This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

1960s Asian migrants to the United States (Stand in picture for the moment)

The earliest Asian migrants to the United States were predominantly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, but following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished a quota system that had limited immigration from non-western European countries, the Asian American population not only grew — it diversified. Prof. Ronald Takaki, who was a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in “Strangers from a Different Shore” that there were one million people of Asian descent living in the U.S. in 1965. By 1985, this number jumped to five million, or two percent of the entire U.S. population. Prior to the new immigration law, 99 percent of Asian Americans were Chinese, Japanese or Filipino, but by 1985, 12 percent of Asian Americans were Vietnamese, 11 percent Korean and 10 percent Indian. The 1965 Immigration Act ended various exclusionary immigration policies. It also set up a system of preference that favored skilled workers and the families of American citizens. This landmark piece of legislation facilitated massive new waves of Asian migration. New communities arose, such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, and the Sikh community in Yuba City, whose temple is pictured here. As Asian migrants with more capital arrived, “suburban Chinatowns” such as Monterey Park grew.

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:
2. Gidra - The Voice of the Asian American Movement Murase, who completed his undergraduate degree in 1970, said he had few opportunities to learn about Asian Americans in the classroom. In response, he and five other UCLA students established Gidra in 1969, a monthly newspaper that highlighted and commented on Asian American issues while also enabling local artists and writers to share their work. Gidra was initially established at Campbell Hall as an Asian American student publication, Murase said. As Gidra’s influence began to extend beyond UCLA following its early publications, Murase said he and his peers moved their operations to a rented office on Jefferson Boulevard – about five and a half miles from UCLA – and accepted submissions from the larger community, including those who lived outside of Los Angeles or were not of Asian descent. Through the work of its volunteer staff and contributors, Gidra produced a total of 60 issues before its closure in 1974, Murase added.
3. 1968 Oakland High School at funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton PHOTO BY NIKKI ARAI - Oakland High School students participated in the funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton, killed by Oakland Police in 1968. The Black Power movement, led by various groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party, emerged in the latter half of the sixties. Coined by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power movement inspired racial pride and advocated for local community control, self-determination and economic development. At the same time, other social movements challenged the existing social order. At UC Berkeley, students engaged in civil disobedience over a university ban on political activity and initiated the Free Speech movement. The women’s liberation movement emerged in the late ‘60s as organizations formed to confront society’s sexism and to promote women’s equality. Likewise, activists organized the environmental movement to protect the earth, stop pollution, and clean-up toxic environmental hazards in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Each of these movements, as well as their militancy, informed the Asian American movement.
4. 1960s/1970s Health Fair at Castelar Elementary The Movement suffered from misogyny and homophobia. Though perhaps less so than other Third World left groups (e.g. there were fewer instances of physical abuse and assault), women and queer-identified people fought for presence, voice, and their issues. At the same time, the analysis of a “triple oppression” of class, race, and gender for women, and the creation of a multiracial LGBT identity, opened a profound reworking of patriarchal and heterosexual norms. These movements within the Movement are crucial not only to appraising the Asian American Movement, but offer vital case studies for our intersectional present.
5. 1965 Delano Grape Strike, Filipino farm workers
6. 1970s Flier for "The Struggle for National Democracy in the Philippines" This flier advertises an event titled "The Struggle for National Democracy in the Philippines" which was sponsored by the Union of Democratic Filipinos and Liberation Books. A sideshow, songs and discussion are advertised. In this movement, Asian Americans, who had individually become involved with the causes of the times, drew together to address their own racial status and identity. They confronted enduring stereotypes of the unassimilable heathen, the Yellow Peril, and the perpetual foreigner. This generation of students faced the model minority myth, that Asian American students were expected to be hard-working, studious, and quiet even in the face of discrimination. While many sought to assimilate to mainstream Anglo-American cultural norms, they soon recognized that they could not assimilate fully into the white mainstream. The other racial model for Asian Americans was the Black Power movement, which rejected American racism and promoted Black autonomy, racial pride, and community control. For those African American activists, the ideologies of self-determination and cultural nationalism became realized through militant organizations, a flowering of Black arts and expression, and a reclamation of indigenous and ethnic histories. Some of the subsequent Asian American organizations, such as the Red Guard, modeled themselves partially after the Black Panthers, while others were more connected to diasporic movements, such as the Union of Democratic Filipinos, which was also involved in opposing martial law in the Philippines.
