Asian and Asian American workers resist oppression and shape their own lives.

This book celebrates the first thirty years of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO (APALA), the first national Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) worker organization within the US labor movement. The voices in this book capture the spirit, determination, and commitment of a multiethnic, multigenerational group of AAPI labor activists who built a dynamic organization within the US labor movement to advance worker rights and labor solidarity. Included are founding members, emerging young activists who are charting a new path for AAPIs in labor, and the leaders who are no longer with us but who inspire others to continue their legacy.

Introduction / David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma -- Part I. Migration flows -- Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and the American empire / Keith L. Camacho -- Towards a hemispheric Asian American history / Jason Oliver Chang -- South Asian America: histories, cultures, politics / Sunaina Maira -- Asians, native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in Hawai'i: people, place, culture / John P. Rosa -- Southeast Asian Americans / Chia Youyee Vang -- East Asian immigrants / K. Scott Wong -- Asian Canadian history / Henry Yu -- Part II. Time passages -- Internment and World War II history / Eiichiro Azuma -- Reconsidering Asian exclusion in the United States / Kornel S. Chang -- The Cold War / Madeline Y. Hsu -- The Asian American movement / Daryl Joji Maeda -- Part III. Variations on themes -- A history of Asian international adoption in the United States / Catherine Ceniza Choy -- Confronting the racial state of violence: how Asian American history can reorient the study of race / Moon-Ho Jung -- Theory and history / Lon Kurashige -- Empire and war in Asian American history / Simeon Man -- Queer Asian American historiography / Amy Sueyoshi -- The study of Asian American families / Xiaojian Zhao -- Part IV. Engaging historical fields -- Asian American economic and labor history / Sucheng Chan -- Asian Americans, politics, and history / Gordon H. Chang -- Asian American intellectual history / Augusto Espiritu -- Asian American religious history / Helen Jin Kim, Timothy Tseng, and David K. Yoo -- Race, space, and place in Asian American urban history / Scott Kurashige -- From Asia to the United States, around the world, and back again: new directions in Asian American immigration history / Erika Lee -- Public history and Asian Americans / Franklin Odo -- Asian American legal history / Greg Robinson -- Asian American education history / Eileen H. Tamura -- Not adding and stirring: women's, gender, and sexuality history and the transformation of Asian America / Adrienne Ann Winans and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

A “provocative and sweeping” (Time) blend of family history and original reportage that explores—and reimagines—Asian American identity in a Black and white world “[Kang’s] exploration of class and identity among Asian Americans will be talked about for years to come.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Mother Jones In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. They came with almost no understanding of their new home, much less the history of “Asian America” that was supposed to define them. The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children, who are neither white nor truly “people of color.” Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang’s exquisitely crafted book brings these lonely parallel climbers together and calls for a new immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

Throughout the history of the United States, fluctuations in cultural diversity, immigration, and ethnic group status have been closely linked to shifts in the economy and labor market. Over three decades after the beginning of the civil rights movement, and in the midst of significant socioeconomic change at the end of this century, scholars search for new ways to describe the persistent roadblocks to upward mobility that women and people of color still encounter in the workforce. In Glass Ceilings and Asian Americans, Deborah Woo analyzes current scholarship and controversies on the glass ceiling and labor market discrimination in conjunction with the specific labor histories of Asian American ethnic groups. She then presents unique, in-depth studies of two current sites-a high tech firm and higher education-to argue that a glass ceiling does in fact exist for Asian Americans, both according to quantifiable data and to Asian American workers' own perceptions of their workplace experiences. Woo's studies make an important contribution to understanding the increasingly complex and subtle interactions between ethnicity and organizational cultures in today's economic institutions and labor markets.

Prologue -- The trailblazers -- The garment workers -- The mill workers -- The revolutionaries -- The miners -- The harvesters -- The cleaners -- The freedom fighters -- The movers -- The metalworkers -- The disabled workers -- The sex workers -- The prisoners -- Epilogue.

The mid-1970s was a turning point in the history of New York's Asian/American communities. As the city stood on the brink of economic collapse, the broader labor movement's membership declined, but many Asian/American New Yorkers demonstrated their labor activism in worker centers, grassroots organizations, as well as unions. This was also a moment, as the Cold War waned, when tens of thousands of Asian migrants resettled in New York City. With the influx of migrants in a tightening economy, the nature of the city's workforce changed, adding to the growing labor surplus, just as work was disappearing. My dissertation titled "One Rise, One Fall: Labor Organizing in New York's Asian Communities, 1970s to the Present," is a study of labor activists' strategies to deal with the economic crisis and reconcile their racial difference. Through oral histories and archival research, my dissertation bridges the fields of Asian American Studies, urban studies, and labor history. While historians have examined the intense economic transformations of the 1970s, noting the changes in the labor market and decline in trade unionism, few have examined the varied attempts to organize durable unions and labor organizations in this period. My dissertation contributes a class analysis to the literature on racial formation, examining the strategies of New York's Asian communities in harsh economic times. Dominant discourses about race and class, like yellow peril and model minority narratives, became a barrier for Asian/American labor activists looking to build worker power and remake their city. In some instances, Asian/American workers were perceived as dangerous foreigners who were taking white working-class jobs, and in other contexts, they were docile and deserving subjects in contrast to black and brown Americans. These two poles - of yellow peril and model minority narratives - informed Asian/American labor mobilizations. This study examines how race and class were inextricably intertwined, affecting modes of labor organizing in every industry. Opening with a study of Asian/American building tradesmen and their fight for jobs in the mid-1970s, "One Rise, One Fall" examines the multiple strategies that Asian/American workers deployed in order to cope with economic changes and racial discrimination. In my study, Asian/American organizers struggled to organize new immigrants in the Chinese restaurant industry in the 1980s, and rank-and-file garment workers fought for fair piece rates despite the logics of a global supply chain in the 2000s. Each chapter is a case study of organizing strategies in midst of Asian/American laborers' varied circumstances of citizenship, race, class, and gender. As labor organizing became increasingly difficult in an era of increased migrations, weakened labor laws, and globalized production, labor mobilizations in Asian communities occurred in and outside of unions. My research reveals the capacity and creativity of labor activism in grassroots organizations, worker centers, and labor unions, since the 1970s. Through this case-study approach, my dissertation analyzes the experiences of organizers and workers, in order to investigate how Asian/Americans navigated the politics of work, difference, and the radical restructuring of the urban-based global economy.