Alex Orquiza

Providence College

R. Alexander Orquiza Jr. is an associate professor of history at Providence College. He is a historian of 20th-century American race, empire, and popular culture. His first book, Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality Under American Rule (Rutgers University Press 2020) tells what happened when American colonizers began to influence what Filipinos ate, how they cooked, and how they perceived their national cuisine. His second book examines how American popular culture commemorated American empire in music, architecture, literature, sports, food, and teaching. It will show how immigrants, racial and ethnic minority activists, and anti-imperialists pushed back against who could be called “American.”

Orquiza has also researched and published on the intersections of modern food culture, the media, and education. He has contributed essays to Oxford University Press on Filipino cuisine in New York City in Savoring Gotham: A Food Lover’s Companion to New York City (2015) and MIT University Press on the creation of the contemporary Philippine food system in Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (forthcoming). Orquiza’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the W.M. Keck Foundation.