Week 1: "Four Prisons' and the Movements of Liberation" Response

Joshua Rivera

Asian American Studies - A01

Blog/Week #1

“Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation” by Glenn Omatsu focuses on the prisons (history and geography, history, society’s social and class structure, oneself) and the difficult journey that Asian-Americans had to go through from their early immigration years in the 1960s to the twenty-first century. Originally, the majority of Asian-Americans fought for the same rights such as housing opportunities and employment equality in order to better their lives. However, as time progressed, the Asian-American population began to fracture as those who originally came during the early years of immigration grew old and those born in the United States began to adopt a more western way of thinking through ideologies such as individualism and capitalism. This fracture poses a very difficult future for Asian-Americans because the number of individuals with the original desire to fight for equality within a common group through grassroots organizations has begun to decrease while the number of individuals (or neo-conservatives as the reading states) has begun to increase due to being born in a different time period, with a separate set of conditions such as western education. This offset compels those with the experience of immigration to raise social awareness for their cause for support.

Question: In what ways can the first generation of immigrants teach their children and newer generations of immigrants how to fight for equality and against exploitation?