As much as Asian Americans used to be invisible in mainstream U.S. economy and culture, Asian American activism has also been invisible in both the public media and social movement literature. Linda Trinh Vo’s book, Mobilizing an Asian American Community, is a timely study that fills this void. Vo chooses the site of San Diego, California during the 1970s to mid 1990s, a time of drastic growth in both number and diversity within the Asian American/immigrant population, and shows the interactive processes of how the Asian American community emerged out of necessity, and evolved to play an important role in negotiating and redefining San Diego’s multi-ethnic landscape and Asian American identities.
In less than 300 pages, the book packs in much documentary detail about the multifaceted Asian American ethnic movement spanning over nearly three decades. Vo ingeniously chooses the following story lines which together provide quite a comprehensive account of San Diego’s Asian American movement. The first is the transformation of the Union of Pan Asian Communities (UPAC), established in the early 1970s, which primarily gathered funding from the government and private foundations to provide social services to the impoverished Asian American and immigrant population. In contrast, the Asian Business Association, a younger, spin-off organization from UPAC, aimed to go beyond the social welfare model, and to bring about economic self-efficiency for lower class Asian Americans, help middle-class Asian Americans incorporate into the mainstream, and utilize their trans-Pacific ties to gain economic power in the local setting. In the cultural realm, Vo narrates how Asian Americans were unified in complaining and demanding apologies after local TV and radio aired denigrating caricatures of Asians Americans. As the community continued to grow, many realized the importance of mainstream political participation. One of the chapters delineates the involvement of Asian American voters and leaders in the local electoral process. Another chapter tells the story of the community’s success in preserving and renovating San Diego’s downtown Asian Pacific Thematic Historic District.
Social science scholars have increasingly acknowledged that the overarching category of “Asian American” is problematic because there is great diversity among Asian Americans in terms of ethnicity, cultural and linguistic background, immigrant generation, and socioeconomic standing. In Mobilizing an Asian American Community, Vo vividly demonstrates how the Asian American categorization was imposed by the mainstream society onto individuals of Asian background, and how in reaction, Asian Americans individually and collectively resisted the label, and yet also learned to utilize it to achieve empowerment within the white-dominated sociopolitical system. This theme that Vo calls “politics of resistance and politics of accommodation” runs through all of the mobilization stories. In the initial stage of UPAC, for example, when the organization was seeking funding, it was often dismissed based on the notion that Asian Americans, being a “model minority,” did not need help. In the media, Asians were portrayed derogatively with exaggerated facial features, heavy accents, stereotypical behaviors, and a distorted mixture of ethnic-cultural symbols (e.g., the controversial K. C. Wang character who practices acupuncture, quotes Confucius all the time, and wears a Japanese happi coat). In response, Asian Americans wrote complaint letters, met with media representatives, held community meetings, formed ad hoc pan-Asian coalition organizations, and sought help from non-Asian organizations. These processes brought the concept of “Asian American” and its diverse components to the attention of the public and Asian Americans themselves.
At the same time of resisting and negotiating a pan-Asian American racial label with the outsiders, Asian Americans also had to reconcile many differences and conflicts among themselves. For example, first generation immigrants had very different perspectives and resources than U.S.-born Asian Americans. Women leaders faced extra obstacles in their activist career. Intermarriage between Asian American ethnics could bring as much trouble as intermarriage between Asian Americans and whites. In pan-Asian American organizations and in local electoral settings, ethnicity of the leader might split the Asian American voter population. In addition, participants in the ethnic movements debated about joining force with other Asian American ethnics, and about forming coalitions with other racial minorities. As Vo rightly stressed, the mobilization of the San Diego Asian American community is as much about conflict as about coalition.
Mobilizing an Asian American Community is an innovative book. The study combines participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and historical-archival data to provide a complete account of how San Diego’s Asian American ethnic movement evolved. Being an activist herself in the community, Vo had rare access to core activities (such as boarding meetings) that are essential to understanding movement dynamics. Some may regard the light treatment of social movement theory as a weakness—for example, the concepts and implications of the dualities of “the privileged minority and the oppressed minority,” “politics of resistance and a politics of accommodation,” and so forth, could have been elaborated further. But the book more than makes up for these shortcomings with its rich content and accessibility. The book’s organization, choice of events, and analysis show clear roots in social movement theory, yet the materials can be used as data for scholars in other fields such as racial and ethnic relations, social psychology of identity and stereotyping, among others. Because U.S. society has a tendency to concatenate diverse groups into large, indiscriminate racial categories, it would be interesting to compare the mobilization process to that of other racial and ethnic groups.
In sum, this book will be indispensable reading for students of racial/ethnic mobilization, or Asian American and immigrant identities. Ethnic activists who seek to understand their own work will also find the book insightful.