please follow my requirement file, read through the article, giving the quoted from each reading article and give me the words around 500-750.

Reading Journals (10% or 100 points total / 8) Each week for weeks 2-9, you will complete and submit a reading journal that summarizes the main points from the week’s reading and discusses ideas you developed based on the readings. The length and style are at your discretion. I cannot imagine that you would be able to adequately summarize and reflect on the week’s readings in less than two pages, but you might. It will be most helpful to you if you complete these weekly.

There are three grade possibilities for these assignments:

12.5 = You submitted something and it met expectations by engaging all the readings;

9 = You submitted something and it did not meet expectations;

0 = You did not submit anything. This is almost a simple “check” assignment.

The “9” grade is for those submissions that show you have not done (all) the reading or not done it thoroughly.

These assignments are mainly for you to a) keep you on track and b) give you a record of your ideas about the readings.

Length: 2+ pages Style: Informal, Formal, Academic, Whatever Works For You Citation: Mention the authors, use quotations marks, and, if it’s helpful for you, refer to pages.

127Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Who StudieS the ASiAn
AmericAn movement?

A Historiographical Analysis

diane c. fujino

The sixties are a stretched-out decade synonymous with political protest. Yet Asian American activism barely registers on any political radar
for a number of reasons, including being conspicuously understudied.

Here, I seek to develop, for the first time, a historiography of the Asian

American Movement (AAM).1 The study focuses on grassroots and

non-institutionalized discourses and practices from the late 1960s, when

longstanding resistance by Asian Americans became characterized as a

“social movement,”2 to the decline of the AAM in the late 1970s.

My analysis generates four periods of study. The first (late 1960s to

mid-1970s) was dominated by activists and activist-scholars produc-

ing knowledge in the zenith of the AAM. The second (late 1970s to late

1980s) represented a vacuum in AAM research. The third (late 1980s to

late 1990s) saw a slow upsurge in AAM scholarship and a greater inclu-

sion of scholarly works and civil rights frameworks. The fourth (2000 to

present) can be seen as the “coming of age”—the adolescence, but not full

maturity—of AAM scholarship, with the greatest number of scholarly

works, a re-emphasis on the radical roots of the AAM, and attention to

Steven Lawson’s “interactive model” that calls for connecting local and

national, social and political issues.3

Unlike historiographies of established fields that focus on books, my

analysis also includes journal articles, book chapters, Ph.D. dissertations,

jaas june 2008 • 127–169
© the johns hopkins university press

128 • jAAS • 11:2

and Masters’ theses.4 Three types of works are excluded. First, based

on conventional definitions of social movements, this article does not

explore participation in establishment politics, including the electoral

arena.5 Second, it is beyond the scope of this essay to include the rich and

varied novels, poetry, films, music, and other cultural productions created

within and, in turn, generative of the AAM. Third, as is common with

historiographies, this article does not analyze primary-source materials,

including the many vibrant AAM newspapers.6

Five areas of struggle were critical to the 1960s–1970s AAM. First,

Asian Americans of diverse ages helped to transform the Antiwar Move-

ment from its emphasis on saving American lives to exposing racism,

sexism, and capitalism at home and abroad. Activists linked the U.S. war

in Vietnam to critiques of U.S. imperialism and militarism in Cambodia,

Hiroshima, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawaii, and elsewhere. Second,

given the predominance of youth in the AAM, it is not surprising that

educational transformation, particularly establishing ethnic studies, cap-

tured their imagination. More than simply including marginalized groups

on campus and in the curriculum, activists contested the very structures

and purpose of the educational system and redirected learning toward

community service rather than self- or corporate interests. San Francisco

State College’s five-month strike that birthed ethnic studies remains the

longest student strike in U.S. history. Third, “serve the people” programs

and connections to the community, particularly working-class communi-

ties, became central guiding principles of the AAM. Activists developed

programs to meet basic human rights, including the provision of housing,

jobs, healthcare, and education. Fourth, labor struggles were integral to

the AAM, not only because of the working-class location of many Asian

Americans in that period and historically, but also because of the influence

of Marxist theory, which identifies capitalism as the primary source of op-

pression and class struggle as key to liberation. Fifth, the AAM originated

a new political and pan-Asian identity and a new vocabulary, creating the

very term, “Asian American,” to signify a common experience with racism

and a shedding of the passivity associated with the “Oriental.”7

129Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

MainstreaM social MoveMent literature

Mainstream social movement scholarship, primarily in the fields of sociol-

ogy, political science, and history, has produced a voluminous literature

on the 1960s–1970s social movements.8 Yet there has been scant atten-

tion paid to the study of the AAM, with a few exceptions.9 Two frame-

works—the logic governing U.S. race relations and the tendency towards

liberalism—help to explain this erasure of memory in relation to Asian

American resistance. First, two mainstream newsmagazines popularized

the image of Asian Americans as the “model minority” in 1966, the same

year that Stokely Carmichael popularized the concept of “Black Power”

and that the Black Panther Party formed. The alleged Asian American

tradition—upward mobility gained from hard work, delayed gratification,

self-reliance, and passivity—contrasted sharply with the long-established

Black protest tradition (and the earlier image of Asian Americans as hy-

perpolitical yellow peril threats).10

Second, the social movement literature tends to privilege the Civil

Rights and the early New Left movements of the mid-1950s to early 1960s.

These movements, while contesting racism and economic inequality,

upheld views of U.S. society as pluralistic and committed to the liberal

values of democracy and equality contained in the 14th Amendment’s

equal protection clause. Social movement scholars, most famously Todd

Gitlin, created a “good sixties/bad sixties” divide. Prior to 1965 or 1968, this

narrative goes, the Black freedom and New Left movements, respectively,

were engaged in projects creating participatory democracy, the beloved

community, and interracial unity. After that turning point, the movements

turned towards militancy and violence, Black Power and nationalism.11

Historian Clayborne Carson observed, “As the nonviolent struggles of

the early 1960s gave way to the violent racial conflicts of the late 1960s,

the understandable reluctance of scholars, most of whom were white, to

study black movements close up rather than from afar became more and

more evident.”12

The model minority logic promotes hard work and non-resistance as

the main pathway to upward mobility; a liberal framework promotes the

U.S. as a pluralistic society that provides channels for voicing grievances

and is responsive to those concerns. The location of Asian Americans as

130 • jAAS • 11:2

a “wedge group” in the racial hierarchy with greater access to economic

rewards seems to validate the democratic and egalitarian structures of U.S.

society. But the AAM’s legacy negates these logics. The AAM calls attention

to anti-Asian racism. The AAM embraced, to a large degree, the ideology

of Black Power, with its radical analysis of U.S. racism, capitalism, and

imperialism and its call for self-determination. Uncovering the history of

the AAM raises questions about the nature of U.S. pluralism and model

minority opportunities and suggests the relevance of grassroots protest

and radical critiques in the past and present.

asian aMerican MoveMent scholarship in the Field oF asian aMerican
studies

The field of Asian American Studies (AAS) has been critical to the pro-

duction of AAM scholarship. Yet a paradox emerges. On one hand, it is

not surprising that AAS scholars would study the AAM, given the field’s

genealogy. On the other hand, a systematic and rigorous area of social

movement research has not, after four decades, been developed. This ten-

sion between acknowledging and erasing an activist history of the field is

represented in two of the most influential Asian American history books.

Ronald Takaki’s widely read and lengthy work, Strangers from a Different

Shore, does not even mention 1960s–1970s activism. Sucheng Chan does

discuss the 1960s–1970s AAM in one page of her slim Asian Americans:

An Interpretive History. Yet several pages are devoted to the post-1970s

struggles, particularly hate crimes and electoral campaigns—issues that

reinforce a liberal framework.13 Chan’s focus is reproduced in AAS antholo-

gies, which discuss Asian American resistance, but give minimal attention

to the 1960s–1970s.14

Why hasn’t more AAM research been produced? Who studies the

AAM? It was often activists-turned-scholars who studied the early New

Left. Yet relatively few AAM activists became formal scholars,15 perhaps for

two reasons. First, AAM activists had a different relationship to race, class,

and cultural capital. Unlike Richard Flacks’s finding that many early New

Left activists came from middle-class families with the cultural capital to

facilitate doctoral studies, the families of Asian American activists were

131Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

often either working-class or promoting study in the sciences, professional

fields, or pragmatic occupations.16 When Asian American activists became

academics, they were often located in “non-research” university positions,17

resulting in a slower rate of scholarly production. Second, the paucity of

AAM studies also reflects the AAM’s engagement with radicalism. As the

New Communist movement emerged in the early 1970s, the radical wing

of the AAM embraced Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and its demand for

revolutionary transformation. This decision included prioritizing work-

ing-class jobs and critiquing the mainstream educational system as a

bourgeois social institution. Aligned with their political ideology, several

AAM activists consciously left college and/or found working-class jobs.18

For those located in the academy, the AAM is more dangerous to study,

especially if one is closeted about a radical past.

Until the recent period, activist-scholars in “non-research” university

positions and students have produced the bulk of AAM studies. Most

notably, activists or “organic intellectuals,” in the Gramscian sense, have

written personal reflections and activist analyses.19 Yet priorities placed on

day-to-day organizing and the lack of institutional support erected bar-

riers to sustaining an intensive and prolonged research project. But more

recently, memoirs and biographies have been published as “pre-Movement

activists” enter their golden years.20 As 1960s–1970s activists approach

retirement or ill health, more memoirs—a popular genre for ‘60s activ-

ists—are likely to emerge.21 In addition, the recent surge of dissertations

on social movements suggests an upswing in AAM studies.

In his historiographical essay, Steven Lawson observed three periods

of Civil Rights Movement scholarship. The first generation of scholars

(late 1960s to late 1970s) focused on national leaders and events and

privileged judicial and legislative strategies. The second generation (late

1970s to mid-1980s) shifted attention to local and grassroots organizing.

The third generation (mid-1980s on) adopted an “interactive approach,”

connecting “the local with the national, the social with the political,” and

internal with external factors.22 Though AAM scholarship also began in the

late 1960s, the study of the AAM does not fit with Lawson’s periodization

for several reasons. First, from the start, the AAM, by and large, did not

promote individual leaders, though activists like Yuri Kochiyama were seen

132 • jAAS • 11:2

as leader-mentors. Instead, there was a conscious adoption of collective

leadership models. Former AAM activists highlight this idea in Philip Vera

Cruz’s memoir: “Leadership, I feel, is only incidental to the movement. The

movement should be the most important thing . . . . It must be something

that is continuous, with goals and ideas that the leadership can then build

upon.”23 Second, rather than making policy change or government reliance

its central goal, the AAM emphasized the power of people to create self-

sustaining institutions. AAM scholarship, with some exceptions, tended

to repudiate, from the start, the focus on national leadership and electoral

victories. Not surprisingly, AAM studies have been heavily social histori-

cal, with a focus on ordinary people and everyday lives. Third, given the

geographic concentration of Asian American communities on the West

Coast, AAM activity occurred in local and regional areas, particularly in

urban sites in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles and to a lesser

extent in New York City. Rather than spotlight national organizing, per

se, AAM studies reflected this focus on local struggles and on an interac-

tive approach connecting local, national, and international movements.

In contrast to Lawson, my periodization of AAM historiography attends

to the issues of author’s location, audience, political economy, and larger

social movement activity.

i. late 1960s to Mid-1970s: activist productions; radical,
coMMunity-based issues

Material on the AAM began emerging as the Movement unfolded. The

UCLA Asian American Studies Center (AASC) played a central role in

its production. In 1971, a mere two years after its establishment, AASC

published Roots: An Asian American Reader. Roots contains close to sixty

articles, many reprints from AAM publications, arranged in three broad

sections on identity, history, and community.24 As examples of the assimi-

lationist logic, Roots included: (a) the 1966 U.S. News & World Report’s

article, “Success Story of One Minority Group in America,” which popu-

larized the image of Chinese Americans as “model minorities” and (b) an

interview with S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College

during the strike and future Republican U.S. senator, who stated, “The

133Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

wartime relocation” was positive because it “gave us a chance to really

become Americans, to integrate into U.S. cities, rather than remaining

residents of Little Tokyo.”25 By contrast, the majority of articles in Roots

promoted political protest, Third World solidarities, and opposition to

institutionalized racism and imperialism as strategies for gaining collec-

tive mobility.