7. 1971 Asian Americans not only called for peace in order to bring troops home, but also protested U.S. intervention and imperialism in Vietnam As a newly-formed group identity, Asian American consciousness was rooted in the communities from which they came. Actively seeking to reclaim their histories and to find their own voices, they sought out narratives from their ancestors and elders. They became engaged with their home neighborhoods, creating local programs to “serve the people” and to rally the masses. They also sought to forge solidarities across ethnicity, race, and national boundaries as they identified with other “Third World” peoples. This term recognized the exploitative relations in the global hierarchy where the least developed nations faced oppressive histories and conditions similar to historically marginalized communities in the U.S. Through the practice of supporting one another’s movements and struggles, Asian American students built a collective identity and common cause to address racial injustices. Additionally, Asian American students were deeply influenced by major international developments of the 1960s. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia reached its apex on campuses in early 1968; the success of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive demonstrated that despite the onslaught of U.S. military might, the war could not be easily won. Asian American war protestors realized their paradoxical position. On one hand, they knew they were Americans, but they were being sent to fight an enemy that not only looked like them, but were in a subordinate position in the world order like they found themselves to be within boundaries of their own country
8. 1960s/1970s GIDRA Staff photo Murase, who completed his undergraduate degree in 1970, said he had few opportunities to learn about Asian Americans in the classroom. In response, he and five other UCLA students established Gidra in 1969, a monthly newspaper that highlighted and commented on Asian American issues while also enabling local artists and writers to share their work. Gidra was initially established at Campbell Hall as an Asian American student publication, Murase said. As Gidra’s influence began to extend beyond UCLA following its early publications, Murase said he and his peers moved their operations to a rented office on Jefferson Boulevard – about five and a half miles from UCLA – and accepted submissions from the larger community, including those who lived outside of Los Angeles or were not of Asian descent. Through the work of its volunteer staff and contributors, Gidra produced a total of 60 issues before its closure in 1974, Murase added. Coming of age in the 1960s, Asian American students at universities developed a new, distinct consciousness as Asian Americans shaped by the racial and international context of the time. By 1968, when the Asian American population numbered about 1.3 million, 80 percent of Japanese Americans and about 50 percent of Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, respectively, were born in the United States. Asian Americans had come to reach the same educational attainment as whites, but still earned substantially less because of racial discrimination. For example, in 1960 Filipinos earned only 61 percent of the income of whites with comparable educations. Japanese and Chinese also earned less than their white counterparts, making 77 percent and 87 percent, respectively. Among the 107,366 Asian American college students on university campuses in 1970, Chinese and Japanese made up the vast majority, with over eight out of ten Asian American students being of either Japanese or Chinese American descent.
9. 2021 Stop Asian Hate Feng Shen holds up a sign stating “Asians Are not Viruses Racism Is!” in front of candles left out for the eight victims of the Atlanta Mass shooting during the candlelight vigil held in Thousand Oaks, CA. on March 20. 2021. Photo credit: Ryan Bough https://moorparkreporter.com/4016775/news/there-is-no-vaccine-for-racism-ventura-county-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-community-holds-candlelight-vigil-for-atlanta-murder-victims/
10. 1960s/1970s Asian American protest Community and Place Mao told his followers to “serve the people,” and Movement activists took the call to heart. In the context of Los Angeles, they found their calling in historic Japanese, Filipino and Chinese American communities. Often neglected by government agencies and limited by language access and social stigma, these neighborhoods needed jobs, health services, and education access. As these younger, college-educated, radicalized Asian Americans worked in the community, they built intergenerational bridges and emphasized the importance of place. Their battles against eviction and redevelopment took on a double urgency: both protecting historical communities and the new Movement centers that shared spaces with them.
11. 1969 Roots and Resources Roots and Resources Founded in 1969 out of a campaign by student activist and faculty allies, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center quickly became a center for resources-gathering and scholarship for the Asian American movement. Asian American student organizations at CSULA, Occidental, USC, and other colleges soon followed. It was a vital hub and training ground for young activists, a place they could earn a salary while doing community work. Roots, the publication which inspired this exhibition’s title, was a course reader published by the UCLA Asian American Studies department in 1971. The editors, many of them young organizers themselves, defined the stakes and reasons for publishing such a volume in the preface: “the lack of appropriate materials in readily accessible form is one of the greatest immediate problems”
13. Asian American Studies and ethnic studies courses Students had to keep fighting for Asian American and ethnic studies courses to be offered every year in the early period of the ethnic studies centers. THE CALL FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES ON WEST COAST CAMPUSES As students became involved with both international and local issues, they began to call for a relevant education that could address these concerns. However, as Irene Dea expressed, they found a system of higher education that largely excluded students of color from admission and whose courses showed little reflection of their histories and experiences. In 1960, California enacted its Master Plan for Education that created a three-tiered college system. The University of California (UC) system was to admit the top 12 percent of the state’s high school students, while the California State University (CSU) system was to accept the top 33 percent. The community colleges were to admit all others. Due to the creation of this stratified system, the percentages of Black students dropped at San Francisco State University from 11 percent in 1960 to only 5.3 percent in 1968. Students of color made up only 17 percent of the university overall. promise to use special admissions for 428 Third World students and shelved a proposal to hire for Black Studies. BSU and TWLF thus initiated a student strike on November 6, 1968 with the BSU making ten demands and TWLF seeking five additional ones, including community control over faculty hiring and curriculum development in the establishment of ethnic studies. In response to these educational disparities, students at SF State were the first to