Dear Friends,

I would humbly like to post the following information on my book: Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American politics (Stanford University Press, 2007) for anyone interested in community-based organizations in Koreatown. The manuscript was the product of my Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA and my first insight into Koreatown community politics which turned out to be a humbling experience after watching the passion and hard work of community organizers in Koreatown. Below I’ve included a book summary. The book touches on a wide range of topics such as building “ethnic solidarity” in suburbanizing communities; the politics of negotiating the multiracial context of ethnic enclaves; the political strategies organizations have used to tackle inequality (e.g. labor and gender) within the community; the dyamics of intergenerational conflict and cooperation among leaders; the historical evolution of Koreatown; and the process of ethnic identity formation among a diversifying second generation.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback or suggestions you may have in terms of content and course adoption, especially since it will help me plan out my new book on children of immigrant families. If you would like a free copy to consider for course adoption, you can stop by the Stanford booth at the conference or click on the following link: http://www.sup.org/instructors/instructors.cgi?x=exam.

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?isbn=0804756570
http://www.amazon.com/Legacies-Struggle-Conflict-Cooperation-American/dp/

0804756589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216675262&sr=8-1

LEGACIES OF STRUGGLE explores the intergenerational dynamics of first-generation (foreign-born) and 1.5/ 2nd generation (American-born) organizations in post-Riot Koreatown, LA in order to understand how community-based organizations, can navigate traditional ethnic power structures and the evolving, multiracial context of ethnic enclaves like Koreatown to achieve their political goals. In particular, the book examines the different strategies that these 1.5/ 2nd generation-run ethnic organizations use to create a sense of ethnic solidarity among their constituents against the forces of mobility and assimilation that have fractured the broader ethnic community. Although Koreatown is becoming divided by intergenerational conflict, class polarization, and suburban flight, the book shows how Korean American organizations are able to cultivate ethnic political solidarity through the centralized resources and institutional infrastructures of the old enclave economy, which continues to expand economically despite the suburbanization of Korean American residents. Because the immigrant elite control the enclave’s resources, Chung argues that the American-born leadership must strategically negotiate its political agenda and mainstream ties within traditional immigrant power structures.
Based on a broad survey of Koreatown politics and an in-depth analysis of two organizations, the book identifies two ways 1.5/ 2nd generation ethnic organizations have cultivated ethnic political solidarity: one based on an middle-class approach to ethnic political solidarity that works in accommodation to the immigrant elite (Korean Youth and Community Center (KYCC)) and the other on a broader social justice framework of ethnicity based on alliances with outside interest groups (Korean Immigrant Workers Advocate (KIWA)). Both cases challenge the traditional assumption that assimilation undermines ethnicity as a meaningful framework for political solidarity among the American-born generation. These diverse strategies ultimately lead to the diversification and specialization of ethnic political structures, not its disintegration. Legacies of Struggle reveals how such community-based organizations have thus created innovative spaces for political participation among Korean Americans.

In the latter case, KIWA’s progressive mission and strong stance against the exploitative labor practices of Korean businessowners in regards to Korean and Latino workers have raised major opposition from Korean immigrant businessowners and other members of the traditional ethnic elite. As opposed to isolating themselves from the ethnic community, Chung shows how KIWA is able to do what mainstream labor unions can not—that is, mobilize a strong but malleable co-ethnic membership by providing a progressive space for diverse Korean American activists excluded from the conservative immigrant-dominated power structure. However, because the organization lacks substantial funding and support from the ethnic elite, KIWA’s success ultimately lies in its ability to cultivate alliances with labor unions, leftist racial organizations, and other progressive groups outside Koreatown in order to employ external pressure against immigrant powerholders with minimal financial costs.

Chung’s research makes several contributions in terms of understanding how children of immigrants and contemporary ethnic politics are challenging traditional scholarship on assimilation and incorporation. First, it shows how 1.5/ 2nd generation organizations in the contemporary era can re-create the ideological and institutional foundations of ethnic solidarity among their membership despite socioeconomic mobility and class-based divisions. The study considers how community-based organizations are adopting new political strategies to accommodate to the shifting demographic patterns of post-1965 immigrant populations, whose assimilation trajectories are too diverse to fit traditional one-dimensional models of political participation.