Amy Uyematsu’s “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” first

printed in the UCLA student-activist publication, Gidra, captured the

AAM generation’s rejection of their parents’ assimilationist and integra-

tionist aspirations. Instead, she positioned the Black Power movement,

with its bold efforts at self-definition and self-determination, as a model

for the nascent AAM. She turned the racial order on its head by asking

Asian Americans to see a shared oppression with Black Americans and

to challenge the anti-Black racism harbored by many Asian Americans.26

AAM leader Pat Sumi rebuked the commodity desires and political myopia

of many; borrowing from Mao, she likened this logic to “a frog sitting at

the bottom of the well” who thinks “the sky’s no bigger than the well.”

Instead, she urged readers to feel a connectedness with community and

contestation: “If you identify with your people, then you become part of

their suffering and also part of their fighting power.”27 Most articles focused

explicitly on AAM struggles, organizations, or individuals, or offered social

analyses of community conditions, economic and racial inequalities, and

collective resistance. Several articles framed social problems through a

critique of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, including I Wor Kuen’s

Twelve-point Program, which called for “an end to male chauvinism,”

“community control of institutions and land,” and “a socialist society.”28

Roots, as “the standard textbook for AAS courses throughout the nation

for many years,” had a major impact on student and activist understand-

ings of Asian American history.29

Five years after Roots, AASC published Counterpoint. In offering a

more scholarly approach, particularly in its critical assessment of the state

of AAS scholarship and its call for new theoretical and methodological

models, Counterpoint helped to propel an analytic turn in the nascent

field. In particular, editor Emma Gee criticized earlier paradigms for their

reliance on the assimilationist framework, including an exclusive use of

134 • jAAS • 11:2

English-language sources. Yuji Ichioka’s article on Issei socialists and H.

Mark Lai’s on the Chinese American Left are but two of the more widely

known of the many Counterpoint articles that created an Asian American

history marked by resistance and political engagement. Counterpoint was

not striving to emulate mainstream academic standards, but rather to

develop alternative theories, particularly on institutional racism, internal

colonialism, and Marxism, and a methodology of praxis. Gee noted, “All

[articles] are here to aid in the search to uncover the wrong questions

divorced from social reality and to raise new questions rooted in it.”30

Because Counterpoint, like Roots, emerged in the context of the AAM,

virtually all of the articles—whether on immigration, community forma-

tion, history, media, or “land, labor, and capital”—contained a political

edge and a critique of social conditions. Most articles on the 1960s–1970s

AAM centered on educational transformation, labor struggles, and

redevelopment campaigns within a U.S. context. But given the Third

Worldism of the times, it was not surprising to see a discussion of global

issues, including “The Story of Marcos Coercion.” Still, compared to

Roots, Counterpoint had a diminished activist focus. One could interpret

this change as the turn from activism towards institutionalization taking

place in many AAS programs by the mid-1970s. Another reading is that

Counterpoint was seeking to develop critical theoretical paradigms and to

encourage original research on issues of race, class, and nation.31

As the oldest journal in AAS, Amerasia Journal has exerted a major

impact on the direction of the field.32 That the 30th anniversary cumulative

index, published in 2001, lists one heading as “Asian American Studies and

the Movement” is suggestive of their mutually constitutive nature.33 The

journal has focused on political issues, educational transformation, critical

pedagogy, and critical essays on the development of the field—all integral

to the origins of the AAM. But, a careful examination of the entire run

of Amerasia Journal reveals surprisingly few articles on the 1960s–1970s

AAM, outside of the 1989 special issue.34

Anthologies produced at other universities also reflected the field’s

origins in the AAM and, in turn, helped to shape the nascent AAM.35 Stu-

dent-based women’s collectives at UC Berkeley and Stanford University

published Asian American women’s anthologies.36 That Berkeley’s Asian

135Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Women (1971), the more sophisticated and politically radical of the two,

was also more influential is suggestive of the ways that their critiques of

racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism resonated with the larger

AAM. Asian Women sought to articulate an analysis of Asian women’s

subordination linked to class and race inequality: “The liberation of our

revolutionary sisters in China and Vietnam has taken place within socialist

revolutions.”37 As was typical of Asian American women’s organizing at the

time, Asian Women articulated a sense of alienation from the mainstream

women’s movement and a desire to work alongside “our brothers” against

sexism because “[i]t is the social system [referring to capitalism], not men,

which is the enemy.”38

Internationalism, anti-imperialism, and Third Worldism were com-

mon themes throughout Asian Women. Several articles centered on opposi-

tion to the Vietnam war, including a delegation’s report on the influential

Indochinese Women’s Conference in Vancouver, and on how the U.S.

government’s use of toxic chemicals in Vietnam and the sterilization of

Third World women created a situation of “genocide.” An interview with

activist Pat Sumi revealed the impact on her political transformation of

her trip to North Korea, North Vietnam, and China on a delegation led by

Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Though there was less attention to

sexuality than in current women’s anthologies, Asian Women criticized the

inequality of birth control (sterilization and IUDs to Third World women

and the Pill to middle-class U.S. women), advocated women’s control of

their own bodies and sexuality, and supported gay rights.”39

In her implicitly socialist-feminist analysis of the Asian American

women’s movement, Mayumi Tsutagawa (1974) criticized women, espe-

cially those of the middle class, for engaging in a “superficial rebellion”

based on “a highly individualist way of thinking”:

[They] may study the Joy of Sex and seek equal partnership in bed rather

than studying the history of our society and seeking a better way of life

for all our people . . . . They also may think that “I should get a high paying

job just because I am a woman and just as good as a man” rather than

thinking about a better work situation for all sisters . . . . It is not enough

to rebel against the un-cute little stereotypes of Asian females.40

Instead, Tsutagawa called for a historical and materialist analysis of wom-

en’s oppression based on women’s unpaid domestic labor, the ideology of

136 • jAAS • 11:2

“the happy home and lovely family,” and the double oppression of Third

World women. She also urged unity and struggle with Asian American

men and “all Third World peoples.”41

UC Berkeley’s AAS second anthology, Asian American Review (1976),

focused less on activist issues and its editorial staff consisted mainly of

faculty, paralleling the changes towards institutionalization and Movement

decline seen in the UCLA AASC anthologies. Still, Asian American Review

diverges from mainstream academic content and form. A staff member

served on the editorial board; contributors were students, staff, and faculty;

and materials covered intellectual, personal, and creative expressions. Two

articles focused explicitly on AAM issues outside of pedagogical discus-

sions: the International Hotel struggle for low-income housing and a story

on activist-poet Janice Mirikitani.42

In this first period, it was mainly activists who produced AAM studies,

with institutional support from newly emerging Asian American Studies

programs. Among the ideological heterogeneity in these publications, there

was a strong tendency towards radical analyses, with critiques of racism,

capitalism, and imperialism (and sexism to a lesser degree); the study of

domestic issues in global contexts; a focus on grassroots and community-

based issues; and dialectical movement among ethnic-specific, pan-Asian,

and Third World contexts.43

ii. late 1970s to late 1980s: vacuuM oF aaM studies

From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, there was a near vacuum of AAM

studies, outside of valuable AAM newspapers.44 This decline in production

coincides with what Sucheng Chan calls a period of “stagnation” in AAS,

in terms of program development, faculty hires, and publications.45 Still,

this period saw numerous books published on Asian American subjects,46

including resistance outside the 1960s–1970s.47 So beyond stagnation, this

publication void hints at the impact of the political economy and social

movement activity.

Many argue that the AAM was in decline by the late 1970s,48 a phe-

nomenon related to the conventional wisdom that the “long ‘60s” ended

by the mid-1970s.49 To the contrary, activist-intellectual Max Elbaum, in

137Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Revolution’s in the Air, convincingly argues that the “New Communist

Movement” flourished throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.50 More-

over, as the nationalism of the late 1960s morphed into the Marxist-Lenin-

ism of the 1970s, separate groups that worked in alliance with one another

(Third World solidarity) transformed themselves into multinational

formations.51 In the AAM, for example, I Wor Kuen and the Red Guard

Party, both formed in 1969, merged in 1971 to become the first national

Asian American revolutionary organization. Then, in 1978, I Wor Kuen

merged with the largely Chicana/o August Twenty-Ninth Movement to

form the League of Revolutionary Struggle, one of the largest New Com-

munist organizations, unique in its predominantly oppressed nationality

membership and women’s leadership.52

My point is that these groups existed throughout the 1970s and 1980s,

during the period of decline in the production of AAM scholarship. So,

what changed the correspondence between the larger social movements

and AAM publishing? Clearly, the increasingly conservative political

climate exerted an influence on the direction of both political organizing

and AAS. While these multinational groups continued to organize around

Asian American issues, they did so in less visible ways. More significantly,

the revolutionary nature of these groups created a divide with AAS, which

was becoming de-radicalized—thus, contributing to the vacuum of AAM

studies in this period.

III. Late 1980s to Late-1990s: MoveMent towards acadeMIc and
reforMIst currents, PersIstence of actIvIst and radIcaL anaLyses

In the late 1980s, there was a re-surfacing of AAM publications. Important

to launching this period was Amerasia Journal’s special issue commemorat-

ing the 20th anniversary of the San Francisco State College strike.53 That

the strike had led to the establishment of ethnic studies helps to explain

why an AAS journal might focus on these events. But, why now? Why

commemorate the 20th anniversary, but not the 10th or 30th? Editor Rus-

sell Leong offers clues in his introduction. His brief commentary begins

and ends with a discussion of the tenure battle of an AAS professor. Don

Nakanishi had been denied tenure, but his case was fraught with, ac-

138 • jAAS • 11:2

cording to his attorney, Dale Minami, “racism and bigotry” and “fraud

in high places.”54 Not just any UCLA faculty, Nakanishi was co-founder

of Amerasia Journal and longstanding director of UCLA’s AASC. To the

journal staff, Nakanishi’s case signaled the ongoing need to organize

against anti-Asian racism and to continue the struggle for educational

transformation. In this context, it seemed apropos to reflect on the San

Francisco State strike.55

The 1989 special issue was unique among Amerasia Journal issues in its

focus on the 1960s–1970s AAM. Glenn Omatsu’s influential “Four Prisons”

commenced the issue by examining changes in political thought—from

1960s radicalism to 1980s neoconservativism—generated by shifts in the

political economy, particularly the “one-sided class war” waged by corpo-

rations in the 1970s. In response to those who locate the AAM within a

civil rights framework, Omatsu argues that the AAM “coincided not with

. . . civil rights but with the later demand for black liberation; . . . was not

centered on the aura of racial identity but embraced fundamental ques-

tions of oppression and power; . . . and that the main thrust was not one

of seeking legitimacy and representation within American society but the

larger goal of liberation.”56 Karen Umemoto’s article was the first study

to highlight the role of Asian American students in the San Francisco

State strike, though Asian American groups comprised fully half of the

six organizations in the Third World Liberation Front. Her article locates

educational inequalities within social structure, particularly institutional-

ized racism and increasing corporate control over education, and articu-

lates Black Power-inspired theories and strategies of the strike, including

the concept of student- and community-based self-determination. The

article, which has become a classic text in the field, is noteworthy for its

use of interviews, archival materials, and secondary sources to give voice

to student-activist perspectives and to situate the strike within the 1960s

political economy. Umemoto’s piece, along with Susie Ling’s article on

the Asian American women’s movement in Los Angeles, both based on

M.A. theses, are the only empirically based articles on the ‘60s–‘70s AAM

in this thick volume. The issue also contains two dozen activist reflections

on lessons learned from the ‘60s–‘70s AAM.57

The most extensively researched and influential study on the nation-

wide, multifaceted AAM is William Wei’s book, authoritatively titled, The

139Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Asian American Movement (1993). Wei’s book is ambitious in its study of

the AAM from the late 1960s to early 1990s and in its national breadth.58

Methodologically, Wei interviewed or collected materials from an ex-

traordinary number of people (N=246) and gathered extensive archival

documents, including organizational internal documents, Movement

publications, and mainstream newspapers.59 On page one, Wei sums up

his interpretation of the AAM: “essentially a middle-class reform move-

ment for racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment in a

culturally pluralistic America.”60 But, Wei’s interpretation is at odds with

the majority of AAM studies.