mobilize large numbers of campus and community supporters around demands for an accessible and relevant education. The Black Student Union (BSU), along with the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) organizations, demanded special admissions for underrepresented communities. TWLF included three Asian American student groups: Intercollegiate Chinese of Social Action (ICSA, founded in 1967); Philippine Collegiate Endeavor (PACE, 1967); and Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA, 1968). Each of these groups had already developed community-based projects, such as youth development work in Chinatown, resistance to the I-Hotel evictions in Manilatown, and fighting redevelopment in Japantown. The TWLF organized itself around three goals: special admissions, development of Third World curricula, and hiring of faculty of color. Supporting the BSU and TWLF, members of these groups participated in a sit-in at the campus president’s office in spring 1968, and won the establishment of an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) office on campus and an increase in special admissions. The next fall semester, however, SF State administrators attempted to remove a lecturer in Black Studies who was an advocate in the Black Power movement. They also broke their
14. 1960s A fight against displacement and to preserve low income housing for the Elderly
15. 1960s/1970s International Hotel in San Francisco
16. 1970 Asian American Women's Movement Activists Although not widely known outside the Asian community or among feminist activists and scholars outside of the Los Angeles area, there was a thriving, militant Asian American women's movement in southern California starting in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Like other movements among feminists of color, it both grew out of and remained tied to the larger national/ethnic movement and the anti-war movement. Asian American consciousness and activism most often developed on college campuses and, ultimately, often led to the development of Asian American studies. The core women activists in the Los Angeles area, however, focused most of their political work and organizing in grass roots community programs, and looked to Chinese and Vietnamese women revolutionaries for their inspiration. Many of them were members of the Community Workers Collective, which engaged in studying political liberation movements in other countries as a basis for their community organizing. Based on their study and organizing experience, the Asian Women's Group developed one of the first multi-media interactive presentations on the Asian women's movement which was performed at venues along the West Coast. They also founded the first Asian Women's Center in the US, establishing principles of unity to guide their programs; and collectivized their salaries to generate more staff and programs. They collaborated in anti-Vietnam War activities, and used their resources to support other struggles such as Wounded Knee. Despite ongoing struggles with the men in the larger Asian American movement, these women activists remained committed to and involved in the broader movement and eschewed separatism. The Asian American activists included in this series include: May Ying Chen, Miya Iwataki and Evelyn Yoshimura. An additional interview with long-time Asian American male activist, Alan Nishio, sheds further light both on the activities of the women and on the relationship between them and the broader Asian American movement in Los Angeles.
18. 1965 Protesting apart of the Delano Grape strike “The Delano Grape Strike began on September 8, 1965, in protest to substandard wages being paid to predominantly Filipino farm workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. A week later, they were joined by the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by prominent labor leader Cesar Chavez, his elder brother Richard, and Dolores Huerta. Less than a year later, the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers – and more than 2,000 workers had joined the fight. Ultimately, the strike spread across North America and even Western Europe as consumers supported the workers by boycotting non-union grapes”
19. 1995 SPARC Neighborhood Pride Mural Program Sponsored Mural located on 1660 Beverly Boulevard at Unidad Park, Sponsored by SPARC’s Neighborhood Pride Mural Program in 1995. On September 8th, 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a majority Filipino labor group, initiated a strike against Delano grape growers amidst cries of “welga!” (the Tagalog word for “strike”). The purpose of the strike was to get union contracts, higher pay, and improved working conditions.
20. 1972 Filipino Farm Workers gather to plan the construction of Agbayani Village Filipino union members played key roles in the farmworker movement. Most of these men, respectfully known as Manongs, migrated to the United States in their teens and 20s. Racist laws in California at that time forbade them from marrying outside their race, so most remained single. Evicted from farm labor camps after joining the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, by the end of the strike in 1970 many Filipino men were without families, pensions, and places to live. In 1973 and 1974, the farm worker movement built the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village. It provided some of Manongs with safe and comfortable housing, human dignity and respect in their final years. Hundreds of volunteer laborers constructed this complex. The village was named after a Filipino Manong who died of a heart attack on the picket line. The village provided residents with individual rooms, a community kitchen serving Filipino cuisine, a dining hall, living and recreation room, and garden. As the first affordable housing community built by what is now the Cesar Chavez Foundation, Agbayani Village served as a model for dozens of properties built across four states that continue providing affordable housing. The Chavez Foundation manages the property today, which still houses people.
21. 1960s Photo of Philip Vera Cruz 2 “In the words of Philip Vera Cruz: ‘On September 8, 1965, at the Filipino Hall at 1457 Glenwood St. in Delano, the Filipino members of AWOC held a mass meeting to discuss and decide whether to strike or to accept the reduced wages proposed by the growers. The decision was "to strike" and it became one of the most significant and famous decisions ever made in the entire history of the farmworker struggles in California. It was like an incendiary bomb, exploding out the strike message to the workers in the vineyards, telling them to have sit-ins in the labor camps, and set up picket lines at every grower's ranch... It was this strike that eventually made the UFW, the farmworkers movement, and Cesar Chavez famous worldwide.’”
22. 1960s Photo of Philip Vera Cruz “He was one of the co-founders of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a labor union that later joined the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to become what is known today as the United Farm Workers (UFW). During his years with AWOC, Philip and the other leaders made the decision to start Delano Grape Strike which was one of the most significant and well known strikes in the history of farmworker struggle in California. This strike is what eventually made the UFW. Philip Vera Cruz was the long standing second Vice President of the UFW until he retired in in 1997.”
