For early Asian immigrants, transnationalism was a typical aspect of their social practices and thinking. Displacement, travel, and resettlement ushered in simultaneous negotiations of Asian immigrants with the United States and their countries of origin. Transplanted Asians also faced another challenge. They felt compelled to continue regarding their “homelands” as an essential part of their everyday lives even while residing on U.S. soil. They were categorically excluded from the American body politic; this “othering” of Asian subjects was crystallized in their legal status as “aliens ineligible for citizenship”-the racialized label that signifi ed their collective powerlessness in the United States...

More than twenty years have passed since the overthrow of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos and twenty-five since the assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., the single greatest catalyst of their downfall. Much has transpired since. The Philippines has become one of the largest exporters of labor, sending men and women throughout the world as domestic help, entertainers, nurses, and seamen. In turn, they send remittances that buttress the Philippines’ gross domestic product. The film star Joseph Estrada, who was among the senators who voted against the retention of U.S. military bases in the Philippines,...

In the three-plus decades following the end of the war in Vietnam, Vietnamese in America and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) have maintained a paradoxical relationship, one that differs from those typically analyzed in the growing literature on migrant transnationalism.¹ Some of this has to do with the uniqueness of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) among world regimes and its unitary role in governing the rapidly developing country of 85 million; contributing to this are the unusual circumstances of Vietnam-U.S. relations and Vietnamese migration to the United States, which has occurred as a result of both “push” and...

This chapter examines the cases and contexts of two history-making electoral victories in metropolitan Boston during the past decade: that of Chanrithy Uong, the first Asian American elected to the Lowell City Council in 1999, and that of Sam Yoon, the first Asian American elected to the Boston City Council in 2005. Both examples are notable, not only because of their individual achievements, but because of their direct relationships to larger contexts of urban inequality, demographic change, and coalition building by Asian Americans with other communities of color and immigrant communities (Bui et al. 2004; Kiang 1994, 1996; Kiang and...

Nearly a decade would pass before Veronica jettisoned that sense of floating.¹ Anchored by American citizenship, she became an active participant in a collectivity of post-1965 naturalized Chinese Americans whose work speaks to a deep desire to invoke ways of belonging and membership. This identity project, at once both private and public, is highly politicized. It is manifested in the dynamics of both group and individual agency; its ultimate goal is the transformation of perceived unequal power relations (Gregory 1998). Put most succinctly, in the past two decades new Chinese activists have redrawn the Asian American political playing field in...

The relationship between the attachments of immigrants to their home country and political participation in the country of settlement is highly debated. The conventional wisdom contends that a deeper attachment to one’s home country acts as a barrier to participation in the United States. Engagement with the political issues of the country of origin is a reflection of disinterest or apathy toward American politics.

The new scholarship using a transnational perspective has questioned this conventional wisdom and points to the reality of dual attachment of immigrants in different realms of their social and political life and discusses the ways in...

This chapter examines the practice and institutional mechanisms of diasporic politics within the context of “governance without a government” to highlight its transnational and global deployment. The study of diasporic politics has followed two different paths or two phases in the development of the hermeneutics of its parameters. First, the interest was to locate it inside the arena of the nation-state to understand the political assimilation of immigrant groups into society (Esman 1986). Issues of citizenship, incorporation, and participation dominate this field of inquiry (Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001). Second, there was a shift of emphasis with a singular focus on...

It is now accepted wisdom that the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 contributed to a dramatic rise of the non-white population and a major shift in the demographic makeup of the U.S. population. Much of the attention to sustained migration from the “Third World,” however, has focused on Latinos. Although the population of foreignborn Latinos was about twice that of foreign-born Asians in the 2005 American Community Survey,¹ foreign-born Latinos were a minority of the total Latino population (40 percent), whereas foreign-born Asians were a majority of the total Asian population in the United States (62...

In October 1926, the Japanese-language newspaperNippu Jijicarried an editorial titled “Basic Problem of Second Generation.” TheNippu Jijihad both Japanese and English sections and boasted of the largest circulation in Hawai‘i as a Japanese-language newspaper. The editorial deplored what it called the tendency of many young Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) to lack Japanese virtues and claimed they imitated only “negative” characteristics of the Americans:

The children of Oriental parents are American citizens, and it goes without saying that they should Americanize. It is regrettable thing to note, however, that Americanization is understood to mean the abandonment of all...

Arif Dirlik, tracing “the idea of Asian America,” notes the paradox: How does one reconcile an Asian American movement founded in the 1960s on the reconstruction of domestic identities with the global forces that have shaped the population since?

The movement embedded the problems of Asian America in US soil. In doing so, it also endowed pan-ethnic identifi cation with normative status, so that although ethnic “disidentification” is ever present as an option (and is perhaps also found in everyday practice), it no longer seems “natural.” (Dirlik 1999: 37)

Migration and regional power shifts have placed greater pressure on the...