Wei contends that because so many AAM participants were college

students, they represented a middle-class movement.61 But, others argue

that the working-class roots of many Asian American student-activists

helped to motivate their work to support Pilipino farmworkers, to provide

health services in Chinatown, and to struggle for low-income housing. Wei

also minimized the contributions of street youth groups like the Red Guard

Party in San Francisco, modeled after the lumpen proletariat membership

and theories of the Black Panther Party, and diminished the significance

of the intergenerational membership of groups like Asian Americans for

Action in New York, started by middle-aged Japanese American women,

one of whom was active in radical struggles dating back to the 1930s.62 By

overlooking working-class, rural, elderly, street youth, and other constitu-

encies, I contend that Wei in effect created a narrative of a “middle-class”

and “student” movement.

Wei’s analysis further renders revolutionary organizing ineffective

because of its failure to radically transform social structures, without rec-

ognizing the significance of freedom dreams. First, he tends to evaluate the

effectiveness of an organization by its abilities to achieve its goals. But, is it

appropriate to compare the attainment of reformist goals, no matter how

ambitious and challenging (e.g., building a community center), with the

attainment of revolutionary goals (e.g., transforming capitalism)? Second,

Wei downplays the non-material gains achieved through radical ideas. In

Freedom Dreams, Robin D.G. Kelley argues that though Black radicals did

not attain their goal of revolutionary societal change, they unlocked the

imagination of the oppressed to strive for freedom.63 Similarly, Winifred

140 • jAAS • 11:2

Breines notes that while the Students for a Democratic Society failed to

build a “strategically effective national organization,” they were successful

in their effort to build community and to “create and prefigure in lived

action and behavior the desired society.”64 About Wei, May Fu writes,

“He gauges the effectiveness of the movement by solely evaluating the

institutional, structural gains and longevity of organizations and does not

consider how the work challenged and transformed the lives of participants

and how they viewed themselves in relation to social power.”65

Third, while Wei tends to dichotomize reform and revolution, oth-

ers offer a dialectical analysis. Like the Black Panther Party, many Asian

American radical organizations engaged in reformist activity, namely

serve-the-people programs, but did so to promote revolutionary goals.66

Fourth, Wei’s language—“equality” and “empowerment” as opposed to

“liberation” and “self-determination”—reveals his bias towards reform.

Just as Omatsu writes about the ways that language shapes and reflects a

particular politic, Wei’s vocabulary likely reveals not only the period in

which he writes, but also his politics.67

Wei’s interpretation of a “culturally pluralistic America” further

reinforces his assumptions of reformism, liberalism, and normative his-

tory. According to the pluralist model, because U.S. institutions operate

to promote democracy and equality, voting and other establishment

practices are sufficient to achieve social justice. Yet much of the literature

suggests that many AAM activists held oppositional views towards U.S.

institutions, making transgressive, grassroots organizing and radical

critiques relevant and necessary. Finally, by defining success as the attain-

ment of national visibility and organizational longevity, Wei undermines

the contributions of small groups working in localized sites and fails to

analyze the relationship between the whole and the parts, the global and

the local. Even as he studies social movements, Wei’s analysis reproduces

“normative history”—an approach that Charles Payne rebukes for privi-

leging top-down analysis:

Top-down interpretations are strongly predisposed toward the normative,

and in movement studies that tendency can show up in several ways

beyond simply artificially expanding the roles of national leaders and

institutions— . . . treating nonviolence as if it were somehow natural

141Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

while treating militancy as inevitably doomed to failure, overestimating

the degree of national consensus about the movement’s goals, framing

radicalism as irrational. . . . 68

Based on a misplaced civil rights etiology for the AAM, despite its emer-

gence in the period of Black Power, it is Wei’s interpretations, more than

anything else, that renders his study flawed.

A few books published in the 1990s focus, to varying degrees, on the

1960s–1970s AAM. Yen Le Espiritu’s Asian American Panethnicity (1992)

offers an important discussion of the pan-Asian formation that was

rooted in the AAM and significantly shaped AAS. Others deploy radical

frameworks that emphasize anti-capitalist labor struggles and Black Power

ideologies, notably autobiographical and biographical accounts of Pilipino

labor organizer Philip Vera Cruz (1992), murdered Pilipino cannery union

organizers and KDP activists Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo (1995),

and renowned Chinese American activist and socialist theorist Grace Lee

Boggs (1998).69 Still, these books underscore the sluggishness with which

scholarship on the 1960s–1970s AAM proceeded in the 1990s. Given her

purpose of analyzing pan-ethnicity from the 1960s to the 1980s, Espiritu’s

book devotes only a single chapter to the ‘60s–‘70s AAM. While Boggs is a

prominent activist-intellectual of historic significance, the study of her life

hardly informs an understanding of the AAM. “The first and only period

in my life that I was meeting regularly” with political Asian Americans,

Boggs acknowledges, was when she worked with the short-lived Asian

Political Alliance in Detroit in the early 1970s.70 Moreover, the group

focused heavily on political study and had only limited interactions with

the local Asian American community.71

Still, the Amerasia Journal special issue and Wei’s pathbreaking but

problematic book signaled a new period of AAM scholarship. But, why

did the recovery of AAM scholarship proceed so slowly, and why at this

time? Black Panther Party (BPP) literature also increased in this period,

but that was grounded in a particular event. The death of Panther leader

Huey Newton in 1989 inspired BPP commemorations, reduced internal

factional conflicts, and spurred writing on the BPP.72 No such singular

event exists for the Asian American political community. Moreover, this

revival does not coincide with major shifts in the political landscape, with

142 • jAAS • 11:2

the conservative Reagan-Bush era lasting until 1992 and the Reagan-Bush-

Bush stronghold continuing to the present. Perhaps the publication of

Pilipino labor leader Philip Vera Cruz’s memoirs holds clues. The book

was under consideration for publication in 1979, until one member of

the editorial board of a university press rebuked the book for its candid

criticism of UFW leadership, particularly Cesar Chavez. The book finally

appeared a dozen years later via alternative presses at UCLA, more than

twenty years after the advent of the AAM.73 The fate of Vera Cruz’s book is

suggestive of another theme. The lack of publications does not necessarily

reflect a lack of research activity. One might expect that graduate students

in AAS and ethnic studies would conduct research on the 1960s–1970s

AAM, yet there has been surprisingly little.74

Significant to Omatsu’s discussion in “Four Prisons” is the relationship

between political economy and knowledge production. The multicultural-

ism of the 1980s created a space for discussions of race and culture. But,

scholars and activists have also critiqued multiculturalism for allowing the

celebration of diversity, in the absence of any radical transformation of the

social structures that produce and reproduce inequalities. Vijay Prashad

rebukes this “bureaucratic multiculturalism” for reinterpreting antira-

cism as the promotion of diversity.75 It is this context of multiculturalism,

combined with the nationwide conservative turn in the 1980s, that helps

to explain the simultaneous growth in AAM studies and the diminished

revolutionary ideas in these materials.76 Representing the dual nature of

this period of AAM historiography, in the 1990s more than at any other

time, scholars interpreted the AAM within civil rights discourses, even

as themes from the first period, including radicalism and working-class

labor struggles, continue to persist, especially in studies by activists and

graduate students.

iv. 2000 to the present: acadeMic and activist productions;
international, third world, and radical currents

Since 2000, there has been a steady upsurge in research on the 1960s–1970s

AAM, so much so that it can be considered an emerging field of scholar-

ship. The number of dissertation studies being turned into books points

143Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

to promising future developments.77 What accounts for this upswing?

First, there is a correspondence between social movement activity and

scholarship. The two most productive periods of 1960s–1970s AAM

scholarship were in the 1970s and 2000s. Both build upon, in my analysis,

the two most dynamic periods of Asian American activism. The late 1960s

to mid-1970s was, by far, the most vibrant period. The 1990s ushered in a

renewal of Asian American activism and the creation of new Asian Ameri-

can grassroots organizations, including a “second wave” of AAS activism,

widespread protests against a series of regressive California propositions,

and increased radical organizing.78 This activity coincided with motion

in other social movements that radiated renewed hope about a figurative

“return to the ‘60s.”

Second, a generation’s gap in time provided the psychological distance

necessary for critical reflection and inspired a desire to leave a legacy. Still,

some aspects of the AAM, particularly the revolutionary wing, cannot be

researched adequately today. Persistent personal conflicts and fears about

the exposure of one’s radical past make this a delicate topic.

Third, the glaring dearth of publications on the AAM and activists’

deep disappointment in Wei’s book inspired several authors, particularly

Ho (2000) and Louie and Omatsu (2001), to produce materials on the

AAM. In addition, in 1998, Giant Robot, a glossy, irreverent, pop-culture

Asian American ‘zine, published a lengthy feature section on the “Yellow

Power Movement.”79 Though fairly superficial, the fifteen interviews by the

magazine’s publisher and editor created a stir. They disseminated the his-

tory of the AAM to a popular youth audience, linked it to Black Power, and

helped to regenerate interest in AAM studies. As one ‘60s activist grilled

me, if two apolitical young people could do this, why hasn’t AAS?

Fourth, institutional mechanisms, particularly the establishment

of AAS and American Studies book series at university presses and new

technologies strengthening alternative presses, have been critical to the

publication of AAM books.80 It is likely that these outlets will continue to

be important to the future publication of AAM studies.

In these contexts, activists and scholars began to shift their gaze

towards the 1960s and ‘70s. Two of the most important books on the

multifaceted, nationwide AAM are anthologies: Legacy to Liberation:

144 • jAAS • 11:2

Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, by Fred Ho

(2000), and Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, by Steve

Louie and Glenn Omatsu (2001).81 Different collectives of AAM activists,

mainly radicals from the 1960s–1970s, but also some younger activists,

developed each anthology. In both books, most authors embraced radical

ideologies identified as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, revolutionary

nationalism/internationalism, or eclectic anti-imperialism. These essays

underscore the centrality of the Black Power movement, of revolutions in

Asia and the Third World, and of the Vietnam War on the development

of the AAM and on individual activists. The diversity in terms of topics

(e.g., culture, politics, feminism, religion, the gay movement), geographical

location (Mid-West, New York, California, Hawaii), genres (prose, poetry,

interviews), and time (1960s to 1990s) speaks to the far-reaching range

not only of the editors’ visions, but also of the AAM. Moreover, that few

authors or organizations or individuals as subjects overlap, though the

books were created independently, is suggestive of the breadth of the AAM.

But, significant differences also exist between the two anthologies.

With The Movement and the Moment, UCLA AASC continues its AAM

publications into the twenty-first century. While most contributors draw

their politics from revolutionary thinkers, the most significant impact of

the 1960s–1970s AAM, according to these authors, stemmed from their

“serve the people” practice and connection to community—reflecting

Mao’s advocacy of the primacy of practice in the unity of theory and

practice.82 One author noted, “The most important contribution . . . was

the willingness of youth to go to the masses and learn from them.”83 It

is this focus on practice that enables this anthology to represent, accord-

ing to one editor, “a broad range of ideas and experiences” that includes

“reform, immediate needs, and revolution.”84 The main theme of the

anthology emphasizes personal transformation in the collective struggle

for justice.