23. 1939 Filipino farm workers Filipino farm workers in Pajaro Valley, near Watsonville, California. The first generation of Filipino trade unionists became leaders in the multiracial organizing of migratory workers in the agricultural sector and the salmon canning industry from the 1920s through the 1960s. Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Chris Mensalves, Sr. and Pete Velasco were the leaders who helped to form the Alaska Cannery Workers Union Local 37, now affiliated with the Inlandboatmen’s Union and the United Farm Workers.
24. 1965 Larry Itliong leads Filipino Farm Workers Larry Itliong & other Filipino leaders of Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) approached NFWA to participate in strike against major grape growers of the Central Valley. Filipino farmwohe Delano Grape Strike. Born in the Philippines, Itliong immigrated to the U.S in 1929, hoping to become a lawyer. Instead, he ended up working in the Alaskan fish canneries and along the West Coast as a farm laborer. During that time, he experienced how badly laborers were treated and saw the power they could gain by working together. He became an activist and organizer. Following his service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Itliong became a U.S citizen and in 1954 moved to Stockton’s Little Manila, where he organized for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). He was so good at recruiting new members that union leaders asked him to move to Delano to organize Filipino grape workers. It was there that he helped change the history of farm labor. On Sept. 8, 1965, he led AWOC members in walking off the grape vineyards to demand wages equal to federal minimum wage and better working conditions. But Itliong knew that for the strike to succeed, they needed members of the National Farm Workers Association to join. He approached NFWA’s leader, César Chávez, with the proposal. On Sept. 16, the AWOC and NFWA joined forces beginning the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott. It lasted five years and was one of the most important social justice and labor movements in American history, ending with victory for the farmworkers. In the meantime, the AWOC and NFWA merged in 1966 to become the United Farm Workers (UFW), with Chávez as director and Itliong as assistant director. In 1971, Itliong left the UFW but continued to work for Filipino Americans until his death in 1977 at age 63. One of his major successes was securing funding for the construction of the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in Delano, which has provided housing and support for retired Filipino farmworkers since 1974.
25. 1960s Asian migrants to the United States (Stand in picture for the moment) The earliest Asian migrants to the United States were predominantly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, but following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished a quota system that had limited immigration from non-western European countries, the Asian American population not only grew — it diversified. Prof. Ronald Takaki, who was a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in “Strangers from a Different Shore” that there were one million people of Asian descent living in the U.S. in 1965. By 1985, this number jumped to five million, or two percent of the entire U.S. population. Prior to the new immigration law, 99 percent of Asian Americans were Chinese, Japanese or Filipino, but by 1985, 12 percent of Asian Americans were Vietnamese, 11 percent Korean and 10 percent Indian. The 1965 Immigration Act ended various exclusionary immigration policies. It also set up a system of preference that favored skilled workers and the families of American citizens. This landmark piece of legislation facilitated massive new waves of Asian migration. New communities arose, such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, and the Sikh community in Yuba City, whose temple is pictured here. As Asian migrants with more capital arrived, “suburban Chinatowns” such as Monterey Park grew.
26. 1970s/1980s Location shoot in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for Visual Communications The roots of Asian American studies and its flourishing as a field of study has borne fruit, evidenced by the accomplishments of its students, a growing diversity in the curriculum, and the strength of local Asian American community institutions. For the students, Asian American studies validated their identities as Asians in America. It allowed them to explore a common history and cause with fellow Asians. And it offered a space to develop solidarities within and across racial, ethnic, gender and other boundaries. Asian American studies was a hotbed where students could grow in their activism and leadership. On university campuses, Asian American studies institutionalized community-based learning and research that re-envisioned the role of the university. Finally, the Asian American community as a whole benefited, as students went on to apply their skills and experiences to establish needed community programs and services as well as local and national organizations. They also entered mainstream institutions and advocated on behalf of those whose voices were missing.
27. 1960s/1970s Student protesting for Asian Studies classes Students had to keep fighting for Asian American and ethnic studies courses to be offered every year in the early period of the ethnic studies centers.After the TWLF strikes at SF State and UC Berkeley and the creation of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, the struggle to establish Asian American studies continued as students sought to develop the curriculum that was relevant to their communities
28. 1968 SFSU Mass Strike Called THE CALL FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES ON WEST COAST CAMPUSES, As students became involved with both international and local issues, they began to call for a relevant education that could address these concerns. However, as Irene Dea expressed, they found a system of higher education that largely excluded students of color from admission and whose courses showed little reflection of their histories and experiences
29. 1960s Sacramento Assembly Center, which held nearly 5,000 Japanese Americans from the Sacramento area in 1942 prior to their transfer to Tule Lake concentration camp in northern California. World War II exposed the blatant hypocrisy of American democracy and its institutional racism when the U.S. government incarcerated over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps. Over six in ten internees were U.S.-born citizens, who were incarcerated for about four years under the suspicion of espionage and fear of their disloyalty. Not until 1988, after Japanese Americans lobbied for redress and reparations, did the U.S. government apologize for unjustly incarcerating its own citizens. In the decade after World War II, Asian Americans remained scarred by the internment and by the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Consequently, the U.S.-born generations of Asians, who grew up attending American public schools, generally felt pressure to integrate into American society by acculturating and assimilating.