Acknowledging the significance of inequality within ethnic communities, Chung also reveals how marginalized leftist organizations can use mainstream resources to contest the dominance of traditional powerholders within the enclave based on a new and flexible approach to ethnic solidarity—thereby opening new avenues for political
participation among second-generation Korean Americans who do not fit the traditional mold. Such grassroots strategies are particularly crucial in an era where ethnic enclaves have become the main sites of globalized labor exploitation yet mainstream labor unions are neither interested nor well-equipped to tackle the internal power structures of Asian immigrant communities.

Finally, Chung’s study reveals how the different bases of empowerment—that is, one rooted within the ethnic community and the other in mainstream society—can be harnessed to generate inter-generational and inter-racial cooperation based on “complementary resources” (i.e. mutually providing networks and resources that the other lacks). In this respect, the book underscores the strategic ways in which racial and ethnic populations may find lines of commonality with other minority groups in the post-Civil Rights era, despite the widening ethnic and class interests that divide them.

The Hmong Studies Journal has just printed Volumes 7 and 8 in physical, hard copy editions.

Please see the press release at this link:

http://www.hmongstudies.org/HSJPrintingsPR08.html

The Hmong Studies Journal is a unique and established peer-reviewed Internet-based academic publication devoted to the scholarly discussion of Hmong history, Hmong culture, Hmong people, and other facets of the Hmong experience in the U.S., Asia and around the world. View the journal online at: http://www.hmongstudies.org/HmongStudiesJournal.html

Please contact me if any additional information is required.

Mark Pfeifer editor@hmongstudies.org

new book:

Amalgamation Schemes

Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

Jared Sexton

Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the
post–civil rights United States, the principal political effect of
multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy
nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in
Amalgamation Schemes, multiracialism displaces both by evoking
long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative
sexuality.

In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of
contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives
of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial
studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about “the browning of
America.” He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial
exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform
in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the
singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing
principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton
interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery
and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in
the new multiracial consciousness.

An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes posits
that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces
determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and
dismantle radical black and feminist politics.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/sexton_amalgamation.html

*************
For Immediate Release
July 29, 2008

Contacts: Wei Chi Poon, wcpoon@library.berkeley.edu, 510-642-2220 or Lillian Castillo-Speed, csl@library.berkeley.edu, 510-642-3947

One of Two Major Asian American Photograph Collections Recently Processed and Made Available for Research

The Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley has recently completed the processing of a major archive of San Francisco Chinatown photographs. This is one of two significant photograph collections that the library owns. These two collections are most likely the two largest Asian American photograph collections held in a public institution. The Kem Lee Photograph Archive project received funding for two years from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to process approximately 200,000 images. The images document San Francisco‚s Chinatown from the 1940s to the 1980s. The electronic finding aid for these images is in the Online Archive of California, which is maintained by the California Digital Library. The second major photograph archive contains over 240,000 images and was produced by Henry Woon, who documented Asian Americans in San Francisco and the East Bay from the 1950s to about 2000.

Mr. Kem Lee was an artist, a freelance professional photographer and a photojournalist for several Chinese community newspapers, such as Chinese World, Chinese Times and Young China, and official photographer for the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. and New Year pageant parades in San Francisco. Because he was also the owner of a photograph studio in Chinatown, he had an unparalleled opportunity to capture all aspects of the Chinese American experience in San Francisco, including beauty contests, businesses and businesspeople, family association events, festivals, movie stars, political and student organizations, prominent Chinese Americans, and wedding and family portraits. In particular, he captured one of the most important historical events for the Chinese American community, the naming of China as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Henry Woon was an amateur and freelance photographer and photojournalist for East West newspaper and Asian Week. In 1956, he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, having majored in political science with a minor in art. After graduating from Technical High School, Mr. Woon joined the Army during World War II. During the Korean War, he re-entered the Army again as an Army Chinese interpreter. He experienced the harsh realities of racial prejudice and war in the army. The prejudice made him realize the importance of documenting the Asian American community and the people of color of the Bay area and how they contributed to the richness of the country they loved. In contrast to the Kem Lee archive, the Woon archive includes a broad coverage of various ethnic groups and topics in the Bay Area, including book talks at libraries, community street fairs, war protests, family association events, prominent people and politician visits, and UC Berkeley student and alumni activities among other topics.