By contrast, Ho designed Legacy to Liberation to study the revolution-

ary wing of the AAM.85 While The Movement and the Moment emphasizes

similarities of practice, Ho’s book strives, at least in some essays, for analytic

critique and ideological clarity. To his credit, Ho encouraged authors to

articulate their political differences, though some may read these essays

145Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

as overly polemical. This anthology seeks “summations” of revolutionary

organizations from an insider perspective. Legacy to Liberation, like The

Movement and the Moment, focuses on the connection between personal

and political transformation; Estella Habal presents a particularly candid

and moving discussion of the struggles of being a fully immersed activist

and a single parent. Interviews with four veteran activists, mostly little

known—Black Panther Richard Aoki, Japanese American radical Mo

Nishida, former Red Guard leader Alex Hing, and renowned activist Yuri

Kochiyama—provide the sociological imagination, the blending of biog-

raphy and history, seen in both anthologies. Legacy to Liberation, with its

politically incisive and radical material, will primarily attract an activist

audience. Movement and the Moment, with its more accessible personal

reflections, the most striking and extensive photographic images of the

AAM, and the backing of the influential UCLA AASC, will likely draw a

wider readership and increased possibilities for classroom adoption.

Two books published by respected academic presses deploy scholarly

methodologies to study Asian American radicalism. In Black Brown Yellow

and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (2006), Laura Pulido presents a

sophisticated racial comparative analysis of Japanese American, Black,

and Chicana/o organizing in Los Angeles, 1968–‘78. Rather than assuming

similiarities in an effort to create Third World solidarity, Pulido studies

how differential racialization and class locations affect political organizing,

ideologies, gendered practices, and cross-racial relations. As the first racial

comparative study of the AAM, her work moves AAM studies beyond

discussions of the impact of the Black Liberation Movement, to empirical

analyses, based on interviews and archival documents, of the complicated

ways in which race, class, and nationalism shaped the formation, ide-

ologies, and practices of the three revolutionary groups she studied. She

also demonstrates the diversity of ideologies and practices present in the

1960s–1970s and speaks to radicalism’s continuing relevance.86

Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005),

written by the present author, portrays an activist’s transformation from

provincial patriot to Third World revolutionary. Though the political

memoir or biography is one of the most popular genres in many social

movements,87 few such works exist on AAM activists. The discussions of

146 • jAAS • 11:2

Kochiyama’s struggles to balance family and political responsibilities, her

insider/outsider location in the Black Liberation Movement, and the ways

that she negotiates gender create a nuanced and humanizing portrait of

an activist almost singularly known for her relationship with Malcolm X.

In addition, Kochiyama’s memoir, Passing It On (2004), contains a fasci-

nating and engaging reading of her own life, augmented by photographs

and archival documents.88

These four books point to a growing area in AAM scholarship that

examines cross-racial alliances, particularly Afro-Asian solidarities.89

Activists and scholars readily acknowledge the profound impact of the

Black Power movement on the origins and development of the AAM.

While these studies often emphasize collaborations, perhaps as a cor-

rective to the mainstream focus on interracial conflict, they also explore

the uneasy themes of tensions and hierarchy in race relations. The first

major book in this area is Vijay Prashad’s everybody was kung fu fighting

(2001), which examines Afro-Asian connections with sweeping historical

and geographical breadth, and includes one chapter on the 1960s–1970s

period.90 Bill V. Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004) consciously builds

on Prashad’s ideas, and even more explicitly applies a materialist and

anti-imperialist analysis to connect Asian and African politics, with a

substantive focus on the 1960s–1970s.91 AfroAsian Encounters, edited by

Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (2006), focuses heavily

on cultural connections in literature, music, and performance between

Asians and Africans. Finally, AFRO/ASIA, edited by Fred Ho and Bill V.

Mullen (2008), presents a scholarly and activist discussion of Afro-Asian

political and cultural connections.92 These studies, along with three special

journal issues,93 point to the centrality of the Black Liberation Movement

on the AAM, while Daryl Maeda’s article (2006) interrogates the meaning

of “performing Blackness” on Asian American identity and masculinity.94

While the major Asian-to-African impetus focuses on the significant im-

pact of Asian revolutionaries, particularly Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh,

and Kim-il Sung, on Black Power struggles, as Robin D.G. Kelley discusses,

Asian Americans also worked in and helped to shape Black movement

organizations and struggles.95

The theme of trans/internationalism has been present in AAM studies

from early on. Most notably in the first and fourth historiographic periods,

147Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

authors applied anti-imperialist frameworks to the Vietnam War, discussed

the ideological influences of Mao and other Third World revolutionar-

ies, and analyzed local issues within national and global contexts. Still,

Catherine Ceniza Choy (2005) is correct in calling for greater attention

to the impact of transnational capital, politics, and social movements on

the AAM. In the Pilipina/o American activist community, the presence

of newly immigrated revolutionaries changed the nature of AAM activ-

ism, including raising the political consciousness of U.S.-born youth and

compelling a “dual strategy” of focusing on struggles in both Pilipina/o

American communities and the Philippines.96

In San Francisco’s International Hotel (2007), Estella Habal argues for

the centering of Pilipina/o history and activism in the I-Hotel campaign.

When the majority Pilipino tenants were evicted in 1977 and the build-

ing was demolished two years later, San Francisco’s Manilatown collapsed

with it. As an activist-turned-scholar, Habal draws on her intense I-Hotel

activism to write a social history of this movement. While traditional

scholars may reprove Habal’s lack of objectivity, what she calls “a histori-

cally informed memoir” provides a refreshing model for authors to locate

their own politics and experiences in their writings. Significantly, just as

she provides a critical analysis of the overall campaign, Habal offers candid

criticism of her own and her organization’s work. The fall of the I-Hotel

in the late 1970s marked the decline of the first and most intense phase

of the AAM, not the least because it served as a “local movement center”

housing numerous AAM organizations.97 This campaign’s importance to

the AAM is signaled by the number of Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses

that focus in part or in their entirety on this topic.98

In addition to several articles and book chapters,99 the completion

of recent Ph.D. dissertations and M.A. theses on the 1960s–1970s AAM,

including Habal’s, are suggestive of a growing area of AAM studies.100

Here, I highlight five important and well-researched studies. Daryl J.

Maeda (2001) applies Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory to analyze

paradigm shifts in Asian American identity and politics.101 Like Espiritu,

Maeda argues that Asian American identity is rooted in the AAM, but

his is an identity grounded in Third World solidarities, anti-imperialism,

and internationalism. Though less explicitly than does Habal, Harvey C.

148 • jAAS • 11:2

Dong (2002) draws from his 1960s–1970s activist experiences to frame his

examination of San Francisco Bay Area organizing, 1968–1978, through

two major lenses: (a) grounding local struggles in national and transna-

tional contexts, including the impact of transnational Asian capital on

the Chinatown-based garment industry and redevelopment efforts in

San Francisco and (b) linking campus and community activism. Gisele

L. Fong (2003) examines the role of cultural production, namely posters,

music, performance, and publications, in creating and reflecting identity

formation and social movement activity. Drawing on Charles Payne’s

call to study grassroots and local organizing, May C. Fu’s (2005) disser-

tation on the 1960s–1970s AAM analyzes the ordinariness of day-to-day

organizing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit, recognizing its

power to transform participants and society. Though not specifically on

the AAM, Jason M. Ferreira’s (2003) important work on Third World

radicalism provides an important comparative and critical framework for

analyzing Asian American participation in the San Francisco State Col-

lege strike for ethnic studies. These five dissertations, and the books that

will emerge from them, have the potential to infuse rigor into a growing

AAM scholarship.102

Together, current studies reveal a rearticulation of the themes of the

first period. But this time, scholars and activists as well as multiple genera-

tions of activist-scholars are studying the AAM. They are using a wider

variety of methodologies, moving from a heavy reliance on activist analyses

and first-person narratives to predominantly social historical studies based

on archival sources and oral history interviews. It is surprising in some

ways that the vast majority of current studies render a radical reading of

the AAM. Today’s conservative climate, rather than prompting political

moderation, seems to have inspired oppositional topics and analyses.

conclusion and Future directions

I conclude with three points to stimulate discussion and future study. First,

despite heterogeneity in AAM studies, the majority of authors ground the

AAM in radicalism, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and Third World

solidarity. These studies discuss how Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, the

149Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Black Power ideology, and revolutions in Asia and the Third World were

the main forces shaping the development of the AAM. This is notewor-

thy, given the model minority positioning of Asian Americans and social

movement literature’s tendency towards more moderate, less threatening

struggles. One questions whether this gaze towards the radical reflects the

actual working of the AAM or the politics of its authors. Scholars increas-

ingly articulate a need to discuss the ways in which authorship, audience,

historical moment, and geographic location, among other factors, affect

any research, writing, or creative project. While political views no doubt

influence what one chooses to study and one’s interpretations, including

my own, a perusal of activist publications readily lends itself to anti-im-

perialist and internationalist readings. In fact, when one considers that

the AAM developed during the height of Black Power, it is not surprising

that the AAM reflected and in turn was generative of the radicalism of the

late 1960s and 1970s. In short, while acknowledging the diversity of AAM

ideologies and practices, anti-imperialism, internationalism, and Third

Worldism are the strongest currents running throughout.

Second, AAM historiography shows how Asian American activists

sought to contest racism and, in so doing, challenged and changed the

racialization of Asian Americans. Through their struggles and analyses,

AAM activists not only demonstrated the existence of anti-Asian racism,

but also advocated protest, rather than hard work and passivity, as the

most effective means for disputing discrimination and creating a more

just society. As they subverted the model minority image and logic, AAM

activists simultaneously challenged notions of U.S. pluralism and its claims

to equality and democracy. They abided by Amy Uyematsu’s call to see a

shared oppression with Blacks and simultaneously developed pan-Asian

and Third World identities.103

Third, in contrast to other social movement studies that focus on

nationally visible leaders, organizations, and campaigns, AAM studies

tend to focus on local grassroots organizing and collective models of

leadership.

Some future directions emerge for the study of Asian American social

movements that correspond, but not in a linear fashion, to the preced-

ing discussion. First, the most common AAM methodologies include

150 • jAAS • 11:2

first-personal activist reflections, memoirs and autobiographies, and

social historical studies. All of these efforts need to continue, but with

the deployment of more critical analyses and rigorous methodologies. I

call for 1960s–1970s activists to reflect critically and candidly about their

personal struggles and on the contributions and limitations of AAM

theory and practice. More biographies, oral histories, and studies of social

movement organizations are needed to fill out the sparse skeleton of AAM

research.104 Social history, with its focus on studying ordinary people from

the bottom up, is a particularly relevant method for studying grassroots

movements. Daryl Maeda’s and Gisele Fong’s use of cultural history

provides another useful framework for studying the AAM. In addition,

more theoretically grounded studies are needed. Kim Geron and Michael

Liu’s current project—the first extensive application of social movement

theory to the 1960s–1970s AAM—would augment the meager use of

social movement theory in studying the AAM.105 I also advocate making

ideology and political theory a central subject of analysis. This focus is

particularly relevant when studying the Asian American Left, who were

the most ideologically advanced of the three groups in Laura Pulido’s

study. Theoretical studies would work to unpack and critique activist and

mainstream (mis)understandings of cultural nationalism, revolutionary

nationalism, internationalism, and the influences of Marx and Lenin as

well as of Mao, Fanon, and other Third World revolutionaries. Finally, in

this age of globalization, an examination of the internationalist currents

in the 1960s–1970s AAM can serve as a corrective to the popular miscon-

ception about the “newness” of transnationalism and can re-center the

transnational aspects of the predominately U.S.-centered historiography

of the AAM. These studies would be in conversation with the charge that,

given significant changes in the state (from national to transnational) and

the global capitalist economy (from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism),

the 1960s–1970s social movements hold little relevance today, except as

a source of inspiration.

Second, this last point segues to a call for an intensive examination of

the relationship between political economy and social movement activ-

ity. What shifts in the U.S. and global political economies help to explain

the rise and demise of the 1960s–1970s AAM? I have already made the

151Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

argument that the AAM’s emergence during the period of Black Power

and the 1970s advent of the New Communist Movement exerted a large

influence on the development of radical ideologies. Significantly, what

has been the impact of the AAM on U.S. and global society? How has, for

example, the AAM’s efforts to dismantle the model minority paradigm

shifted race relations or the politics of protest in the United States?

