The november election of 1996 marks the watershed that never was for Asian American politics. The reelection of Democratic president Bill Clinton to a second term, along with favorable political trends in Asian America, had Asian American political elites all but convinced that they were ascending as respected players on the national political scene. Asian American politicians and organized interest groups, aware of demographic trends, repeatedly pointed out that the Asian American population was the fastest-growing minority group in the 1990s.¹ Better still, Asian American communities had grown predominantly in Electoral College “vote-rich” states such as California, New York, Texas,...

This book investigates how Asian Americans as a racialized formation navigate the institutional setting of a national two-party system populated with strategic, goal-oriented political actors. The argument is grounded in both the specific ways in which the two-party system operates and in the dominant racialized discourses surrounding Asian bodies in the United States. I break with traditional political science scholarship in insisting on the centrality and the historical particularity of racial formation in determining the political outcomes for this group: I contend that Asian Americans, because of the historical and specific way in which they have been racialized, cannot successfully...

In may 1996 the second annual fund-raising gala of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Institute (CAPACI) drew more than twelve hundred donors from around the country to Washington, D.C.¹ Keynote speaker President William Jefferson Clinton, who had also attended the previous year, extolled the important contributions that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders had made to the United States, drawing some thirty-three rounds of enthusiastic applause. The bipartisan institute had also invited the likely Republican nominee, retired senator Robert Dole, who ultimately sent a letter of greeting in his stead with warm words for the contributions of the institute and...

Counting americans by race is at least as old as the United States itself. Its institutional roots can be found in Article 1, Section 2, clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution.¹ The Founding Fathers mandated that every ten years a comprehensive enumeration of the American population would take place. In and of itself, this did not force government counters to separate by race, but because the founders deemed enslaved blacks, euphemistically described as “all other persons,” only three-fifths of a person, and because each state was apportioned a number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives based on the...

In 1994 a major political battle of national and international resonance was fought in California over Proposition 187, a statewide initiative intended to prevent undocumented residents from utilizing state services such as public education and various forms of medical assistance.¹ Proposition 187 enjoyed the support of a majority of voters throughout California and was especially but not exclusively popular among conservatives.² Most Latinos in California and nationwide, not to mention Mexicans on both sides of the border, understood Proposition 187 to be anti-Mexican and anti-Latino.³ The initiative was fiercely fought, not least because incumbent Republican governor Pete Wilson, suffering badly...