Together the Lee and Woon photographic archives record the history of Asian American life in the Bay Area for a period of over sixty years. They also constitute a public record of events in this unique ethnic American community, whose history, though reminiscent of the history of many other groups in our nation of immigrants, has not yet been well-documented. Kem Lee and Henry Woon documented their struggles, their political growth, their changing culture, and their vanishing generations. They also preserved their accomplishments, their milestones, their faces, their family relationships, and their collective pride in their community.

There is a growing demand for Asian American primary documents, such as photographs, in university courses and among worldwide researchers. The completion of the project to process the Kem Lee photographs goes a long way to meet that need. However, the Ethnic Studies Library is actively seeking funding to process and preserve its second major photograph collection, the Henry Woon archive.

Please contact the Asian American Studies Librarian, Wei Chi Poon at <mailto:wcpoon@library.berkeley.edu> wcpoon@library.berkeley.edu or 510-642-2000 for more information on how you can help the Ethnic Studies Library tell „the rest of the story.‰

The Ethnic Studies Library is a unit of the Ethnic Studies Department. It serves the curricular needs of the students, faculty and staff of the department while providing a repository for archival materials critical to research in Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Native American Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies. The year 2009 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Ethnic Studies Department and the collections of the Ethnic Studies Library.

–end–

The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. By Scott Kurashige http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/wiener/print

City of Fear

By Jon Wiener

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630

This article appeared in the June 30, 2008 edition of The Nation.

June 11, 2008

Associated Press
Quiet streets: Little Tokyo in July 1942, after the US government interned thousands of citizens.

From 1920 to 1960, Los Angeles was the whitest and most Protestant city in the United States, and the American city with the smallest proportion of immigrants–just 8 percent in 1960. By the end of the twentieth century, it was a multiracial place: 3.7 million residents, with 30 percent white, 10 percent black, 10 percent Asian and almost half Latino. During “the white years” in LA history, you might think Asian immigrant groups and black migrants from the South lived in separate worlds. The truth is more complicated: sometimes they were pitted against each other, sometimes they fought–and sometimes they joined forces in left-wing campaigns for jobs, housing and political power. Those competitions and alliances are the subject of Scott Kurashige’s fascinating and important new book, The Shifting Grounds of Race. Kurashige’s originality lies mostly in his research on Japanese-Americans and in his use of black history as an illuminating counterpoint to their struggles.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, Kurashige begins his story in the 1920s, when Japanese immigrants were legally defined as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” although, alone among Asian immigrant groups, Japanese men were permitted to bring wives–and thus raise a generation of American-born children, the Nisei, or “second generation.” Because whites wanted to keep racial minorities out of their neighborhoods, the small number of Japanese in LA sometimes lived in the same neighborhoods as blacks. For those with some money, the West Jefferson neighborhood, near USC, was the place to be. Chester Himes described it in his 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go as “a pleasant neighborhood, clean, quiet, well bred.” In a 1929 study of the neighborhood, USC interviewers found that while local whites were hostile to both groups, blacks and Japanese-Americans “generally held favorable views of each other.”

The Communist Party organized among blacks and Japanese-Americans in LA in the 1930s and ’40s, and Kurashige emphasizes the CP’s “multiracial vision of full equality” for both groups. In the ’20s, the party in LA was a small organization of mostly Jewish immigrants from Russia, but during the Popular Front period, beginning in 1936, it grew to nearly 3,000 members. The national CP had a “Japanese section” with 200 members and claimed a thousand more Japanese-American fellow travelers, vocal opponents of the rise of fascism in Japan. (LA at the time had a population of 35,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans.) Nisei leftists in LA organized the Market Workers Union in 1936, with 500 Japanese-American members. But when the Teamsters took over the union in 1937 in a jurisdictional dispute, they purged the Nisei.