Third, how do we understand the AAM in relation to other social is-

sues and analytic categories? Pulido cogently argues that the racialization

of various groups affected the development of particular ideologies and

practices, cross-racial relations, and gendered politics. In terms of studies

of Third World collaboration and conflict, the scholarship has focused

on Afro-Asian connections, to the exclusion of Asian-Chicano or Asian-

Indigenous relations. Future studies might explore cross-racial relations

in the East Los Angeles blow-outs or the Wounded Knee struggles, or they

might offer racial comparative analyses of the anti-war movement. In ad-

dition, the analysis of race in the AAM has, to varying degrees, trumped

intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In terms of

the women’s movement, AAM publications and earlier studies tended to

focus on women’s organizing, while recent works use gendered analyses,

including the study of masculinities, to interpret social movement activity.

Only a few studies exist on the Asian American gay and lesbian movement

that emerged in the late 1970s.106 By contrast, AAM studies often draw a

close link between racism and capitalism. Yet, labor organizing and class

struggle have been relatively neglected, especially compared to the greater

attention paid to campus and community organizing. The role of religion

in the AAM has been woefully neglected; contrast this omission with the

attention given to the study of religion in the Civil Rights and Chicana/o

movements.107 Finally, a spatial analysis could help to illuminate how

and why the AAM developed in particular ways in specific geographic

locations.

In conclusion, to understand the complexities of the AAM, future

studies need to attend to the dialectical relationship between the individual

and the collective, human agency and social structure, the ordinary and the

spectacular, reform and revolution, and critical analyses and close listening

to the subjects of history. It is hoped that such studies, collectively, will

152 • jAAS • 11:2

create a history of Asian American activism that captures the vibrancy,

the commitments and contradictions, the personal and political struggles,

and the victories and losses of the AAM. In so doing, these studies will

contribute to a complex history of Asian America that counters the erasure

of Asian American activism through the model minority logic as well as

the normative construction of history.

notes

Acknowledgements: This essay greatly benefited from the astute and criti-
cal comments of Sucheng Chan, May Fu, Matef Harmachis, Fred Ho, Daryl
Maeda, and Glenn Omatsu, and the careful research assistance of China
Mauricio.

1. The fairly sizeable literature on Asian American resistance outside the
1960s–1970s can be divided into four areas: (a) Asian American, primarily
Chinese and Japanese, opposition to racialized legislation and legal practices
prior to 1924; (b) resistance to labor practices and exploitation, including the
influential semi-fictional memoir by Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973/1946); (c) Japanese American
resistance to mass incarceration during World War II, and the redress and
reparations movement of the 1970s and ‘80s; and (d) contemporary Asian
American activism. On Asian American scholarship, see Sucheng Chan, “Asian
American Historiography,” Pacific Historical Review, LXV (1996): 363–399;
Sucheng Chan, “Selected Biography,” In Defense of Asian American Studies: The
Politics and Teaching and Program Building (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2005), 203–252.

2. Kim Geron applies social movement theory to argue that Asian American
organizing in the late 1960s and 1970s constituted a social movement (“Serve
the People: An Exploration of the Asian American Movement” in Nakanishi
and Lai, Asian American Politics, 163–179).

3. Steven Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of
the Civil Rights Movement,” The American Historical Review 96 (1991):
456–471.

4. This study relies on an extensive search of 1960s–1970s AAM literature that
enables a critical analysis of the scholarship. Still, I may well have omitted
materials, particularly articles, book chapters, M.A. theses, and Ph.D. disserta-
tions, that do not show up through conventional keyword searches such as
“social movements” and “protest” or in AAM archives at UC Berkeley, UCLA,
or UC Santa Barbara.

5. Here, I follow standard definitions of social movements as embodying wide-
spread collective actions that involve outside-the-establishment methods for
creating social change, such as “collective efforts by socially and politically
subordinated people to challenge the conditions and assumptions of their

153Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

lives . . . . [C]ollective action becomes a ‘movement’ when participants refuse
to accept the boundaries of established institutional rules and routinized
roles. Single instances of popular defiance don’t make a movement; the term
refers to persistent, patterned, and widely distributed collective challenges
to the status quo” (Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks,
eds., Cultural Politics and Social Movement, Philadelphia; Temple University
Press, 1995, vii ). On Asian American electoral politics, see Gordan H. Chang,
ed., Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects (Wash-
ington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001); Pei-te Lien, The Making of Asian American Through Political
Participation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Don T. Nakanishi
and James S. Lai, eds., Asian American Politics: Law, Participation, and Policy,
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

6. Gidra in Los Angeles, and Bridge in New York, were established as AAM pub-
lications (William Wei, The Asian American Movement, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1993, chapter 5). Several AAM organizations, including the
Asian American Political Alliance in Berkeley, the Red Guard Party in San
Francisco, Asian Americans for Action in New York, I Work Kuen, and KDP,
published newspapers as one part of their political activities. The Steve Louie
Collection at UCLA contains these and other 1960s–1970s AAM publica-
tions from across the nation. The UCLA Asian American Studies Reading
Room and UC Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Library are important repositories
of archival documents on the AAM.

7. Yuji Ichioka, co-founder of Asian American Political Alliance at UC Berke-
ley, is credited with coining the term, “Asian American” (Chan, In Defense
of AAS, 202; Mary Uyematsu Kao, “To a Senior Comrade,” Amerasia Journal
28:3 (2002): xviii).

8. Even here, M.J. Heale notes that there are few review essays or historiographi-
cal studies on the “Sixties qua the Sixties.” He observes, “The student can
be introduced to most recognized topics in American history, such as the
American Revolution or the New Deal, via essays that survey the literature
and lay out the scholarly battleground. Not so with the Sixties” (“The Sixties
as History: A Review of the Political Historiography,” Reviews in American
History 33 (2005): 133.

9. It is mainly Asian American Studies scholars who publish studies on the
AAM in mainstream publications, including Andrew Hsiao, “The Hidden
History of Asian American Activism in New York City,” Social Policy (1998):
23–31; Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, “Political Consciousness, Identity, and So-
cial Movements: Peasant Women in the Philippines and Filipino Immigrant
Activists in Chicago,” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 21
(1999): 271–292; Kim Geron, Enrique de la Cruz, Leland Saito, and Jaideep
Singh, “Asian Pacific Americans’ Social Movements and Interest Groups,” PS
Online (2001): 619–624.

10. The model minority image was solidified in the 1960s (William Petersen,
“Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” New York Times Magazine, Janu-

154 • jAAS • 11:2

ary 9, 1966; “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.,” U.S. News &
World Report, December 26, 1966). But, the work of associating Asian
Americans with passivity took place over decades in the context of shifting
political economies. In contrast to the earlier image of Japanese and Chinese
Americans as hyperpolitical yellow peril threats, in the 1920s and ‘30s, social
scientists and historians, Asian American and White alike, promoted ideas
of Asian Americans as benign, apolitical, and non-threatening contributors
to U.S. society (Gordon H. Chang, “Asian Americans and Politics: Some
Perspectives from History,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives,
Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang, Washington: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press and Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, 13–38). In the
mid-1940s, to facilitate their resettlement from the concentration camps, U.S.
governmental agencies like the War Relocation Authority and the Office of
War Information emphasized the good citizenship of Japanese Americans
and the patriotism of Japanese American veterans (Roger Daniels, Prisoners
without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, New York: Hill and Wang,
1993).

11. Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?” The Journal of American History 75
(1988): 528–545; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New
York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1987); Todd Gitlin,
The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995).

12. Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,”
in The Civil Rights Movement in America, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson and
London: University of Mississippi Press, 1987), 21.

13. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans:
An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991). In addition, Victor
G. and Brett de Bary Nee include chapters on San Francisco Chinatown labor
and radical organizing in their book, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary
Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1972).

14. One notable exception is Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood’s anthology that
commences with a section on the 1960s–1970s AAM (Contemporary Asian
American: A Multidisciplinary Reader (New York: New York University Press,
2000). Also on 1960s–1970s Asian American activism is Hirokazu Miyazaki,
“Sansei Radicals: Identity and Strategy of Japanese American Student Ac-
tivists in Hawaii,” in Frankin Ng, Judy Yung, Stephen S. Fugita, and Elaine
H. Kim, eds., New Visions in Asian American Studies: Diversity, Community,
Power (Pullman: Washington State University, 1994), 173–187. Other AAS
anthologies include the following: Gary Y. Okihiro, Shirley Hune, Arthur A.
Hansen, and John M. Liu, eds., Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises
and Prospects for Asian American Studies (Pullman, WA: Washington State
University Press, 1988); Gail M. Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. Sumida,

155Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

and Russell C. Leong, eds., Frontiers of Asian American Studies: Writing,
Research, and Commentary (Pullman, WA: Washington State University
Press, 1989); Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives; Linda
A. Revilla, Gail M. Nomura, Shawn Wong, and Shirley Hune, eds., Bearing
Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific American Perspectives (Pullman, WA:
Washington State University Press, 1993); Wendy Ng, Soo-Young Chin, James
S. Moy, and Gary Okihiro, eds., ReViewing Asian America: Locating Diversity
(Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1995); Gary Y. Okihiro,
Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and K. Scott Wong, eds., Privileging
Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies (Pullman, WA: Washington
State University Press, 1995); Wu and Song (2000); Linda Trinh Vo and
Rick Bonus, eds., Contemporary Asian American Communities (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002); Kent Ono, A Companion to Asian American
Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

15. I recognize that the divide between “scholars” and “activists” is a slippery
slope. Are scholars only tenure-track faculty, those with formal academic
affiliations, or anyone who produces intellectual scholarship? Nonetheless,
there remains an analytic distinction between those with institutional support
and resources—a category that is itself widely variable, depending on one’s
institution and one’s position within the academy—and those without.

16. Richard Flacks, “Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement,
in In Protest! Student Activism in America, ed. Julian Foster and Durward
Long (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Richard Flacks, “Revolt of the
Young Intelligentsia: Revolutionary Class Consciousness in Post-Scarcity
America,” in The New American Revolution, eds. Roderick Aya and Norman
Miller (New York, Free Press, 1971).

17. These positions include tenure-track faculty positions at teaching colleges,
permanent or temporary lecturers at research or teaching universities, or
staff positions. In short, they tend not to be tenure-track faculty positions
at major research universities, which offer more institutional resources and
time for research.

18. Activists Steve Louie and Mo Nishida, for example, consciously committed
“class suicide” and joined the ranks of the working class as a dockworker and
a maintenance worker, respectively.

19. That AAM activists would produce writings and political analyses is not
surprising. In her racial comparative study, Laura Pulido found that Asian
American activists were exceptionally engaged in theoretical development
(Black Brown Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 2006).

20. I use the term, “pre-Movement activists,” to refer to Asian Americans who
began their activism prior to the advent of the AAM (Diane C. Fujino, “Race,
Place, Space, and Political Development: Japanese American Radicalism in
the ‘Pre-Movement’ 1960s, Social Justice, Vol. 34 (3), forthcoming). The desire
to leave a legacy was an important motivating factor for Philip Vera Cruz

156 • jAAS • 11:2

(Craig Scharlin and Lilia V. Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of
Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement, Los Angeles: University
of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center and Asian American Studies Center,
1992; reprinted, University of Washington Press, 2000); Grace Lee Boggs
(Living for Change, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Yuri
Kochiyama (Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life
of Yuri Kochiyama, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and
Richard Aoki (Diane C. Fujino, Panthers, Samurais, and Scholars: Richard
Aoki and Afro-Asian Solidarities, work in progress; Michael Cheng and Ben
Wang’s documentary-in-progress; see trailer on www.youtube.com).

21. For example, activist-musician Fred Ho’s writings are forthcoming (Wicked
Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader, ed. Diane C. Fujino, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

22. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now,” 456–457.
23. Scharlin and Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz, 97, 104.
24. The section on “Identity” focused on countering the model minority image

of Asian Americans and on developing a pan-Asian identity rooted in politi-
cal and cultural resistance. The “History” section connects identity/personal
experiences with social structure and historical and political processes. The
“Community” section examines political and social issues affecting Asian
American communities and resistance to oppressive conditions, including
an ideologically broad range of progressive-to-radical issues. Amy Tachiki,
Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong, eds., Roots: An Asian American
Reader (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Asian American
Studies Center, 1971).

25. “Success Story of One Minority Group in American,” Roots, 6–9; Editorial
Board, “An Interview with S.I. Hayakawa,” Roots, 21.

