Draft: Do Not Cite Erika Lee Asian Americas 4/18/12 Chapter Fourteen Asians in the Americas as Twenty-first Century Model Minorities, Transnational Migrants, and Diasporic Citizens Contemporary Asians in the Americas are creating new, multilayered diasporic identities. Like earlier Asian immigrants, today’s new arrivals do so in a variety of ways. They are simultaneously ethnic and immigrant minorities within nations, transnational migrants who engage in two homelands, and diasporic citizens making connections across borders. These varied identities offer Asians flexibility in defining what “Chinese American,” “Japanese Brazilian,” “South Asian Canadian,” etc. mean and under what contexts. At the same time, the status of Asian immigrants in the Americas continue to be influenced by changing global politics and relations between Asia and the Americas as well as domestic race, class, and gender relations. History, too, including deliberate acts of remembering, preserving, and commemorating the roles and contributions of Asians in the Americas, has become a central part of defining what it means to be Asian in the Americas today. Immigrant Minorities Contemporary Asian immigrants in the Americas are first immigrant and ethnic minorities within specific nation states. New Chinese immigrants in the United States, for example, have helped to revive older Chinatowns in big urban centers like New York City. At the same time, they have also formed new ethnic enclaves in the suburbs, complete with Chinese-owned banks, restaurants, malls, Chinese-language newspapers. Monterey Park in southern California, where Chinese make up more than one-third of 1 Draft: Do Not Cite Erika Lee Asian Americas 4/18/12 the city’s population, has been nicknamed “the first suburban Chinatown.” Just like in the earlier Chinese communities established throughout the Americas beginning in the late nineteenth century, the high concentration of Chinese immigrant-serving businesses and services in these new ethnic enclaves ease the transition into the United States while fostering close community and homeland ties.1 Chinese in the Americas have also successfully integrated into local and national communities. In the United States, the number of elected officials of Asian Pacific American descent almost tripled from 1978 to 1000.2 In 2012, both the mayors of Oakland, CA and San Francisco, California are Chinese Americans, as is the U.S. Ambassador to China. Ambassador Gary Locke also previously served as U.S. Secretary for Commerce and was a two-term Governor in the state of Washington. In Canada, the arrival of new immigrants from Asia after 1967 coincided with the country’s adoption of multiculturalism as an official policy that encouraged the preservation of ethnic and cultural identities to assist in resettlement and adjustment in Canada.3 In Toronto, for example, recent Chinese immigrants maintain their strong 1 On the revitalization of older urban Chinatowns, see Chang, Chinese in America, 337; Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic, Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community (New York: New Press, 2005) 343-8. On Monterey Park, CA, see Timothy Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The RemakinG of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 2 Lai and Arguelles, “Politics and Civil Rights,” The New Face of Asian America, 210. 3 Canadian multiculturalism is based on equality, an emphasis on Canadian identity being comprised of ethno-cultural pluralism, choice, and the protection of civil and human rights. According to many Canadian scholars, Canadian discourses of multiculturalism have been problematic. Renisa Mawani has argued that Canadian multiculturalism erases the role of colonialism, slavery, and racism in Canada’s past and present. See Renisa Mawani, “’Cleansing the Conscience of the People’: Reading Head Tax Redress in Multicultural Canada,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 19:2 (2004) 2 Draft: Do Not Cite Erika Lee Asian Americas 4/18/12 Hong Kong identities by participating in voluntary, sports, religious, cultural, and social organizations. In Montreal, a large number of vibrant Vietnamese ethnic associations range from political organizations to students clubs and professional and religious associations. 4 These activities do not prevent new Asian immigrants from adapting to and integrating into Canada. Chinese Canadians have high rates of naturalization and view themselves as Canadian citizens, and like Chinese Americans, they have rapidly integrated into Canadian politics. A high number of Hong Kong immigrants have been elected to local office in recent years.5 In the United States and Canada, Americans and Canadians of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, South and Southeast Asian descent have also joined together in pan-ethnic and interracial alliances to advocate for civil rights and national inclusion. In Latin America, local Chinese refer to themselves as tusan, a word derived from the Chinese tushenG (local-born). Following the end of World War Two, Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Peruvians used many different strategies to retain and express 127-151, pgs. 127-130; Sherene H. Razack, “Introduction: When Place Becomes Race,” in Sherene H. Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: UnmappinG a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002) 1-14. 4 On Hong Kong immigrants’ participation in Toronto, see Valerie Preston, Audrey Kobayashi, and Myer Siemiatycki, “Transnational Urbanism: Toronto at a Crossroads,” in Vic Satzewich and Lloyd Wong, Transnational Identities and Practices in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006) 91-110, p. 100-101. On Vietnamese in Canada, see Louis-Jacques Dorais, “From Refugees to Transmigrants: The Vietnamese in Canada,” in Robert G. Lee and Wanni W. Anderson, eds., Displacements and Disaporas: Asians in the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: 2005) 170-193, 176-177, 179-184; Linda Trinh Võ, “Vietnamese American Trajectories: Dimensions of Diaspora,” Amerasia Journal 29:1 (2003) ix-xviii, x. 5 Preston, Kobayashi, and Siemiatycki, “Transnational Urbanism,” 91-110, p. 100-101. 3 Draft: Do Not Cite Erika Lee Asian Americas 4/18/12 their ethnic heritage while they sought to be included in mainstream society. Japanese Brazilians, for example, chose from hyphenated Japanese-Brazilian identities, ultra- Japanese nationalism, and brasilidade, an assimilated Brazilian identity. Many Japanese Peruvians viewed the election of nisei Alberto Fujimori as Peru’s president in 1990 as a sign that Japanese Peruvians had finally been accepted in the country.6 Transnational Migrants Just as new Asian immigrants are adapting to and integrating into their new homes, many also remain transnational migrants simultaneously connected to and at the intersections of both their old and new homelands. For example, Chinese in Mexico like Eduardo Auyón Gerardo, who was born in Guangdong, China of a Chinese father and a Mexican mother, now seek to build commercial and cultural ties between the two countries. As president of the Chinese Association of Mexicali, Auyón Gerardo leads Mexican businesspeople to China several times a year to organize bilateral trade opportunities.7 6 On “tusan,” see Pan, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, 258-259. Jeffrey Lesser explains the various forms of Japanese-Brazilian identities in “In Search of the Hyphen: Nikkei and the Struggle over Brazilian National Identity,” 50-52 (37-58) and “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei: A Short History of Identity Building and Homemaking,” in Jeffrey Lesser, SearchinG for Home Abroad, 11-13. On Fujimori, see Raul Araki, “An Approach to the Formation of Nikkei Idnetity in Peru: Issei and Nisei,” (76-89) in Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, and James A. Hirabayashi, eds., New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 7 Adrian H. Hearn, Alan Smart, and Roberto Hernández Hernández, “China and Mexico: Trade, Migration, and Guanxi,” in Adrian H. Hearn and José Luis León-Manríquez, China EnGaGes Latin America: TracinG the Trajectory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011) 139- 159, pgs. 147-148. 4 Draft: Do Not Cite Erika Lee Asian Americas 4/18/12 Some Hong Kong and Taiwanese families are literally spread across the Pacific Ocean between North America and Asia. Choosing to split up the family unit in order to pursue business opportunities in Asia and educational opportunities in the United States and Canada, “astronaut” Chinese fathers shuttle across the Pacific for business while their wives and children live and attend school in North America. Similarly, Taiwanese “parachute” kids have been left in the United States alone or with caretakers and relatives to go to school and better their chances of gaining admission to a prestigious United States university.8 These transnational “split-family households” are similar to the trans-Pacific families that working-class Chinese immigrants formed during the Chinese exclusion era from the late nineteenth century through World War Two. But unlike these earlier sojourners who often never saw their families again, today’s elite Chinese immigrants are able to travel back and forth much more frequently. New communications technology such as email, international phone service, fax, and internet communications make transnational connections much more frequent, intense, and direct. A number of Asian immigrants practice flexible and selective forms of citizenship.