This ethnographic, sociological, and historical project explores the underrepresented diversity of experiences of elderly first-generation Korean women living in Little Tokyo Towers, and critically analyzes how gender, class, age, and homeland experience have impacted the ways that they navigate their relationships with their Japanese American neighbors, as well as within their own Korean community. Through my collection of oral histories, this project opens a window into examining an array of issues that challenge popular assumptions about the elderly, inter-ethnic relations, and community formation.

Chamorros are the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. This region's long colonial history can be seen in the strong presence of Catholicism. As a part of the Catholic religion, the rosary prayer is used for many occasions including, death. This particular rosary prayer is known in the Chamorro language as a lisåyo. Drawing on twelve interviews, newspaper articles, and several scholarly works I explore how the lisåyo is an important space for examining aspects of Chamorro traditions. Just as these traditions continue to be perpetuated, they are nonetheless in flux, renegotiated in response to the changing socio-economics of Chamorros wherever they may be. One example I discuss is the role of the techa or prayer leader. The role is seen as a powerful position for Chamorro women within their community and continues to perpetuate the Chamorro culture by teaching its language and values. However, this role has undergone changes as perceptions of the techa become feminized in response to larger flows of power such as capitalism, Catholicism, and migration. Due to these continuous forces, the future of the role of the techa and the rosary practice remains unknown as they continue to impact how Chamorros practice and perceive their traditions. As second-generation Chamorros in Southern California reexamine what it means to be Chamorro away from the Mariana Islands, the rosary practice and its future remains unclear. This thesis addresses the concerns and perspectives of Chamorros living on the Mariana Island of Guam and second-generation Chamorros living in Southern California, exploring how these narratives paint a larger picture of Chamorro culture change and adaptation.

Pacita Todtod (married name Bobadilla) was a Filipino American actress and singer, as well as community leader and editor-in-chief of the Philippines Mail, a Filipino American newspaper. Through Todtod’s performances and written works, we can observe the complex power dynamics of race and gender in the colonial context of American paternalism in the Philippines during World War II, and in the local politics of Filipino American migrant communities in Northern California. Todtod advocated for Filipino women’s political participation, representing a specifically Filipina form of nationalism, a controversial position at the time. Her sudden and quiet departure from the Mail signaled the end of her journalism career, cutting short what potentially was the start of a Filipino woman’s bright future in politics. Despite the mysteries surrounding her life, this paper seeks to reconstruct the story of Pacita Todtod as a partial window into the Filipino American women’s world of the 1940s.

Started in 2019, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship (SAF) is a six-month long program for Japanese American and Muslim American young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who desire to build transformative relationships, receive political education, and participate in multi-disciplinary arts and creative expression workshops. Therefore, the SAF program is a unique opportunity for youth of color to engage in creative, healing justice frameworks to develop deeper understandings of personal and family histories, and to resist larger structures of Islamophobia and white supremacy. When the COVID-19 pandemic presented programming difficulties to hosting SAF retreats in-person in 2020, the Vigilant Love team adapted the SAF program to virtual and hybrid modalities, maintaining the program’s core missions while also creating a system of care for SAF participants who experienced heightened stress during the pandemic. In this case study, I draw on interviews with SAF alumni and the Vigilant Love leadership team to examine the ways that the SAF program not only pursued its goals for inter-spiritual and multi-ethnic community-building but also reveals needed alternative models for youth of color leadership development by grassroots community-based organizations.

I argue that within the current landscape of non-profit and grassroots community work, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship offers a timely model of youth-centered organizing, inspired by themes of interracialism and “serving the people” from the Asian American Movement and the Third World Left. Promoting accessibility through hybrid, online retreats and ensuring community care through mindfulness and creative-expression activities were a few of the ways that the Vigilant Love facilitation team responded to recent moments of precarity and stress. This case study considers how a community-based organization has sought to build “solidarity” and “community” through an accessible youth-centered program revolving around queer and trans-affirming politics, sustainable mentorship pipelines, and deep political education for their constituents.

This project uses La Fiesta de Los Angeles, a multiethnic parade, as an entry point into understanding ethnic and race relations in Los Angeles, California from 1894-1903. Expanding upon historical research and theoretical frameworks that explore the intersectionalities of race, gender, class, and nationality within La Fiesta de Los Angeles, this project investigates how the development of a racialized Los Angeles in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries offers important historical perspectives for the United States. It focuses on the Chinese community in Los Angeles and their participation in the parade and endeavors to recognize their exercise of agency, however limited. Photographs and postcards of La Fiesta are used to glean clues about the development of the Chinese American community and how they sought to present themselves. In La Fiesta, the Chinese used their culture as capital to combat prejudice and create business opportunities. In appealing to American Orientalist imagination, the Chinese were able to craft their own representation in a way that increased their popularity (even if temporarily) in American society and staked a claim to a sense of belonging in Los Angeles.

“[W]omen are…believers in muscular manhood. These lank, scrawny limbs…he was more like a woman than a man.”–1870

“What other men visit salons to get, the Asian gene pool provides for free…ladyboy fingers: soft and long.”–2004

Despite a difference of over a century in publication dates, these excerpts from popular periodicals evince remarkably similar imaginings of the Asian male body. This correspondence is indicative of the ways in which contemporary non-normative constructions of Asian American masculinity suggest a historical linearity rooted in early American conceptions of Asian immigrant men.