26. By reprinting the first two sections of Amy Uyematsu’s four-part article,
Roots emphasizes Asian American identity and pan-Asian and Third World
unity, while losing the Gidra article’s (October 1969, 8–11) larger objective
of linking liberation with political opposition to capitalism and imperialism
(“The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” Roots, 9–13).

27. Editorial Board, “An Interview with Pat Sumi,” Roots, 253, 261.
28. I Wor Kuen: Twelve-point Program, Roots, 296.
29. UCLA’s AAS website notes: “Roots was the first of over 200 books that the

UCLA AASC Press has produced in the past 35 years. Our Roots . . . went
through twelve printings, and sold over 50,000 copies” (www.aasc.ucla.
edu/archives/35notables).

30. Emma Gee, ed., Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Los Angeles:
University of California, Los Angeles, Asian American Studies Center, 1976),
4–6. Compared to Roots, Counterpoint has a wider ethnic reach with its inclu-
sion of Vietnamese, Samoans, East Indians, and Hawaiians, in addition to the
usual emphasis on Chinese and Japanese and to a lesser extent on Pilipina/os
and Koreans.

157Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

31. Sucheng Chan’s review of Counterpoint, calling for studying Asian American
experiences in the context of U.S. capitalism and internationalism, anticipates
the work of a group of scholars and graduate students at UCLA (“Contextual
Frameworks for Reading Counterpoint,” Amerasia Journal 5 (1978): 115–129).
This group, headed by sociologists Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, sought
to develop theoretical frameworks and to conduct original research on Asian
immigration in the context of Western capitalist and imperialist development.
Their work resulted in the publication of the groundbreaking anthology,
Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before
World War II, eds. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).

32. For background material on Amerasia Journal, see Wei, The Asian American
Movement, 123–130.

33. Glenn Omatsu, then associate editor of Amerasia Journal, explained that he
introduced the category of “contemporary politics and social movements”
in the mid-1980s: “This was controversial because at that time, most in AAS
felt there were no social movements and preferred the more traditional clas-
sification of politics, which they interpreted as electoral politics.” Omatsu’s
the use of this category was a conscious effort to resist the erasure of Asian
American activism (Omatsu, letter to author, circa Fall 2006). The bibliogra-
phy contains hundreds of articles from academic journals and newspapers on
“contemporary politics and social movement” since Amerasia Journal began
indexing articles by subject in 1986. In addition, 88 articles on the “Asian
American Studies and Movement,” some of which are very short pieces, were
published in Amerasia Journal from 1971 to 1977. See Glenn Omatsu, “An-
nual Selected Bibliography,” Amerasia Journal 13 (1986–87): 181–184; Glenn
Omatsu, “1994 Annual Selected Bibliography,” Amerasia Journal 20 (1994):
124, 130–136; Judy Soohoo, “1997 Amerasia Journal Annual Selected Bibli-
ography,” Amerasia Journal 23 (1997): 233, 236–241; Ellen D. Wu, compiler,
Amerasia Journal: 1971–1997 Cumulative Article Index (Los Angeles: UCLA
AAS Press, 1998); 30th anniversary cumulative index, 1971–2001.

34. Using Amerasia Journal’s category of “social movements,” I found the fol-
lowing Amerasia Journal articles on the 1960s–1970s AAM, outside of the
1989 special issue: Amerasia Staff, “An Interview with Warren Furutani,” 1:1
(1971): 70–76; Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Lowell Chun-
Hoon, “An Interview with Dr. S.I. Hayakawa,” 1:3 (1971): 58–68; Madge Bello
and Vincent Reyes, “Filipino Americans and the Marcos Overthrow: The
Transformation of Political Consciousness,” 13:1 (1987): 73–84; Helen C.
Toribio, “We Are Revolution: A Reflective History of the Union of Democratic
Filipinos (KDP),” 24:2 (1998): 155–177. Post-1970s AAM articles center on
Don Nakanishi’s tenure battle, Grace Lee Boggs, Boston’s Asian American
community, South Asian movements, AAS pioneer and historian Yuji Ichioka,
and AAS professor and community activist Ling-chi Wang.

35. Jovina Navarro, ed., Lahing Pilipino: A Pilipino American Anthology (Davis,
CA: Mga Kapatid Pilipino Student Association, University of California,

158 • jAAS • 11:2

Davis, 1977). Also Yellow Pearl (New York: Basement Workshop, 1977). The
Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of radical praxis-oriented
scholars, published a special issue on Asian American resistance, but did not
include the 1960s–1970s period (Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Fall
1972).

36. Asian Women (Berkeley, CA: Asian American Studies, University of California
Berkeley, 1971); reprinted by AASC, UCLA, 3rd printing, 1975; Asian Ameri-
can Women (Stanford: Asian American Women’s Collective, 1976). A library
search found no other Asian women’s anthologies from the 1960s–1970s
at campuses with notable AAM activity (e.g., UCLA and other UCs, Yale,
Michigan) or in major cities (e.g., San Francisco, New York, Boston). For
insightful articles on the 1960s–1970s Asian American women’s movement,
see Susie Ling, “The Mountain Movers: Asian American Women’s Movement
in Los Angeles,” Amerasia Journal 15:1 (1989), 51–67; special issues on women
in Gidra (January 1971) and Bridge (Winter 1978; Spring 1979); also Esther
Ngan-Ling Chow, “The Development of Feminist Consciousness among
Asian American Women,” Gender and Society 1 (1987): 284–299.

37. Journal Staff, “Politics of the Interior,” Asian Women, 128–130.
38. Ibid.
39. In Asian Women, see Asian Delegates from Berkeley, “Indochina Women’s

Conference,” 77–80; Marsha Takayanagi, “Birth Control as Genocide,” 99–102;
Cindy Takemoto, “Pat Sumi: Off the Pedestal,” 107–111; “Politics of the
Interior.”

40. Mayumi Tsutagawa, “The Asian Women’s Movement: Superficial Rebellion?”
Asian Resources 1:2 (1974): 55–64.

41. Ibid.
42. In Asian American Review (Berkeley: Asian American studies, 1976): Teri Lee,

“The International Hotel Struggle for Low Income Housing,” 58–68; Teri
Lee, “An Interview with Janice Mirikitani,” 34–44. Editorial board: Sucheng
Chan, Elaine Kim, Ann Umemoto, and Ling-chi Wang.

43. One exception was Ron Tanaka’s deployment of rigid boundaries around
ethnic categories. He assumed that by embracing a pan-Asian or Third
World identity, one necessarily lost one’s ethnic-specific identity. He failed to
distinguish analytically between integration into mainstream White society
and what he considered “integration” into a Third World community of
resistance. This article’s strength lay in its candid descriptions of the double
consciousness, in the Du Boisian sense, of Japanese Americans and the
cultural life of Sansei activists (“Culture, Communication, and the AAM,”
Journal of Ethnic Studies 4:1 (1976): 37–52).

44. In this period, Peter Kwong, “Grass-roots Organizing and Coalition Building,”
in The New Chinatown (New York: Noonday Press, 1987) discussed the AAM.
Two unpublished papers—Roy Nakano, “Marxist-Leninist Organizing in the
Asian American Community: Los Angeles, 1969–1979” (for Don Nakanishi’s
graduate seminar, UCLA, March 1984) and Miriam Ching Louie, “‘Yellow,

159Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Brown & Red’: Towards an Appraisal of Marxist Influences on the Asian
American Movement” (1991)—have informed many AAM studies.

45. Chan, In Defense of Asian American Studies, 187, 203.
46. Chan, “Selected Bibliography,” In Defense of Asian American Studies, 213–

228.
47. Asian Women United of California, ed., Making More Waves: An Anthology

of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon Press,
1988); Fred Cordova, Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans: A Pictorial Essay,
1763-circa 1963 (Seattle: Demonstration Project for Asian Americans, 1983).
Memoirs and oral histories of Asian American activists, all male, include:
Karl Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles:
UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1983); James Oda, Heroic Struggles of
Japanese Americans: Partisan Fighters From America’s Concentration Camps
(United States [no city or state]: KNI, Inc., 1980); Sue Kunitomi Embrey,
Arthur Hansen, and Betty Kulberg Mitson, Manzanar Martyr: An Interview
with Harry Y. Ueno (Anaheim, CA: Shumway Family History Services, 1986);
Peter Hyun, Man Sei!: The Making of a Korean American (Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawaii Press, 1986); Peter Hyun, In the New World: The Making of a
Korean American (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). One of the
most influential anthologies on activism in this period was This Bridge Called
My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981). A
compilation of writings by Asian American, African American, Chicana, and
Indigeneous women, this book reflected the ways in which radical organizing
was increasingly multinational and spurred discussions of the intersectional-
ity of race, gender, and class.

48. Glenn Omatsu locates the “disintegration” of the AAM in the late 1970s;
contributing factors included state repression, the rise of the New Right, and
significantly, “the devastating corporate offensive” (“Four Prisons,” xxiv). By
contrast, Kim Geron argues that “the AAM continued to flourish and grow
after 1975” (“Serve the People: An Exploration of the Asian American Move-
ment,” in Don T. Nakanishi and James S. Lai, eds., Asian American Politics:
Law, Participation, and Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003),
176.

49. The “long sixties” refers to a period of vibrant protest from the mid-1950s to
the mid-1970s (M.J. Heale, “The Sixties as History: A Review of the Politi-
cal Historiography,” Reviews in American History 33, 2005: 135). External
and internal factors spurred this Movement’s demise by the mid-1970s.
The downward turn in the U.S. political economy, which many date to the
1973 energy crisis; the effectiveness of U.S. state repression against political
movements; and the “success” of the Antiwar Movement, with the U.S. with-
drawal of troops from Vietnam in 1973 and eventual defeat by Vietnamese
Communist forces in 1975, combined to undercut many of the large-scale,
vibrant social movements. Internally, some argue that the shift from com-

160 • jAAS • 11:2

munity projects in the 1960s to Party building among revolutionary groups
in the 1970s undercut the strength of social movements. Conversely, others
contend that the movement from self-defense and revolutionary goals, which
included serve the people programs, to an exclusive focus on community
service projects and electoral politics were significant internal factors that
destroyed the Black Panther Party.

50. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che
(London: Verso, 2002). Similarly, Akinyele Omowale Umoja contends that
the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary period did not end by 1972, but
went underground into the Black Liberation Army (“Repression Breeds
Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black
Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, eds.
Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, New York: Routledge, 3–19).

51. For a discussion of differences between multinational and interracial organiz-
ing and between national liberation and anti-racism, see Fred Ho, “Notes on
the National Question: Oppressed Nations and National Liberation Struggle
in the U.S.,” in Wicked Theory, Naked Practice.

52. Other Asian American revolutionary groups include: Wei Min She, Katipunan
ng mga Demogratikong Pilipino (KDP), and Asian Study Group. Multinational
formations like the League of Revolutionary Struggle continued to organize
around Asian American issues, publishing East Wind: Politics and Culture of
Asians in the U.S. in the 1980s. See various essays in Fred Ho, with Carolyn
Antonio, Diane Fujino, and Steve Yip, eds., Legacy to Liberation: Politics and
Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America (San Francisco: AK Press,
2000).

53. Amerasia Journal, Commemorative Issue, “Salute to the 60s and 70s; Legacy
of the San Francisco State Strike,” 15:1 (1989).

54. Russell Leong, “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back,” Amerasia Journal 15:1
(1989): xi–xii.

55. In 1989, Nakanishi’s case was still unresolved, but there were already plans
to devote a section of an upcoming issue to his case. Eight essays on the
Nakanishi case were published in Amerasia Journal 16:1 (1990).

56. Glenn Omatsu, “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements for Liberation,”
Amerasia Journal 15:1 (1989), xvi, xv–xxx; reprinted in Karin Aguilar-San
Juan (ed.), The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s
(Boston: South End Press, 1994); reprinted in Min Zhou and James V. Gate-
wood (eds.), Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (New
York: New York University, 2000); reprinted in Nakanishi and Lai, Asian
American Politics. Daryl J. Maeda also posits that the AAM’s geneaology is
rooted in the Black Power movement (“Forging Asian American Identity:
Race, Culture, and the Asian American Movement, 1968–1975,” Ph.D. dis-
sertation, University of Michigan, 2001).