31. 1969 Gidra Article
32. 1971 Anti-War demonstration on Wilshire Blvd Politicized by War For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World.
34. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
35. 1971“Liberation,” January 1971 issue of Gidra Though Gidra included women on its staff and women’s issues in its pages, a series of “rap sessions” led to a special women’s issue in 1971 with the word “Liberation” and a large Venus symbol on the cover. The issue linked international questions to those at home, from war brides and G.I.s to struggles of women within the Asian American Movement. The focus on the global and the local was also present in the popular International Women’s Day celebrations. Beginning in 1974, the festival united many of the different Movement groups in a common recognition of women’s struggles.
36. 1970s Asian American Protest police brutality and racial Profiling
37. 1968/1980s Activists in Little Tokyo protest against neighborhood redevelopment and the displacement of residents. It is one of the items on display in the new Chinese American Museum exhibit Roots: Asian American Movements in Los Angeles “Hell no, we won’t go!” In the early 1970s, Little Tokyo was marked as a blighted area by the L.A. Master Plan, and the landmark Sun Building was to be torn down and replaced with a luxury hotel. The Sun Building housed the Japanese American Community Services, Asian Involvement Office (or JACS-AI, a more youth- and movement-focused wing of the older service organization), elderly Latino residents, Japanese cultural spaces, and small businesses. In 1973, the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force formed to combat the evictions. It disbanded a couple years later, and was replaced by the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization (LTPRO). The LTPRO waged a multi-year battle of fundraising, demonstrations, community outreach, and Nisei Week outreach. They demanded the construction of a Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), jobs for Japanese workers, and senior housing. In 1976, residents of the Sun Building were finally evicted. In a pyrrhic victory, the LTPRO and organizing was able to secure the Little Tokyo Service Center, founded in 1979, and funding for the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, which opened its doors in 1980. Many of those activists also went on to found the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, which called upon the U.S. government to recognize the legacy of internment.
38. 1973 three young activists in New York City recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. It was no small feat: young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. These lines from “We Are the Children” on the seminal album A Grain of Sand capture this tension: Foster children of the Pepsi generation Cowboys and Indians ride, red man, ride! Watching war movies with the next-door neighbor Secretly rooting for the other side Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. It infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. The verse above both names a dominant paradigm then re-appropriates the image of the heroic cowboy and soldier by actually identifying with the ‘villain’—in this case, the indigenous and Asian combatants.
39. 1972 JoAnne/Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima perform at the Third World Storefront organization Art and Communication The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. Young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. Art was “for the people”: and there was little differentiation between it and activism, and it infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. Los Angeles became home to the first Asian American films ever made. Community-based and politically-charged, they showed Asian struggles, families, and histories in a way Hollywood never imagined. A plethora of newspapers got out the word. From personal essays to reports on U.S. militarism and Asian communities, the concerns and goals of the Movement took shape in those worn and circulated pages.
40. 1970 - Marching for peace-rally through through the streets of Little Tokyo For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World. In 1969, Asians Americans for Peace was founded in Los Angeles. Groups like the Thai Binh and Van Troi Brigades (named after Vietnamese freedom fighters) formed to mobilize youth. Meanwhile, Asian Movement for Military Outreach
Contents of this tag:
1. 2000s Immigrant Voices Calling for Change Immigrant electoral politics was bevvied by a number of immigrant rights organizations that combined demands for immigrant rights with gains at the workplace—often outside of a traditional union structure. They included the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA), the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), the South Asian Network (SAN), and the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN). Activist groups like these made sure that immigrants were not simply providing “boots on the ground” for a newly mobilized labor movement and its electoral ambitions. Rather, their members helped shift the stance of organized labor both locally and nationally. In 1999, breaking from organized labor’s historically anti-immigrant stance, the AFL-CIO, with heavy influence from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, officially adopted a platform supportive of immigrant rights and comprehensive immigration reform. The following year, a labor-sponsored hearing to demonstrate support for the importance of immigration reform—one of a series of forums across the nation—drew an overflow crowd of about 20,000 at the L.A. Sports Arena. “If someone had told me three or four years ago that we’d be taking this position today,” John Wilhelm (then president of HERE) told the L.A. Weekly of the AFL-CIO’s reversal on immigrant politics, “I’d have thought they were out of their minds.” Meanwhile, the immigrant rights groups themselves jumped into direct electoral work when in 2003, a statewide bill repealed the right of undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The next year, a new statewide multiethnic collaborative called Mobilize the Immigrant Vote (MIV) began registering, educating, and mobilizing residents to vote and became part of a larger set of efforts to encourage infrequent voters to cast their ballots. MIV’s impact extends beyond Los Angeles County. Yet the real “coming out” of immigrant organizers occurred on May 1, 2006. Across America, immigrant activists and their allies in labor, the left, and faith communities (most prominently, the Catholic Church) came together to protest the proposal of the Sensenbrenner-King bill in Congress. Among its other draconian provisions, this bill would have