Kurashige has found in the archives a few vivid cases where Japanese-Americans and blacks joined forces: in the mid-1930s Japanese-American Communists in LA produced bilingual fliers declaring “Scottsboro Boys Must Be Freed”; and in 1934 Langston Hughes gave the keynote speech at the party’s “Japan Night”–his topic was “The Japanese and the Darker Races.” Internationalism was the party line, but for those who saw World War II in the Pacific as a race war, there was a more sinister side to solidarity: in those same years, W.E.B. Du Bois praised Japan’s invasion of Manchuria for “showing the way to freedom” from white supremacy, calling the Chinese, as Kurashige puts it, “the Uncle Toms of the Far East.” This notion, Kurashige reports, “had spread through portions of Black America.” Hughes had a similar position, writing in 1944 about a white person telling a black church audience that “these Japs are really trying to wipe us white folks off the face of the earth”–to which “a dark and wrinkled old grandma in the amen corner” responded, “It’s about time!”

Prominent Japanese Communists in the United States faced a terrible choice in the 1930s, when almost a dozen from LA were threatened with deportation. With the help of the party’s International Labor Defense, they “voluntarily” accepted exile to the Soviet Union rather than returning to Japan, where they faced execution. But in Stalin’s Russia, Kurashige notes, at least five of them were “imprisoned and executed as ‘infiltrators.’” As tensions across the Pacific grew, mainstream Japanese-Americans, represented by the Japanese-American Citizens League (JACL), were torn between allegiance to Japan and the United States. As late as 1940, LA’s Japanese daily newspaper Rafu Shimpo (founded in 1903 by three students at USC) was printing Japanese government propaganda in its English section, describing the Chinese in Manchuria welcoming invading Japanese soldiers as liberators and describing the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo as a “miracle of the 20th century.”

Before World War II, Japanese-Americans and blacks were, in Kurashige’s words, “roughly equal targets of degradation by whites.” But after Pearl Harbor, the former were defined as enemies of the state, while the latter were granted equal employment rights by the White House. However, Kurashige points out that there were hardly any calls for internment in the month immediately following the bombing. In fact, FDR, Attorney General Francis Biddle and many others spoke out against hostility to Japanese-Americans. In LA, the County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on December 9, two days after the bombing, declaring that Japanese-Americans had “proven their loyalty to the United States by service in the [First] World War and in other ways.” And the Los Angeles Times ran a photo of Mayor Fletcher Bowron with Nisei leaders on December 8 headlined Japanese Americans Ready to Aid Nation. A liberal Republican supporter of civil liberties, Bowron had dismantled the notorious LAPD Red Squad and spoken out against anti-Communist witch hunts in 1940. Immediately after Pearl Harbor he assured Nisei leaders that the city would provide them with the “protection accorded any other citizen.” But by January 1942, with public opinion inflamed over news accounts of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines and with FDR issuing Executive Order 9066 requiring internment, Bowron had turned into a virulent advocate of rounding up all Japanese-Americans. He went so far as to argue that the Nisei posed the greatest threat of sabotage and espionage in what he said would be a “second Pearl Harbor” in LA.

It’s well-known that the mainstream JACL called on Japanese-Americans to cooperate with internment on the grounds that, although it was unjust, the community was powerless to stop it, and redress could be pursued after the war’s end. It’s also well-known that the CP supported the roundup on the grounds that opposing FDR would interfere with winning the war. (The leading Japanese-American CP member, Shuji Fujii, published a telegram he sent to FDR in the Popular Front Eagle that called on the government to “exterminate…un-American elements amongst us.”) But the most shocking fact in Kurashige’s book is that internment was not challenged by Nisei Communists. Despite their enthusiasm, the party suspended its Nisei comrades under the slogan “Everything for National Unity!”

The key research on black organizations’ positions on the internment has been done by Cheryl Greenberg, a professor of history at Trinity College, who found that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the National Council of Negro Women were mostly silent about the internment. Kurashige’s impressive research deepens the gloom. He searched the archives for LA blacks who criticized the internment as racist and found only one black newspaper, the Tribune, that “took a firm stand against” it–but “unfortunately the bulk of its wartime publications are unavailable in existing archives,” so we don’t really know what they said, or whether they changed their position when the climate became even more inhospitable.

