Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
The Community Colleges in China Project was conceived as a way of introducing American community college concepts to China. It was felt that community colleges were both great engines of mass higher education, nimble promoters of new technologies and spurs to local economic development, just the things needed and wanted by a China making the transition from planned … Read more
Date: Friday, May 2, 2003 Time: 8:15AM to 4:30PM Place: Newman Vertical Campus – Baruch College, CUNY 55 Lexington Avenue (E. 25th Street), Room 3-150, btwn Lexington & 3rd Avenues, Manhattan
An introduction to the Community Building Initiative (CBI) at Brooklyn College with particular focus on the observations, experiences, and insights gained through our Asian Outreach efforts. A panel of Asian American/Asian faculty, staff, and students will join us in a dialogue discussion following this presentation.
Since the 1980s, as many as 200,000 mostly rural Chinese have migrated, legally and illegally, from the towns and villages outside the city of Fuzhou, on China’s southeastern coast, to New York’s Chinatown, bringing with them their religious beliefs, their religious practices and even their local deities. In recent years these immigrant laborers in Chinatown’s restaurants and garment sweatshops have established numerous specifically Fuzhounese religious communities, ranging from Buddhist, Daoist, Protestant and Catholic Christianity to popular Chinese religion.
This ethnographic study examines the central roles of these religious communities in the immigrant incorporation process in Chinatown’s highly stratified ethnic enclave. It also explores the transnational networks established between religious communities in New York and Fuzhou, including their role in transmitting religious and social constructs from China to the United States and the influence of these new US institutions on religious and social
relations in the religious revival sweeping southeastern China.
The paper highlights key demographic trends and settlement patterns of Asian New Yorkers using sources including Census and Immigration and Naturalization Service’s data. Based on these patterns underscoring dramatic growth and diversity, and the settlement of Asians in “global” neighborhoods, the paper discusses findings based on a recent community survey conducted with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The survey findings highlight common concerns and issues which inform a community-based policy and research agenda for Asian Americans in NYC.