criminalized any assistance to undocumented immigrants. While the turnout was dramatic all over the country, the largest crowd gathered in Los Angeles: here, half a million people clogged downtown streets. And unlike in 1994, this time—and at the insistence of immigrant organizers themselves—many marchers waved American flags and encouraged one another to become citizens and to vote. Indeed, a popular chant in that May Day march was “Hoy Marchamos, Mañana Votamos” (“Today, We March; Tomorrow, We Vote”). A surge of naturalizations did occur, as lawful permanent immigrants realized the best way to defend their relatives was to show up on election day. Soon, Republican office-holders became as scarce in Los Angeles as a rainy day in August. The multiethnic nature of this organizing showed that this was a movement and not a special interest group. Groups like the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (since renamed Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a telling switch) was critical to showing that this was not a matter of Latino politics. Other organizations like the Pilipino Workers Center helped Asian immigrants engage with the labor movement, particularly since their members were (and are) low-wage, often undocumented workers in homecare and other exploited occupations. African-American politics in L.A. changed too. While the aforementioned Latinization of South Central fueled certain conflicts and fed into some nationalist impulses, the most successful organizations in the new landscape were committed to—indeed, had to be committed to—black-brown coalition building, including around issues of education, neighborhood quality of life, jobs, and immigrant rights. In return, the largely Latino (and often immigrant) SEIU deliberately organized a largely black security guard sector while a similarly Latino-dominated union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), secured provisions in new contracts to ensure outreach to and hiring of black workers who were once so prominent in the sector but had since been eclipsed by Latino numbers.
3. 1983 Carecen The Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), then called the Central American Refugee Center, was founded by Salvadoran refugees who were fleeing persecution by the military during the civil war. CARECEN was founded to secure political asylum for the refugees fleeing persecution, to defend their human rights and to offer immigration and basic social services needed by the refugees who were arriving in large numbers to Los Angeles. CARECEN received its 501 (c) (3) non-profit status.
4. 1966: The Cuban Adjustment Act The bipartisan Cuban Adjustment Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on November 2, 1966, granted work authorization permits and lawful permanent residency (green card status) to any Cuban native or citizen who settled in the United States for at least one year. The Cuban population in the United States grew from 79,000 to 439,000 between 1960 and 1970 as thousands of Cuban exiles sought asylum in the U.S. following hostilities surrounding the Cuban Revolution and termination of diplomatic relations between the two countries on January 3, 1961. Two additional events led to significant migrations from Cuba to the United States. The Mariel boatlift of 1980, which lasted six months, led 125,000 Cubans to Florida’s shores. In August of 1995 the Clinton administration’s wet foot/dry foot policy responded to Fidel Castro’s declaration that no Cuban would be confined from leaving the island by boat. This legislation enabled Cubans who successfully reached U.S. soil to apply for legal status. Those intercepted at sea were repatriated to Cuba. On January 12, 2017, the Obama administration amended diplomatic relations with Cuba, ended the wet foot/dry foot policy, and modified the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 to prohibit its exemption for Cuban nationals who enter the U.S. without visas. See how this thread continues into the 1980s: https://time.com/4888381/immigration-act-mariel-boatlift-history/
5. Immigrant detention system has grown since 2017 - "THE DETENTION MACHINE HAS EXPLODED" The detention machine has exploded, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue for private operators. Since 2017, 40 new detention facilities have opened. Most are run by private operators. As of January 2020, 81 percent of detained people are in facilities owned and/or operated by private companies; that number jumps to 91 percent for people who are detained in facilities that opened after 2017. For Fiscal Year 2021, the Trump administration has requested that taxpayers fund ICE at $4.1 billion, with the intent to expand ICE’s daily detention capacity to 60,000 people on any given day.
8. 1983 In Today’s Headlines, Echoes of Central America’s Proxy Wars of the 1980s deadly conflicts in crowded Central American cities and dusty hamlets during the 1980s. Their effects are still felt today. Over the decades, several million Central America migrants have sought opportunity, refuge, and stability in the United States, driven by a mix of factors including battered economies, violence, corrupt governments, and the desire to reunite with relatives who emigrated earlier or to find a family-sustaining job. While media attention in recent years has focused on the arrival of unaccompanied minors and families, primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the lion’s share of the 3.8 million Central American immigrants in the United States as of 2019 have been in the country for at least a decade. Displacement and economic instability caused by regional civil wars, in which the U.S. government had involvement, led many Central Americans to migrate in the 1980s. The wars ended, but economic instability remained—as did migration. The Central American immigrant population in the United States more than tripled between 1980 and 1990. Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and two earthquakes in 2001 were among the factors further driving migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Similar factors have remained at work in recent years. In November 2020, Hurricanes Eta and Iota devasted the region, affecting as many as 11 million people throughout Central America. Drought also has plagued parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in what is known as the “Dry Corridor.” Further, government corruption, gang activity, and high homicide rates continue to affect parts of the region, driving emigration. The total Central American-born population in the United States has grown more than tenfold since 1980, and by 24 percent since 2010. The 3.8 million Central American immigrants present in 2019 accounted for 8 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population of 44.9 million.
