Our Year of the Tiger series continues with Angel Velasco Shaw

The Year of the Tiger that kicks off with this Lunar New Year is A moment of pride and reflection for Princeton’s vibrant Asian and Asian community. Throughout the year, we raise the voices of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers in a series of thoughtful interviews exploring questions of identity, pride, hope, lived experience of anti-Asian racism, and meaningful steps allies can take.

Image courtesy of Angel Velasco Shaw

Angel Velasco ShowLecturer at the Ephron Center for the Study of America at Princeton, is a visual and media artist, educator, and exhibition curator. Living in New York and Manila, with works in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum in Manila, Cinematheque Suisse Schweizer Filmarchiv in Switzerland, Casa Asia in Spain, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

How do you know yourself?

This is a tough question, especially for someone who grew up in a multiracial, multifaith Filipino Jewish family in the Bronx and Chappaqua, New York, in the 1970s at a time when there weren’t many interracial and interfaith families around. My mother was a pediatrician working for the urban poor and my stepfather was a music producer. Many of our neighbors criticized the “atypical” way we were raised.

My internalization of feeling as if I wasn’t part of the American “norm” created an unease that haunted me until my early twenties, when I became acute…