57. Karen Umemoto, “‘On Strike!’ San Francisco State College Strike, 1968–69:
The Role of Asian American Students,” Amerasia Journal 15:1 (1989), 3–41;

161Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

reprinted in Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (eds.), Contemporary Asian
America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (New York: New York University, 2000).
Susie Ling, “The Mountain Movers: Asian American Women’s Movement in
Los Angeles,” Amerasia Journal 15:1 (1989): 51–67.

58. About Wei’s The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1993), historian Shih-Shah Henry Tsai offers the most laudatory review:
“It is a well-researched and carefully crafted work . . . even-handed approach
of a professional historian, avoiding ideological polemics” (Pacific Historical
Review 64 (1995): 154–155). By contrast, activist-scholars Harvey Dong and
Steve Louie offer the most disparaging reviews. Dong writes: “I felt I had just
finished reading an Asian version of The Destructive Generation by Collier and
Horowitz, another work which denounces the lessons and gains of the sixties
. . . . The greatest damage of Wei’s work is an underlying cynicism toward the
possibility of mass movements changing society” (Hitting Critical Mass: A
Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3, 1996). Louie concludes: “It will
be tempting for instructors . . . to use this book, but, ultimately, it would be
a mistake” (Amerasia Journal 19 (1993): 155–159). Other reviews are mainly
descriptive and mildly sympathetic: K. Scott Wong, International Migration
Review 29 (1995): 1069–1070; Clarence Y.H. Lo, Contemporary Sociology
24 (1995): 344–345; Yen Le Espiritu, Journal of American Ethnic History 13
(1994): 78; David Chuenyan Lai, Pacific Affairs 67 (1994): 481–482; S. Wurtele,
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 31 (1994): 860.

59. Wei discusses neither his methodology nor the number of interviews that
he conducted.

60. Wei, The Asian American Movement, 1.
61. Paul Wong argued that after attending college, even those who grew up in

Chinatowns became alienated from their working-class communities (“The
Emergence of the Asian-American Movement,” Bridge 2, Sept-Oct 1972:
33–39).

62. The Pilipino farmworker movement is most famously written about—in an
earlier period—by Carlos Bulosan in America is in the Heart; also see Scharlin
and Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz. On street youth organizing, see Red Guard
Party newspapers; Red Guard Program and Rules, 1969, in Ho, Legacy to
Liberation, 401–404; “Alex Hing, Former Minister of Information for the Red
Guard Party and Founding Member of I Wor Kuen,” interview by Fred Ho
and Steve Yip, in Ho, Legacy to Liberation, 279–296; Nick Nagatani, “‘Action
Talks and Bullshit Walks’: From the Founders of Yellow Brotherhood to the
Present,” in Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment, ed. Steve Louie
and Glenn Omatsu (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Asian
American Studies Center Press, 2001), 149–155; Tad Nakamura, “Yellow
Brotherhood,” documentary, 2003; Moritsugu “Mo” Nishida, interviewed
by Fred Ho, in Ho, Legacy to Liberation, 297–317. On Asian Americans for
Action, see Kazu Iijima, “A Brief History of AAA and the NY Asian Move-
ment,” speech, n.d.; Glenn Omatsu, “Always a Rebel: An Interview with Kazu

162 • jAAS • 11:2

Iijima,” Amerasia Journal, 13 (1986–87): 83–84, 89, 91–94; Asian Americans
for Action newsletters. In examining the influence of the Chinese American
Old Left on the AAM, Harvey C. Dong observed that older Chinatown labor
movement activists were actively involved in the Asian Community Center
and the International Hotel struggles (“The Origins and Trajectory of Asian
American Political Activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1968–1978,” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2002, 115).

63. Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston:
Beacon, 2002). John Holloway’s “Dignity’s Revolt” and the documentary
“Fourth World War” speak to similar themes of imagination and freedom;
“Dignity’s Revolt,” in Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. John
Holloway and Eloina Pelaez (London: Pluto press, 1998), 159–198; Jacqueline
Soohen and Richard Rowley, “Fourth World War” (Big Noise Films, 2004).

64. Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?,” 542; Wini Breines, Community and
Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1989), 1–6.

65. May C. Fu, “Keeping Close to the Ground: Politics and Coalition in Asian
American Community Organizing, 1969–1977” (Ph.D. dissertation, Univer-
sity of California, San Diego, 2005), 11.

66. Bobby Seale, BPP co-founder, explained: “A revolutionary program is one set
forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system to
a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing exploitative sys-
tem as an appeasing handout to fool the people and keep them quiet.” Huey
Newton, BPP co-founder, elaborated: “[Survival programs] were designed to
help the people survive until their consciousness is raised . . . . In themselves
they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until
conditions change.” See Seale, Seize the Time (Baltimore: Black Classic Press,
1991/1968), 412–413; Newton, To Die for the People (New York: Writers and
Readers, 1972/1995), 89.

67. Omatsu notes that ‘60s–‘70s activists used phrases like “power to the people,”
“self-determination,” and “by any means necessary” to discuss their goal of
liberation. By contrast, ‘80s activists’ vocabulary included “advocacy,” “access,”
“legitimacy,” and “assertiveness” to discuss more moderate visions of social
justice (“Four Prisons,” xvi).

68. Charles Payne, “Bibliographic Essay: The Social Construction of History,”
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 420–421.

69. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identi-
ties (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Scharlin and Villanueva,
Philip Vera Cruz; Thomas Churchill, Triumph over Marcos: A Story Based on
the Lives of Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo (Seattle: Open Hand Publishing,
1995); Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change.

70. Boggs, Living for Change, 196.
71. Fu, “Keeping Close to the Ground,” chapter 3.

163Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

72. Charles E. Jones, ed., Introduction, Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Balti-
more : Black Classic Press, 1998).

73. Scharlin and Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz, xxv.
74. Of the 124 M.A. theses completed at UCLA, the first and largest AAS Mas-

ters’ program in the U.S., from 1978 (the first M.A. thesis) to 2005, only
three focus on the 1960s–1970s AAM: Susie Ling, “The Mountain Movers:
Asian American Women’s Movement, Los Angeles, 1968–1976” (1984);
Karen Umemoto, “Asian American Students in the San Francisco State Col-
lege Strike, 1964–1968” (1989); James Sang Chi, “Remembering the Asian
American Movement: Asian American Views of the State” (2001). Through
San Francisco State University’s AAS Masters’ program, which began in
2000, no M.A. theses examine the 1960s–1970s AAM. There are currently
no Ph.D. programs in AAS. At UCLA, several M.A. theses have focused on
the AAM outside the “long 60s,” including Derrick Lim, “Learning from the
Past: A Retrospective Look at the Chol Soo Lee Movement” (1985); Alice
Hom, “Family Matters: A Historical Study of the Asian Pacific Lesbian Net-
work” (1992); Glen Kitayama, “Japanese Americans and the Movement for
Redress: A Case Study of Grassroots Activism in the Los Angeles Chapter of
the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations” (1993); Sung-Eun Cho, “A
Study of New Social Movement: The Case of the Coalition Against Military
Sexual Slavery by Japan (CAMSS) in Los Angeles” (1993); Gisele Fong, “The
Asian Pacific Student Union (APSU) and the 1987 March on Sacramento for
Education” (1993); Scott Kurashige, “Locating Oppression and Resistance:
Asian Amerians and Racist Violence” (1996); Darryl Mar, “Cultural Produc-
tion and Public Art: The Destruction and Impending Decline of a Political
Project” (1996); Susan Nakaoka, “Nisei Political Activists: The Stories of Five
Japanese American Women” (1999); Tony Osumi, “The UC Riverside Mural:
Art for People’s Sake” (2000). John Delloro’s thesis focused on the Jessica
McClintock campaign for garment workers’ rights.

75. Vijay Prashad further argues that corporate capitalism and the global elite
have rearticulated multiculturalism to generate profits, markets, and ethnic
managers to their own advantage. Here, he draws from Robert Allen: “The
black student is crucial to corporate America’s neocolonial plans. It is the
educated and trained blacks who are slated to become the new managers of
the ghetto, the administrators of the black colony.” Applying these ideas to
the present, Prashad chastises: “The desire for the student of color to become
the comprador figure for global capital is now established.” See Allen, Black
Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (New York: Anchor
Books, 1970), 261–262; Prashad, “Bandung is Done: Passages in AfroAsian
Epistemology,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike
Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2006), xvi–xvii. James Kyung-Jin Lee writes: “Multiculturalism
imagines anew how to reorganize the heretofore unequal representation of
American life; its more difficult task lies in its capacity or even its willingness

164 • jAAS • 11:2

to redistribute uneven resources in American communities” (Urban Triage:
Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism, Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2004, xiv).

76. In the climate of multiculturalism, the first book series in Asian American
Studies (Temple University Press) was launched by Sucheng Chan. Several
other AAS or American Studies book series have since been established at
academic presses and together have facilitated the production of AAS scholar-
ship. It is not surprising that Wei and Espiritu’s books, both published in the
Temple University Press series, resemble Chan’s framing of the AAM. Chan
disagrees, stating to me that she selects books based on scholarship and not
political interpretations (Sucheng Chan, “Prospectus for a Book Series, ‘Asian
American History and Culture’ (1989),” In Defense of Asian American Studies,
35–42, 176; Sucheng Chan, conversation with author, Winter 2007).

77. Estella Habal, San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino
American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2007). Forthcoming are books by Daryl Maeda, Chains
of Babylon: Race, Identity, and the Formation of Asian America, 1968–1975
(University of Minnesota Press) and Harvey Dong (Routledge).

78. In the late 1980s and 1990s, a “second wave” of student activism nationwide
established or strengthened AAS (Sucheng Chan, “Whither Asian American
Studies,” In Defense of Asian American Studies, 175; Okiyoshi Takeda, “One
Year After the Sit-in: Asian American Students’ Identities and Their Support
for Asian American Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4:2 (2001):
147–164). This period commenced with the 1994 erosion of social services
to immigrants (Proposition 187), the 1994 law-and-order “three strikes”
Proposition 184, the 1995 University of California ban on affirmative action,
and the 1996 statewide to ban on affirmative action (Proposition 209). New
formations in 1998 alone include the Asian Left Forum, the Black Radical
Congress, the New Raza Left, Critical Resistance (prisons), and Jericho (po-
litical prisoners). In a movement with few victories, 1999 saw the release of
several long-term political prisoners, including eleven Puerto Rican political
prisoners and White political prisoner Laura Whitehorn. Activism continued
with widespread antiwar activities after September 11, 2001, and in Spring
2006, with the largest marches in the history of the United States, in this case
for immigrant rights. On Asian American activism in the 1990s, see Karin
Aguilar-San Juan, ed., State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the
1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1994); Sonia Shah, ed., Dragon Ladies: Asian
American Feminists Breathe Fire (Boston: South End Press, 1997); Diane C.
Fujino and Kye Leong, “Radical Resistance in Conservative Times: New Asian
American Organization in the 1990s,” in Ho, Legacy to Liberation, 141–158;
Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational
South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006).

165Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

79. Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong, “Yellow Power,” Giant Robot (1998),
61–81; Fred Ho, Legacy to Liberation; Louie and Omatsu, Asian Americans:
The Movement and the Moment.

80. The UCLA AASC continues to be an important source of AAM publications,
as has the establishment of at least half a dozen book series in AAS at academic
presses (Chan, “Prospectus for a Book Series, ‘Asian American History and
Culture,’ [1989],” In Defense of Asian American Studies, 35–42, 176).

81. To note my location, I served on the editorial board of Legacy to Libera-
tion.

82. AAM activists were strongly influenced by Mao’s essay, “On Practice:” “If you
want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If
you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it
yourself ” (Selected Readings From the Works of Mao Tsetung, Peking: Foreign
Language Press, 1971, 71).

83. Quoted by Harvey Dong, “Transforming Student Elites into Community
Activists: A Legacy of Asian American Activism,” in Louie and Omatsu, The
Movement and the Moment, 203.