9. 1962 The Cuban Exiles of Echo Park For nearly two centuries Cuban émigrés have found a kind of freedom in the United States that was lacking in their beloved island.1 The ties between the Cuban community and Echo Park can be traced back more than five decades when members of the Presbyterian Church of Echo Park met the first flight of Cuban refugees in 1962. Like its more well-known counterpart in Miami, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park came to be known as "Little Havana" in the 1960s; for many émigrés it was a gathering site to protest Castro's regime and share the challenges they faced in assimilating to American culture. Prominent Cuban exiles such as sculptor Sergio López-Mesa and composer Aurelio de la Vega built distinguished careers in Los Angeles, and their artistic contributions would be memorialized and celebrated in Echo Park and throughout the city. "Los Angeles played a seminal role in providing refuge for many Cubans who sought to rebuild their lives and who were still making sense of the political upheaval. Unlike other exiles who made their way to Los Angeles, Cuban exiles received government assistance to move west. Los Angeles' Cuban entrepreneurs, businesses, and artists enriched the history and complexity of the city. Echo Park's exile community laid claim to the neighborhood, transforming its eponymous park into a site for annual celebrations and political protests. "
10. 2006 MAY Day Rally
11. 2003 Statewide bill repealed the right of undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses California Repeals Law On Licenses for Immigrants - California lawmakers gave Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) his first legislative victory Monday by repealing a controversial law that would have granted illegal immigrants in the state the right to obtain a driver's license. In a swift and stark political reversal, the state Assembly, which is dominated by Democrats, voted 64 to 9, with seven abstentions, to abolish the measure. The state Senate took the same step late last month. The law, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, would have granted driver's license privileges to nearly 2 million illegal immigrants, many of them working in California's vast farming fields. It has been a political priority for Latino leaders across the state. Similar laws are under debate across the country. But Schwarzenegger had demanded the law's repeal even before his resounding victory this fall in California's recall election. He said the measure, which was approved during the summer by then-Gov. Gray Davis (D), posed too many security risks in a time of heightened national concern over terrorism.
12. 2006 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act Senator Feinstein voted in support of the “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act” (S. 2611) when it came before the Senate for a vote (5/25/06). This bill was comprehensive immigration reform legislation that included provisions on border security, interior enforcement, unlawful employment of aliens, nonimmigrant and immigrant visa reform, backlog reduction, agricultural workers, citizenship assistance for members of the armed services, and family humanitarian relief. Reflection written in 2017: WASHINGTON — President Trump embraced a proposal on Wednesday to slash legal immigration to the United States in half within a decade by sharply curtailing the ability of American citizens and legal residents to bring family members into the country. The plan would enact the most far-reaching changes to the system of legal immigration in decades and represents the president’s latest effort to stem the flow of newcomers to the United States. Since taking office, he has barred many visitors from select Muslim-majority countries, limited the influx of refugees, increased immigration arrests and pressed to build a wall along the southern border. In asking Congress to curb legal immigration, Mr. Trump intensified a debate about national identity, economic growth, worker fairness and American values that animated his campaign last year. Critics said the proposal would undercut the fundamental vision of the United States as a haven for the poor and huddled masses, while the president and his allies said the country had taken in too many low-skilled immigrants for too long to the detriment of American workers. “This legislation will not only restore our competitive edge in the 21st century, but it will restore the sacred bonds of trust between America and its citizens,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event alongside two Republican senators sponsoring the bill. “This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first.”
13. 1982 Plyler v. Doe This Supreme Court case ruled that public school districts cannot constitutionally refuse admission to unauthorized immigrant children because the harmful effects to the public outweighed the cost savings. Every child deserves a fair chance to learn and thrive. That might seem an obvious statement today, but it took years of legal battles fought by MALDEF to ensure that “every” child did not exclude any child – particularly, immigrant children. After nearly five years of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that all children, regardless of immigration status, have a constitutional right to a free public education from kindergarten to 12th grade. The landmark case, Plyler v. Doe, grew out of a 1977 attempt by the Tyler Independent School District in Texas to oust the children of undocumented workers – farmhands, for the most part – from the school system by imposing tuition of as much as $1,000 per student to attend what were for everyone else free public schools.
