Asian American Social Movements

Reading Reflection #1

San Francisco's Japantown

As Professor Valverde mentioned in our first lecture, the history of Asian American social movements has largely been erased. I’ve known for some time that the history of people of color often goes ignored, but it finally clicked with me just how little I’ve heard about the history of Asian Americans. In AP US History I remember learning about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but there wasn’t anything on how Asian Americans responded to this racism and their treatment as lesser than, nothing about their protests and movements.

That’s why I found “Asian Pacific Americans’ Social Movements and Interest Groups” by Kim Geron et al. to be so enlightening. The article discusses how Asian American communities have organized in the past and also how the great diversity among Asian Americans leads to some complications. One example of Asian American organization is the 1970s grassroots efforts in San Francisco’s Japanese community to protect the city’s Japantown, which helped to preserve much of the area.

Learning about such movements makes me wonder which movements have been the most successful and why.

Felicia Peng
Section A01