Public opposition in LA to the internment was limited to a few individuals–notably Clifford Clinton, a white man and the proprietor of the famous Clifton’s Cafeteria downtown (which is still open). Even Carey McWilliams, then chief of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing (and not yet editor of The Nation), reluctantly supported internment in a 1942 article–although he soon became its most outspoken white critic. In black LA, the Eagle, published by leftist Charlotta Bass, ignored the internment and publicized the “Negro Victory Market,” a grocery co-op aimed at replacing the departed Japanese-American grocers.

Meanwhile, poor blacks from Texas and Louisiana were pouring into the city in search of wartime factory jobs. Whites didn’t want black neighbors, and so the newcomers moved to the suddenly vacant Little Tokyo. Overnight Little Tokyo turned into Bronzeville, an overcrowded ghetto known for its wild nightlife, centered on Shepp’s Playhouse, where young Charlie Parker and Miles Davis played. What the white elites had viewed as a Japanese slum they now saw as an even worse Negro slum.

The internment officially ended on January 2, 1945, but the mayor warned that Japanese-Americans “had better not come back to Los Angeles.” In Manzanar, they listened; over the next six months, only 3 percent of LA’s prewar Japanese-American population returned to the city. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) had to force the rest to leave Manzanar in the fall of 1945. Eventually two-thirds came back to LA, but they had nowhere to live–leading the WRA to house them (FEMA-style) in trailer parks in Burbank, Santa Monica, Hawthorne, El Segundo and Santa Ana. The city fathers feared rioting in Bronzeville, but it never materialized; in July 1946 Ebony magazine ran a story on “The Race War That Flopped.” The racial peace seems in part to have been the work of Common Ground, a 1945 project of the Pilgrim House, one of several Protestant church efforts to promote “interracialism.” But Bronzeville/Little Tokyo was still targeted for “urban renewal,” and in 1949, 2,500 Japanese-Americans and blacks were evicted to make way for a new LAPD headquarters and then a city parking garage.

The Protestant integrationists’ goal was to prevent the formation of a new Little Tokyo and instead integrate Japanese-Americans into suburban LA. Nisei leaders worried about undermining their historic community support institutions yet were drawn to the idea of integration; Kurashige notes that “public recognition that the Nisei were even potentially capable of assimilation represented a paradigm shift.” And so the same Japanese-Americans who were treated as criminals during the war became the “model minority” whose successful integration into mainstream America was contrasted with the failure of blacks to overcome what sociologists called “dysfunction.” Liberals like Ronald Reagan embraced them, honoring Japanese-American veterans and declaring in 1945 that “America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on…an ideal.” Not everyone agreed; the Teamsters’ official magazine declared it “senseless to argue” that “Japs are American citizens.” The union lobbied for the revocation of citizenship for Japanese-Americans.

In 1952 Congress passed the McCarran Walter Immigration Act over Truman’s veto. The act banned “suspected subversives” from entering the United States–those kept out included Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Graham Greene. Yet it contained a political triumph for the Nisei. In a little-known provision, the bill asserted that Japan had become our principal cold war ally in Asia. It granted naturalization rights to Japanese immigrants and permitted many more Japanese to immigrate. The quota itself wasn’t as significant as family reunification: in the 1950s, tens of thousands of Japanese legally immigrated, almost all of them family members of US citizens. As a result, more Japanese people arrived in the United States in that decade than in the previous forty years put together.

The new model minority completed its move to the suburbs, notably Gardena, Long Beach and Pasadena. But for blacks, moving just one block into white territory provoked protests and then white flight. The neighborhood around Florence and Normandie, where the Rodney King riots began in 1991, was virtually all-white in 1950; 6,000 blacks moved into the neighborhood during the 1950s, and by the ’60s, only a handful of whites remained.