As the first group of Asian immigrants to warrant social visibility, an exploration of the social figuration of early Chinese immigrant laborers can serve as a basis for understanding this popularization of emasculation. Specifically, to the extent that this group also formed the foundational basis for a seemingly extant legacy of deviance today, an examination of how these pioneer Chinese men were descriptively bounded within popular spaces can expose both the parallels and points of departure from which we can more fully understand contemporary Asian American masculinity.

This paper analyzes the textual imagery of Chinese immigrant laborers as captured in popular periodicals and print media between 1850 and 1924. In exploring perceptions of Chinese masculinity during this period, the projection of deviance is examined through three lenses of Chinese male non-normative constitution: the diasporic attribution of otherness as non-White aliens, queer domesticity as defined by family and occupation, and most visibly within the perceived and material deficit of agency.

This study explores how Hmong refugee women living in Wisconsin have gained valuable knowledge and skills in their church eggroll fundraiser and the stakes of supporting community ties as first-generation Hmong American women. Through this eggroll fundraiser, I look at refugee women’s paid and unpaid labor at two sites: their company jobs where most are employed in metal and plastic industries and their church community. In the Company of Hmong Women is a research thesis that centers the voices of nine Hmong women to present their stories of resilience and resistance in Wisconsin. By focusing on women’s contribution to their communities, this highlights the ways they have navigated and acquired social capital within and outside their Hmong community.

Community cultural wealth is a critical lens through which to recognize alternative forms of capital in communities of color. This approach aims to center the experiences of people of color and acknowledge histories of resistance against U.S. capitalistic demands that make immigrant and refugee communities disposable. The site of the Hmong women’s eggroll fundraiser is one that shows how they are producing and using knowledge, building their community cultural wealth and collective resistance. By looking at these stories, I highlight how Hmong refugee women are making vital contributions to sustain their community ties in Wisconsin.

In the 1910s, an Indian prince and a white American socialite made history by falling in love, and eventually eloping and marrying each other. The romantic relationship of Inayat Khan, an elite and famous musician from Baroda in India, and Ora Ray Baker, an upper-class woman born in New Mexico in America, is a unique case in the context of early-20th-century race relations. They not only challenged racial barriers through their courtship and marriage, but also spearheaded the religious Sufi Movement in the West.

This thesis explores how race, class, gender roles, and spirituality played important parts in constructing Inayat and Ora’s story. Race affected them by determining how Inayat was received in the United States and presenting an obstacle, as they faced disapproval and danger in pursuing their interracial relationship. Class influenced the demographics of the Sufi movement, as well as allowing Inayat and Ora to cross paths in the first place, due to their both having elite social status. Examining their relationship in the context of the gender roles of the era, Inayat and Ora appear progressive in some ways, breaking certain conventions, while adhering to other traditions, including Ora’s responsibility for doing the domestic labor for their family and Inayat’s relatives. The couple’s spiritual beliefs formed the heart of their movement that made a mark in Europe and the United States. Overall, examining Ora’s and Inayat’s interracial and international romance, which lasted until his death in 1927, reveals truths about the environment of the time and place.

From the Garden to the Streets: Working-Class Immigrant Foodways as Resistance in a Gentrifying Los Angeles Chinatown explores how foodways traditional to working-class senior immigrants in Los Angeles Chinatown provide grassroots organizing tools and epistemological frameworks to challenge gentrification, exercise the right to the city, and reimagine community health. Through both a research thesis and a community-oriented storybook presenting creative text, photographs, and visual illustrations, From the Garden to the Streets centers these seniors and their life experiences in relation to their sense of well-being, self-determination, and collectivity. Foodways provides a critical lens to explore the intersection of race, class, and space in the neighborhood, while their stories paint a complex and multidimensional narrative of Chinatown.

An unsustainable and inequitable form of neoliberal economic development facilitated by capitalist structures of power, gentrification is an intentional process of racial, spatial, and economic segregation. It aims to physically and figuratively erase the livelihoods and narratives of working-class senior immigrants who are deviant to the state. The sites of gardens and informal food economies produce knowledge and social networks that foster the community’s cultural wealth and collective power for resistance. Ultimately, these sites produce anti-capitalist politics that have the potential to actualize a vision of an equitable Chinatown that continues to support the poor, the elderly, and immigrants. Highlighting their narratives, thus utilizing their knowledge production as tools to address gentrification, renders possible working-class senior immigrants’ seemingly impossible continued existence in the midst of a gentrifying Chinatown.

This project uses oral histories and ethnographic accounts to explore the founding, history, and community building efforts of Satrang, the South Asian American LGBTQ community organization in Los Angeles. Through the three examples of the Coming Out Day Parade, the Coming Out Coming Home Workshop, and Satrang's online presence, the project critically analyzes how individuals comprising Satrang, as well as the organization itself, negotiate a collective visibility that reflect the complex identities and needs of its members. Furthermore, the project disrupts the homonormative narrative of “coming out” as an ideal by demonstrating how Satrang members are flexibly disclosing their identities as LGBTQ people of color.