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.

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.

Largely unexamined until recently, the Asian American Movement has been active for more than two decades. William Wei traces to the late 1960s the initial genesis of an Asian American identity, culture, and activism through which members of this pan-Asian group could assert their right to belong to and be respected as responsible members of this society. Although its antecedents were the civil rights and Black Power movements, the Asian American Movement actually resulted from the protests against the Vietnam War and the emergence of a generation of college-aged Chinese and Japanese Americans. In this definitive study of the Asian American Movement, Wei fills an important gap in our knowledge of ethnic social movements and the struggle to achieve American cultural democracy. Lacking a nationally known leader but confronted by many shared issues and concerns, the Asian American Movement was essentially a middle-class reform effort to achieve racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment. It focused on ethnic solidarity and self-empowerment through political activism, educational and community development, and cultural expressions. While the Movement was most visible on the West Coast, notably at the Third World Strike at San Francisco State College in 1968, it became a vital force simultaneously on campuses and in Asian American communities throughout the country. Wei evaluates the Movement's effort to develop a unique but cohesive ethnic identity and the internal struggles between reformist and revolutionary approaches to social change. He analyzes the Asian American women's movement, the alternative press, Asian American studies programs, community-based organizations, andMaoist sects. His study concludes with an examination of Asian American involvement in electoral politics and the quest for political empowerment. Interviews with many of the key participants in the Movement and photographs of Asian American demonstrations and events enhance Wei's portrayal of the development and breadth of the Movement and the conflicts within it. Exploring regional differences; issues of ethnicity, class, and gender; and the transition from radical to electoral politics, Wei's comprehensive study is the first book to examine systematically the coming-to-consciousness and mobilization of Asian Americans.

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.

San Francisco's International Hotel is part history and part memoir. It presents the struggle to save the International Hotel in the San Francisco neighborhood known as Manilatown, which culminated in 1977 with the eviction of elderly tenant activists. In telling this compelling story, Estella Habal features her own memories of the antieviction movement, focusing on the roles of Filipino Americans and their participation in both the anti-eviction protests and the nascent Asian American movement. Book jacket.

Once thought of in terms of geographically bounded spaces, Asian America has undergone profound changes as a result of post-1965 immigration as well as the growth and reshaping of established communities. This collection of original essays demonstrates that conventional notions of community, of ethnic enclaves determined by exclusion and ghettoization, now have limited use in explaining the dynamic processes of contemporary community formation.Writing from a variety of perspectives, these contributors expand the concept of community to include sites not necessarily bounded by space; formations around gender, class, sexuality, and generation reveal new processes as well as the demographic diversity of today's Asian American population. The case studies gathered here speak to the fluidity of these communities and to the need for new analytic approaches to account for the similarities and differences between them. Taken together, these essays forcefully argue that it is time to replace the outworn concept of a monolithic Asian America.

This is the first comprehensive study of how U. S. immigration policies have shaped--demographically, economically, and socially--the six largest Asian American communities.

Asian Americans as a force for political change on both sides of the Pacific.