For blacks there was one shining exception to the sea of black segregation in 1960s Los Angeles: the Crenshaw district, west of USC and south of the Santa Monica Freeway. There, Japanese-Americans, blacks and liberal whites lived together–for a time. Crenshaw started out after World War II as “the new Little Tokyo,” and by the early 1960s it had Southern California’s largest Japanese-American community, centered around the new Crenshaw Square shopping center, with its 1950s “Oriental” architecture and landscaping and a Japanese summer festival. But that changed in 1965, when the anger from the riots in nearby Watts spilled into Crenshaw. Japanese-American stores were looted and burned. Afterward, Crenshaw Neighbors, an organization formed by white and black women in 1961, tried to persuade whites and Japanese-Americans not to flee. (It was perhaps the region’s only homeowners’ group that fought for integrated neighborhoods.) The city opened a new high school, Crenshaw High, hoping to keep white and Japanese-American families in the area. That effort failed; Crenshaw became a black neighborhood in the 1970s.

Still, Crenshaw’s political legacy was huge. Tom Bradley, LA’s first black mayor, elected in 1973, got his start in the Crenshaw Democratic Club, where he learned to walk precincts and began his lifelong alliance with Jewish liberals. After taking office, he provided the first real opportunity for Japanese-Americans to participate in city government, and “always maintained a significant Japanese American presence in his office.” During the Bradley era, even as much of black LA fell deeper into poverty, many Japanese-Americans prospered. (Kurashige, however, is more interested in another kind of globalization–the young Japanese-American radicals of the campus Third World liberation movements of the early ’70s.)

After Watts, one symbol of interracial harmony in Crenshaw remained: Holiday Bowl, the Nisei-run bowling alley that had opened in 1958. In its coffee shop, blacks ate udon and Japanese-Americans ate soul food. Kurashige ends his book with the battle to save Holiday Bowl from the wrecking ball in 2000, when Manzanar survivors teamed up with working-class black veterans of the Negro bowling leagues and Anglo preservation activists. They lost that fight. The place was torn down in 2001, but it’s been enshrined in local history by the Japanese-American National Museum of LA. (It also has its own website, holidaybowlcrenshaw.com.) For Kurashige, Holiday Bowl provides a model of an alternative future for “polyethnic” Los Angeles–a future we might call “bowling together.”

About Jon Wiener

Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he’s written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He’s also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New Press).

The AAAS May 2008 newsletter is now out. We have sent the newsletter through email to members who have listed their email addresses on their membership forms. The newsletter is also available on our website: http://aaastudies.org/newsletters/index.html

Book Announcement

HOMEBASE

A Novel

Shawn Wong

With a new introduction by the author

(University of Washington Press, May 2008, $12.95 paperback)

University of Washington Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new edition of Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase.  When it was first published in 1979, this coming of age story was lauded as “a poetically rendered tour de force” by Amerasia Journal.  In his new introduction, Shawn Wong describes the book’s initial publication, the blossoming of Asian American literature from 1970s forward, and his own development as a writer.  Included in the book are discussion questions, many suggested by professors who teach Homebase in their courses.

Shawn Wong is the author of the novel American Knees and an editor of several anthologies of Asian American literature, including Aiiieeeee! and The Big Aiiieeeee!. His work has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship and numerous other prizes. He is professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

For more information about the book, visit: http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WONHOM.html

Beth DeWeese
Direct Marketing Manager
University of Washington Press
PO Box 50096
Seattle, WA 98145-5096
206-221-5890 tel; 206-545-3932 fax

Order books at 1-800-537-5487 or on our website:
www.washington.edu/uwpress

Book Announcement

The Paintings of Yun Gee and Li-lan
Joyce Brodsky
(University of Washington Press, April 2008)

In this generously illustrated volume, teacher, author, and critic Joyce Brodsky brings together works by the expatriate Chinese painter Yun Gee (1906-1963) and his Chinese American daughter, Li-lan, exploring connections between these artists’ lives and paintings.  Both artists can be understood as cosmopolitan and transnational figures—citizens, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, of contemporary culture’s “middle passage.”  As artists who have embraced multinational, multicultural, and multiracial experiences, Yun Gee and Li-lan have combined those experiences intrinsically, sometimes in spite of the pain that such a complex passage may entail.

