʻi. Drawing from her own lived experiences as part of this cohort, she asks: How do young adults from Kalihi express themselves, negotiate their evolving identities, and make sense of (un)belonging in a globalized and transnational world? Her research sheds light on the social injustices embedded in “multicultural paradise” and contributes to decolonial movements in Hawaiʻi. Messin’ Wid Paradise engages with Critical Youth Studies, Indigenous and Women of Color Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and (Asian) Settler Colonialism Studies, positioning young adults from Kalihi as essential voices in these scholarly conversations.