Sociology 4949: Week Eight

I. Video: Becoming American--the Chinese Experience: No Turning Back

II. Takaki, chapter 8: "Searching for Gold Mountain"

A. Combination of pushes and pulls that brought Chinese men to the U.S. beginning around 1850

1. Defeat of Chinese government by Western imperial powers in the Opium Wars led to large indemnities and heavy taxes on Chinese peasants... many lost their lands

2. Economic opportunities in the U.S.: gold mining, railway construction, farm labor

B. Many viewed themselves as sojourners--planning to return to their wives and families with their earnings

1. Largely male society

2. Chinatown already in San Francisco by 1850s: why did Chinatowns develop?

3. What Chinese women came often brought forcibly as prostitutes (compare with current trafficking in women)

a. Debt peonage

b. 1870 census: 61% of 3,536 Chinese women in California listed occupation as prostitute

C. Met with racism and violence, especially when the economy turned weak

1. Effort to form railway union crushed by employers

2. Not eligible for citizenship: remember 1790 federal law limited citizenship to whites

3. Stereotypes that grouped Chinese with blacks and Indians as nonwhite... e.g. couldn't testify against whites in court

4. Eventually often self-employment the only viable way to make a living: by 1900 one in 4 employed Chinese in California worked in laundries

5. Chinese Six Companies tried to influence American policy: noted racism in treatment of Chinese, who were few in number compared with immigrants from Europe, and who were "persecuted for their virtues"

6. (Seattle)

D. Repeatedly mounted court challenges to their lack of civil rights: compare to court battles by American Indians and African Americans... a few modest victories but....

E. 1882: Chinese Exclusion Act, renewed and made "permanent" in 1892

III. Video: "Diary: Asian Minnesotans"

A. State Demography Center: "Minnesota's Immigrant Populations Continue to Increase" June 17, 2004... 8 largest groups

B. Japanese and Japanese American internment: "The real reason was economic." "To me it was totally racial."
"Psychologically it destroyed my dad." (Video later: :"Unfinished Business")

C. Interracial adoption issues: Adoption History Project

1. Restriction of adoption by governments of Korea and more recently, China.

2. Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978... Indian adoptions by white couples as the logical culmination of the boarding school policy...

D. Model minority stereotype

IV. Espiritu: "Asian American Panethnicity"

A. Panethnicity: the unification of disparate ethnic groups into a larger entity... e.g., Asian American, Latino, American Indian

B. Two dimensions

1. Conceptual: how do group members view themselves

2. Organizational: how are groups organized to pursue their interests (power and politics). This one is Espiritu's main focus

3. Conceptual: how others see them (Instructor's note: I am adding this one, although I think it's implicit in Espiritu). Do non-Asians in the United States see people as Japanese-American, Chinese-American, etc. . or are they seen as Asian? e.g., the Chinese man beheaded in Seattle the day after Pearl Harbor... Vincent Chin killed in Detroit

C. Organization of panethnic Asian American movement

1. Role of English language-- a movement that couldn't be organized before World War II because of language barriers among Asian immigrant groups and concentration in ethnic enclaves (compare with Zapatista movement in Chiapas, as more indigenous groups learned Spanish)

2. Common problem(s) (some

a. Economic discrimination (emphasized by Espiritu)... significantly less income, controlling for education (remember the Chinese American scientist in Tuesday's movie who had trained a whole series of white supervisors)

b. Lack of attention to their cultures and histories on college campuses... "Western Civilization"(my freshman year at Stanford, 1965-66) vs. ethnic studies

2. Role of campuses. e.g. 1968 "Are You Yellow?" conference at UCLA

a. Filipino students saw themselves as brown

b. Oriental (east) in relation to Europe

3. Model of black civil rights movement... more general theme of how ethnic and racial movements influence each other