JAENA RAE CABRERA (SHE/HER/SIYA) is a Filipino American library powerhouse—part librarian, part cultural architect, part visibility agent, and, on her most efficient days, a quiet but unmistakable threat to mediocrity. She doesn’t just work in libraries; she treats them like living, breathing ecosystems—places where history gets corrected, erased stories get reinstalled, and entire communities get to see themselves centered instead of footnoted.
Professionally, she’s done the very real, very obsessive work: leading the Filipino American Center at the San Francisco Public Library, serving as president of Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (2023–2025), and consistently pushing Filipino American narratives out of the margins and into spaces that can no longer pretend they don’t exist. But reducing her to titles alone misses the point. Jaena operates more like a systems disruptor disguised as a librarian—someone who understands that collections are power, programming is strategy, and visibility is not optional.
She runs on books, community care, and a refusal to accept “This is how it’s always been done” as a valid answer. Give her a collection and she’ll interrogate it. Give her a blank space and she’ll turn it into a platform. Give her a room full of people and she’ll somehow leave them more connected, more informed, and slightly more aware that something important just shifted.
There’s an intentional duality to her work: deeply rooted in care, but sharp in execution. She can build something welcoming enough to hold a community and bold enough to challenge the structures around it. One moment she’s curating materials that reflect generations of Filipino American experience; the next, she’s amplifying voices that institutions have historically overlooked—and making sure they’re not overlooked again.
Calling her “unhinged” is less about chaos and more about velocity. Jaena moves with purpose, clarity, and just enough irreverence to keep things from getting stale. She doesn’t wait for permission to make space—she makes it, documents it, and then ensures it’s accessible long after the moment passes.
At the center of it all is a simple but powerful throughline: libraries are not neutral, stories are not optional, and representation is not a side project. For Jaena Rae Cabrera, it’s the whole point.
POSITIONALITY
I am a Filipina American cisgender woman with Ilocano and Tagalog ancestry from the Philippines. My family first ventured to the United States as sakadas in Hawaii, before settling in Carson, a suburb of Los Angeles, CA. I am a second-generation college student, and the first to earn a master’s degree. I came to a greater appreciation of my background in college, where the lack of diversity forced me to take a more introspective and critical look at my culture, heritage, and history. The absence of Filipino education I received growing up is directly related to the colonial mindset many Filipinos still possess with the United States. Despite being the third largest Asian population in the US, Filipinos remain largely misrepresented and underrepresented in popular culture and in many institutions and industries. My work as a community advocate and librarian is two-fold: To uplift and educate the community and others about our culture and history, and to preserve that culture and history for us, by us, for future generations. I am also cognizant of myself as a minority in the field of librarianship, and this understanding informs my work through advocacy, mentorship, and leadership.
Program Manager, Filipino American Center, San Francisco Public Library
Co-Director of the 2026 Filipino American International Book Festival
President 2023-2025, Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Co-Chair, APALA Literature Awards Committee
Head of The Palace Project Curation Corps
Editor-in-Chief, WOC+Lib Editor, In The Library With The Lead Pipe
Writer, Mahalaya SF
President, FANHS-SF
Pronouns: she, her, siya
Want to chat? Calendly me.
Jaena Rae 