Contentious Solidarities: Navigating Racialization and Alliance-Building in Korean American Immigrant Rights Work

Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with Korean American immigrant rights organizers, and the Black and Latinx organizers with which they attempt to build solidarity, this presentation explores how the aforementioned tensions unfold in activists’ daily interactions as they attempt to build an interracial solidarity movement at a moment of intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy-making.

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Asian Americans and Immigrant Rights: Keep on DREAMing?

This talk explores the close and constitutive relationship between Asian immigration and struggles for migrant justice. How can we understand the continuing impacts of the seminal role that Chinese and later Asian exclusion played in creating the infrastructure of immigration in the United States? What was the relationship between the emergence of an Asian American … Read more

Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Myth

Tiger Mom. Asian patriarchy. Model minority children. Generation gap. The mainstream discourse has drawn on many generic concepts to describe the prototypical Asian family, which have given rise to two versions of the Asian immigrant family myth. The first celebrates Asian families for upholding the traditional heteronormative ideology of the “normal (white) American family” based … Read more

Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park

Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park—with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population—from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City’s most vibrant neighborhoods. Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in … Read more