Mobilizing An Asian American Community

Focusing on San Diego in the post-Civil Rights era, Linda Trinh Vo examines the ways Asian Americans drew together - despite many differences within the group - to construct a community that supports a variety of social, economic, political, and cultural organizations. Using historical materials, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews, Vo traces the political strategies that enable Asian Americans to bridge ethnicity, generation, gender, language, and class differences, among others. She demonstrates that mobilization is not a smooth, linear process and shows how the struggle over ideologies, political strategies, and resources affects the development of community organizations. Vo also analyzes how Asian Americans construct their relationship with Asia and how they forge relationships with other racialized communities of color. Vo argues that the situation in San Diego illuminates other localities across the country where Asians face challenges trying to organize, find sufficient resources, create leaders, and define strategies.

The first history and analysis of the Asian American Movement.

Chronicles Asian Americans' fight for equality and political inclusion in the United States during the late twentieth century, exploring how the movement brought about surprising social change in ethnic neighborhoods across the country and how it influenced Asian American art, literature, and culture.

Although it is one of the least-known social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Asian American movement drew upon some of the most powerful currents of the era, and had a wide-ranging impact on the political landscape of Asian America, and more generally, the United States. Using the racial discourse of the black power and other movements, as well as antiwar activist and the global decolonization movements, the Asian American movement succeeded in creating a multi-ethnic alliance of Asians in the United States and gave them a voice in their own destinies. Rethinking the Asian American Movement provides a short, accessible overview of this important social and political movement, highlighting key events and key figures, the movement's strengths and weaknesses, how it intersected with other social and political movements of the time, and its lasting effect on the country. It is perfect for anyone wanting to obtain an introduction to the Asian American movement of the twentieth century.

Table of contents

Historically, Asian Americans have been seldom represented, or if so negatively, in the mainstream media and not through their own accord. As a result, popular images of emasculated or villainous Asian American males, submissive or sexually threatening Asian American females prevail as the most salient representations. However, Asian American media organizations have been formed to address the dearth of representation by producing their own media or confronting the Hollywood media industries. While the term 0́−Asian American0́+ refers in large part to the people of Asian descent in the United States, what does it mean to be an 0́−Asian American0́+ media organization and who is included as part of the community of people categorized as 0́−Asian American?0́+ Through a multi-sited ethnography, this dissertation examines the rhetoric of three Asian American media organizations: the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), and the Foundation of Asian American Independent Media (FAAIM). These three organizations are dedicated to issues of Asian American media organizations. CAAM exhibits independent media through their annual film festival, funds films, and produces and distributes independent media for a national audience through their work with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. MANAA engages the Hollywood television and film studios to challenge the production of questionable media representations in mainstream media. FAAIM holds a grassroots Asian American film festival. By conducting participant observation research, this dissertation analyzes interviews, field notes, speeches, and textual and visual artifacts and reveals the multiple and complex modes by which these organizations mobilize a notion of 0́−Asian American.0́+ This study of Asian American media organizations and its rhetoric offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the efforts to construct a pan-Asian American community within an increasingly diverse and changing Asian Pacific Islander American population.

On the beginnings of Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and UCLA.

Asian Pacific American Politics presents some of the most recent research on Asian American politics, including both quantitative and qualitative examinations of the role of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in some of today’s major political controversies. In the highly polarized politics of the United States in the early 21st century, non-Black racial minorities such as Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans will increasingly find themselves swept into the epicenter of many of the divisive controversies. This timely volume presents the latest scholarly research on some of these issues, examining questions such as Asian American support for #Black Lives Matter, responses to racially-charged attacks, and the differences in the political socialization, politicization, and community-based activism within and across sectors of the Asian American population. In addition to examining political identity, voting participation, political mobilization, transnational politics, and partisan formation, the volume also investigates important, but little discussed, issues such as the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement, political incorporation of Filipino Americans, and the struggle to establish "comfort women" memorials in the United States. Contributors also examine, through dialogues, how Asian Americans fit into the larger world of American racial politics, the extent to which they are likely to build coalitions with other communities of color, and the boundaries and contours of Asian American political theory. Exploring and Expanding the Political World Pioneered by Don T. Nakanishi, Asian Pacific American Politics will be of great interest to scholars of race and ethnicity in American politics, immigration and minority incorporation, ethnic identity politics, and political participation and democratic inclusion of Asians. The chapters were originally published in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

The United States has seen several anti-Asian movements, as evidenced by immigration policies, naturalization laws, state and local statutes, and acts of violence. In recent years, Asian Americans have mobilized against prejudice and discrimination, organizing media groups and panethnic coalitions to achieve greater political effectiveness. These essays address recent issues of interethnic relations and conflict and politics in Asian American communities, ranging from the Japanese American redress movement for unjustified World War II internment, Japan-bashing, the model minority stereotype, resistance to urban renewal, interethnic conflicts with other groups, Asian American politics, Asian American panethnicity, and involvement in ancestral homeland politics.

A “comprehensive…fascinating” (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian Americans. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their long history has been forgotten. “In her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United States” (Huffington Post). The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both “despised minorities” and “model minorities,” revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country. Published fifty years after the passage of the United States’ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these “powerful Asian American stories…are inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdue” (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an “epic and eye-opening” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.