84. Steve Louie, The Movement and the Moment, xiii, xix.
85. The idea for Legacy to Liberation was spawned in 1997 in response to, ac-

cording to its editor, the vacuum of Asian American Left publications, the
exclusion of Marxist or revolutionary views in recent progressive Asian
American anthologies, and the “major disappointment and disapproval”
with Wei’s book (page i).

86. Pulido, Black Brown Yellow and Left; also, Laura Pulido, “Race, Class, and
Political Activism: Black, Chicana/o, and Japanese-American Leftists in
Southern California, 1968–1978,” Antipode 34 (2002): 762–788.

87. For a partial listing of political memoirs and biographies, see Pulido, Black
Brown Yellow and Left, 240.

88. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle; Yuri Kochiyama, Passing It On: A Memoir, ed.
Majorie Lee, Akemi Kochiyama-Sardinha, and Audee Kochiyama-Holman,
(University of California, Los Angeles, Asian American Studies Center Press,
2004). Other major works on Kochiyama include: Rea Tajiri & Pat Saunders,
“Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice” (video, 1993) and Mayumi Nakazawa,
Yuri: The Life and Times of Yuri Kochiyama (Tokyo: Bungenshugu, 1998; in
Japanese).

89. The study of Afro-Asian connections extends well beyond the 1960s period
and the area of activism. A few significant works include: Marc Gallicchio,
The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism
in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese
Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004);
Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and
Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 31–63; and Scott

166 • jAAS • 11:2

Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese in the Making
of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

90. Prashad himself notes that Richard Wright’s book on the 1955 Bandung Con-
ference, The Color Curtain, “inaugurates our tradition of AfroAsia studies.”
I do not include Wright’s book here because it addresses a conference that,
despite its political reverberations worldwide and on the AAM, preceded
the AAM by a decade. In everybody was kung fu fighting, Prashad borrows
Robin D.G. Kelly’s concept of “polyculturalism”—as opposed bureaucratic
multiculturalism—to connect cross-racial anti-racist activism. See Prashad,
“Bandung is Done,” xi; Prashad, everybody was kung fu fighting: Afro-Asian
Connections and the Myth of Cultural Plurity (Boston: Beacon, 2001). Prashad
also examines South Asian-Black relations, including the tense topic of Asian
anti-Black racism, in The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000).

91. Three of the book’s five chapters examine the 1960s–1970s period: (a) the
ways in which political and cultural correspondence in the “Bandung era”
facilitated Afro-Asian exchanges across continents, particularly in the writing
of Robert F. Williams and Mao Tse-Tung; (b) the ways in which the Afro-
Asian union of James and Grace Lee Boggs enabled the development of their
“dialectical humanist” theory, influenced by CLR James’ integration of race
and class analyses and Mao Tse-tung’s focus on “the personal as a means to
political transformation;” and (c) the development of Afro-Asian exchanges
in the music and Marxist-Leninst politics of Chinese American musician,
activist, and writer Fred Ho (Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

92. Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters; Fred Ho and Bill V.
Mullen, eds., AFRO ASIA: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections
Between African and Asian Americans, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008).

93. Though these special issues of Souls (2001), Journal of Asian American Stud-
ies (2002), and positions (2003) focus neither on social movements nor on
the “long 60s,” per se, two articles study the 1960s–1970s AAM. Jeffrey O.G.
Ogbar’s article in Souls relied heavily on the interviews in Giant Robot’s Yel-
low Power issue to examine the AAM (“The Formation of Asian-American
Nationalism in the Age of Black Power, 1966–1975,” 3, 2001: 29–38). Vijay
Prashad’s “Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural
Adventure,” in positions (11:1, 2003: 51–89), draws from his chapter in ev-
erybody was kung fu fighting to link Asians and Africans through martial arts
and radical activism.

94. Daryl J. Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Construct-
ing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969–1972,”
American Quarterly 57 (2005): 1079–1103.

95. I argue that, for example, Yuri Kochiyama exerted leadership as a “center-
person” in the New York Black radical movement and that Black Panther

167Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

Party co-founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale consulted with Richard
Aoki as they developed their organization in Oakland; see Diane C. Fujino,
“Afro-Asian Solidarities and Non-traditional Leadership: Yuri Kochiyama’s
Humanizing Radicalism,” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Women in the Black
Revolt, ed. Jeanne Theoharis, Dayo Gore, and Komozi Woodard, (New York
University Press, forthcoming); Diane C. Fujino, “The Black Liberation Move-
ment and the Making of Japanese American Radicals,” in Ho and Mullen,
AFRO ASIA. Also, Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red
China and Black Revolution,” Souls, 1 (Fall 1999): 6–41; Robin D.G. Kelley,
“‘Roaring From the East:’ Third World Dreaming,” Freedom Dreams: The
Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

96. Estella Habal observed, “Without the Philippine radicals, the trajectory
for progressive and radical Filipino Americans, like that of many Asian
American organizations, would have been to merge into the various Marx-
ist-Leninist party formations” (San Francisco’s International Hotel, 69). Also
see Ligaya Lindio-McGovern, “Political Consciousness, Identity, and Social
Movements;” Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Toward Trans-Pacific Social Justice:
Women and Protest in Filipino American History,” Journal of Asian American
Studies 8:3 (2005): 293–307. On 1960s-1970s Pilipina/o American activism,
see Navarro, Lahing Pilipino; Bello and Reyes, “Filipino Americans and the
Marcos Overthrow;” Scharlin and Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz; Thomas
Churchill, Triumph Over Marcos; Helen C. Toribio, “We Are Revolution;”
essays by Estella Habal, Ninotchka Rosca, and Helen Toribio in Ho, Legacy
to Liberation; essays by Cecile Caguingin Ochoa, Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz,
Carol Ojeda-Kimbrough, Rose Ibanez, and Beverly Kordziel in Louie and
Omatsu, The Movement and the Moment.

97. I thank James Lee for this insight; also see (Geron, “Serve the People,”
167); Habal, San Francisco’s International Hotel; Fu, “Keeping Close to the
Ground.”

98. Many writing and teaching about the I-Hotel movement have relied on Teri
Lee’s writings. Harvey Dong’s chapter grounds the struggle in local and in-
ternational political economy and draws a connection with rent strikes and
anti-evictions campaigns in adjacent Chinatown. May Fu draws on interviews
with Habal and Dong, among others, to argue that despite conflictual rela-
tions among the various I-Hotel organizations, “their various constituencies
enabled them to draw on extensive networks of affiliation . . . to defend low
cost and affordable housing, oppose the eviction of the Hotel tenants, and
join them in what would become the largest, nonviolent anti-eviction struggle
in San Francisco’s history. See Teri Lee, “The International Hotel Struggle for
Low Income Housing,” Asian American Review, 1976; Teri Lee, “The Interna-
tional Hotel: One Community’s Fight for Survival” (MA. Thesis, University
of California, Berkeley, 1976); Dong, “The Origins and Trajectory of Asian
American Political Activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1968–1978;” Fu,
“Keeping Close to the Ground;” Carol Deena Levine, “The City’s Response to

168 • jAAS • 11:2

Conflicting Pressures—A Case Study: The International Hotel” (M.A. thesis,
San Francisco State University, 1970); Vivian Tsen, “The International Hotel:
An Anatomy of a Housing Issue” (Master’s thesis, University of California,
Berkeley, 1977).

99. Miyazaki studies the impact of the AAM on the identity development of San-
sei activists in Hawaii; journalist Hsiao overviews 100 years of Asian American
activism in New York City; Geron and colleagues overview the AAM, em-
phasizing South Asian and Pilipina/o American activism; Lindio-McGovern’s
theoretically informed research examines the relationship between political
consciousness, identity, and social movements among Pilipina/o immigrant
activists in Chicago and Pilipina/o peasant women; see endnotes 9 and 14.
There is some movement towards viewing the AAM as an integral part of
Asian American history; see Sucheng Chan, “The Asian-American Movement,
1960s–1980s” in Sucheng Chan et al., eds., People of Color in the American
West (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), 525–533; Jere Takahashi,
Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1997); Timothy Fong’s The Contemporary Asian
American Experience: Beyond the Model Minority (Upper Saddle River: Pren-
tice-Hall, 1998); Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict:
A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934–1990 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Lon Kurashige and
Alice Yang Murray, eds., Major Problems in Asian American History (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2003); also, Studs Terkel’s Race: How Blacks and Whites
Think & Feel About the American Obsession (New York: The New Press, 1992,
309–314). Helen Zia frames her telling of Asian American history around
1980s–‘90s activism (Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American
People, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000).

100. For theses/dissertations on the 1960s–1970s AAM, in addition those in
endnotes 74 and 98, see: Rosette Ho Wirtz, “Creating a Panethnic Identity:
The Asian American Movement’s Vision of Racial and Political Solidarity”
(M.A. thesis, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 1995); Emi Minemura, “Asian
Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women in North America: Activism
and Politics” (M.A. thesis, Michigan State University, 1996); Stacey Cook,
“Power and Resistance: Berkeley’s Third World Liberation Front Strikes”
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of San Francisco, 2001). For theses/disserta-
tions on the AAM outside the “long 60s,” see: Deborah Lou, “We’re All Sisters
Here: Asian American Women’s Experiences from Leftist Politics to Soror-
ity Membership” (M.A. thesis, University California, Santa Barbara, 1998);
Trinity Ordona, “Coming Out Together: An Ethnohistory of the Asian and
Pacific Islander Queer Women’s and Transgendered People’s Movement of
San Francisco” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz,
2000); Jennifer Yee, “Fostering a Commitment to Democracy, Community,
and Social Justice Across Generations: Lessons Learned from Asian Pacific
American Community Activists, Their Mentors, and Their Proteges” (Ph.

169Who StudieS the ASiAn AmericAn movement? • fujino •

D. dissertation, UCLA, 2001); Tritia Toyota, “Reconstructing a Collective
Asian American Political Identity: Political Projects Among New Chinese
American Activists” (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2004); Arlene Daus, “Hate
Crimes Against Asian Americans: Activism and Social Movements on College
Campuses” (M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 2004).

101. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States
(New York: Routledge, 1994).

102. Maeda, “Forging Asian American Identity;” Dong, “The Origins and Trajec-
tory of Asian American Political Activism in the San Francisco Bay Area,
1968–1978;” Gisele L. Fong, “The People United: Cultural Work and the
Making of Asian America, 1968–1985” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles, 2003); Fu, “Keeping Close to the Ground;” Jason M.
Ferreira, “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World
Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968–1974” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California Berkeley, 2003).

103. I recognize the tenacity of the model minority image of Asian Americans.
Pulido found that Asian Americans “rarely registered on the . . . political
radar” of the Black Panthers or Chicano activists in Los Angeles in the
1960s–1970s, in large part because Asian Americans were viewed as model
minorities who did not share a common oppression (Black Brown Yellow
and Left, 169–170).

104. Oral histories are particularly important to the construction of recent social
history. UCLA’s Center for Ethnocommunications, headed by Robert Na-
kamura, is gathering oral histories of Asian American activists. My current
project centers on the oral history narrative of Richard Aoki, examining
radicalism, Afro-Asian and Third World solidarities, and revolutionary na-
tionalist, internationalist, and Marxist-Leninist politics in Aoki’s leadership
in the Black Panther Party, Asian American Political Alliance, and struggle
for ethnic studies at UC Berkeley.

105. Most notably, Clare Jean Kim uses social movement theory to study Black-
Korean activism in the 1990s, Bitter Fruit; also Geron, “Serve the People.”

106. Studies on Asian American gay and lesbian activism include: David L. Eng
and Alice Y. Hom, Eds., Q&A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998); Eric Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An
Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2002); Trinity Ordona, “Coming Out Together;” Emi Minemura, “Asian Pacific
Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women in North America.”

107. Chrissy Lau’s forthcoming article argues that, in addition to the campus and
community, the church was a noteworthy, though little acknowledged, site of
AAM activity (“The Asian American Movement within Protestant Christian
Churches,” in Nancy Wadsworth and Robin Jacobson, eds., At the Intersection
of Race and Religion).

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