14. 2018 Korematsu, Notorious Supreme Court Ruling on Japanese Internment, Is Finally Tossed Out A Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., in 1942. In upholding President Trump’s travel ban on Tuesday, the Supreme Court also overruled the case that had allowed the World War II internments as constitutional.Credit...Bettmann Archive. WASHINGTON — In the annals of Supreme Court history, a 1944 decision upholding the forcible internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has long stood out as a stain that is almost universally recognized as a shameful mistake. Yet that notorious precedent, Korematsu v. United States, remained law because no case gave justices a good opportunity to overrule it. But on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld President Trump’s ban on travel into the United States by citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also seized the moment to finally overrule Korematsu. “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority,” he wrote. Citing language used by then-Justice Robert H. Jackson in a dissent to the 1944 ruling, Chief Justice Roberts added, “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’” In a dissent of the travel ban ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered tepid applause. While the “formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue,” she said, it failed to make the court’s decision to uphold the travel ban acceptable or right. She accused the Justice Department and the court’s majority of adopting troubling parallels between the two cases. In both cases, she wrote, the court deferred to the Trump administration’s invocation of “an ill-defined national security threat to justify an exclusionary policy of sweeping proportion,” relying on stereotypes about a particular group amid “strong evidence that impermissible hostility and animus motivated the government’s policy.” The fallacies in Korematsu were echoed in the travel ban ruling, warned Hiroshi Motomura, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who has written extensively about immigration. “Overruling Korematsu the way the court did in this case reduces the overruling to symbolism that is so bare that it is deeply troubling, given the parts of the reasoning behind Korematsu that live on in today’s decision: a willingness to paint with a broad brush by nationality, race or religion by claiming national security grounds,” he said. He added, “If the majority really wanted to bury Korematsu, they would have struck down the travel ban.” The Korematsu ruling, an exceedingly rare modern example in which the court explicitly upheld government discrimination against an entire category of people based upon a trait like race or ethnicity, traced back to the early days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.
15. 1986 Americans for Border Control
17. 2006 Los Angeles Immigrant Rights March Back in 2006, tough immigration legislation introduced by US Rep. James Sensenbrenner sparked massive protests. The legislation, the Wisconsin Republican said, was a necessary response to rampant illegal immigration. Sensenbrenner’s legislation mandated faster and easier deportations, increased fines for those employing people in the country illegally — and possibly prosecuting people if they assisted the undocumented. “It not only cracked down and tried to demonize immigrants themselves, but anyone who helped,” says Matt Barreto, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who participated in the 2006 marches. “Anyone who even gave a ride, or helped in anyway, an undocumented immigrant just try to have a better life would be in violation of federal law, so it was very extreme in what it was trying to do.” After the Sensenbrenner bill passed in the House, and awaited a vote in the Senate, Latino activists began to organize. “I said we have to move,” says Armando Navarro, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, and a veteran immigration rights advocate. He organized some of the first strategy sessions in Southern California to oppose the Sensenbrenner bill, sessions where big public protests were seen as the best option. “The only political avenue that we had available to us was to take to the politics of the street. We had to show our power, our capability manifested by our numbers.” And those numbers showed up to oppose the Sensenbrenner bill, starting with a 100,000 strong protest in Chicago. But the largest demonstration was held in Los Angeles on March 25th of 2006. On that day, half a million people marched in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, making it the biggest mass gathering in the city’s history. On May 1st, organizers increased pressure by staging a day “without an immigrant” demonstrations, urging undocumented workers, from nannies to janitors to cooks, to march in the streets instead of showing up at their jobs. “We combined the power of the streets with the power of the pocketbook, meaning we would organize so that our economic power was felt, not only our political power of the streets. But our economic power of denying people profit,” says Navarro. Protesters claimed victory when the Sensenbrenner bill was defeated in the Senate. But in the decade since the 2006 marches, immigration rights advocates have spent a lot of time debating the demonstrations’ legacy. Barreto says the marches were crucial in creating an opening for initiatives such as as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows many undocumented individuals who were brought to the United States as minors to stay in the country.
18. 1965 Immigration Act The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.
19. 1960-1962: Roughly 14,000 unaccompanied children flee Fidel Castro’s Cuba and come to the United States as part of a secret, anti-Communism program called Operation Peter Pan. The Second Wave: Freedom Flights By the mid to late 1960s, a swell of discontent rose in Cuba, fed by economic hardship along with the erosion and virtual disappearance of political freedoms. In particular, when Castro closed down some 55,000 small businesses in 1968, virtually eliminating all private property, more Cubans turned against the revolution. It was now the turn of the middle- and lower-middle classes, and skilled laborers. As pressure mounted, Castro opened the port of Camarioca. Relatives from Miami came to collect those left behind in Cuba. Within weeks President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the so-called "freedom flights." By 1974, a quarter of a million Cubans had been welcomed into the United States. A small portion of the refugees arrived indirectly through countries such as Spain and Mexico.
20. 1960s Asian migrants to the United States (Stand in picture for the moment) The earliest Asian migrants to the United States were predominantly Chinese, Japanese and Filipino, but following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished a quota system that had limited immigration from non-western European countries, the Asian American population not only grew — it diversified. Prof. Ronald Takaki, who was a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in “Strangers from a Different Shore” that there were one million people of Asian descent living in the U.S. in 1965. By 1985, this number jumped to five million, or two percent of the entire U.S. population. Prior to the new immigration law, 99 percent of Asian Americans were Chinese, Japanese or Filipino, but by 1985, 12 percent of Asian Americans were Vietnamese, 11 percent Korean and 10 percent Indian. The 1965 Immigration Act ended various exclusionary immigration policies. It also set up a system of preference that favored skilled workers and the families of American citizens. This landmark piece of legislation facilitated massive new waves of Asian migration. New communities arose, such as Los Angeles’ Koreatown, and the Sikh community in Yuba City, whose temple is pictured here. As Asian migrants with more capital arrived, “suburban Chinatowns” such as Monterey Park grew.