“Experiences of Passage represents an ambitious effort to trace the complex processes of transnational movement, cross-cultural identifications, and mixing through the work of Yun Gee and Li-lan.” — Margo Machida, University of Connecticut

Experiences of Passage is a 248-page, hardcover book with 70 illustrations.  For more information, visit:  http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/BROEXP.html

New Report: Asian American students don’t benefit from
No Child Left Behind Act—Major Reforms needed

New York, NY — At the first-ever National Asian American Education Advocates Summit held at Columbia University in April, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), a 34-year old civil rights organization, released its new report detailing several provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that must be overhauled in order to meet the needs of Asian American students.

AALDEF’s report, Left in the Margins: Asian American Students and the No Child Left Behind Act,  demonstrates how Asian Americans who are English Language Learners (ELLs) are currently set up to fail under NCLB.  Citing Census statistics and numerous examples in school districts around the country, AALDEF illustrates how this marginalized community is falling through our public education system’s cracks.  Left in the Margins puts a spotlight on particular school districts where Asian American ELL students are the most visible and also highly vulnerable due to the lack of appropriate services.

Margaret Fung, AALDEF executive director, said: “Since the No Child Left Behind law was enacted, we have not seen significant improvements in the quality of public education.  Instead, Asian Americans– especially immigrant, poor and non-English speaking students–have been left behind to fend for themselves in securing basic educational services. ”

Key recommendations from AALDEF’s report propose several major changes in NCLB:

Provide targeted language services for Asian American ELLs, since nearly a quarter of all Asian American students are ELLs.  Among those between the ages 5 and 17, over half of Hmong Americans, 39% of Vietnamese Americans, and 34% of Bangladeshi Americans are ELLs.

Use absolute numerical thresholds and/or population ratios in smaller districts or counties (rather than states) to determine the need for native language materials.  Asian American ELLs are densely populated in specific neighborhoods throughout the country.  For example, Vietnamese-speaking ELLs in Seattle constitute 16% of all ELLs in the city, but only 4% of the total ELL population in the state of Washington.  If native language materials were available only for language minority groups that made up at least 10% of ELLs in a state, then large numbers of Vietnamese-speaking ELLs would not benefit from native language materials.

Use multiple forms of assessment to measure ELL student achievement and limit the use of testing-based sanctions to abate high dropout rates among ELL students.  In New York City, the class of 2006’s ELL population had a dropout rate of 30% compared to 6.9% of all students citywide.

Provide states with funds to hire more ESL specialists, bilingual education specialists, and teachers bilingual in Asian languages. Although Vietnamese is the second most common native language of ELLs in California, there is only one bilingual teacher for every 662 Vietnamese-speaking students in the state.

Provide states with more funds to translate school documents, hire interpreters, and conduct community education for immigrant families.  Over 40% of Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese households are linguistically isolated.
Require every state to collect comprehensive student data that is disaggregated by ethnicity, native language, socioeconomic status, ELL status, and ELL program type.  Without this information, the educational needs of individual groups are concealed and will remain unaddressed.

Copies of Left in the Margins: Asian American Students and the No Child Left Behind Act are available at www.aaldef.org/docs/AALDEF_LeftintheMargins_NCLB.pdf .

###

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), founded in 1974, is a national organization that protects and promotes the civil rights of Asian Americans.  By combining litigation, advocacy, education, and organizing, AALDEF works with Asian American communities across the country to secure human rights for all.

The University of California Press  is pleased to announce the publication of:

Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Now Available in Paperback!

Mark Wild is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.

http://go.ucpress.edu/StreetMeeting

“Fascinating. . . . A rare and important addition to the rich literature on ethnic and racial experiences in Los Angeles.”-_Journal of American Ethnic History _

Immigrant neighborhoods of the early twentieth century have commonly been viewed as segregated, homogeneous slums isolated from the larger “American” city. But as Mark Wild demonstrates in this new study of Los Angeles, such districts often nurtured dynamic, diverse environments where residents interacted with individuals of other races and cultures. In fact, as his engaging account makes clear, between 1900 and 1940 such multiethnic areas mushroomed in Los Angeles. _Street Meeting, _enriched with oral histories, reminiscences, newspaper reports, and other sources, examines interactions among working-class Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Italians, African Americans, and others, reminding us that Los Angeles has been a multiethnic city since its birth. This study further argues that these ethnic interactions played a crucial role in the urban development of the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/StreetMeeting