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.

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.

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 thesis explores the ways in which eisā, practiced and performed by the Ryūkyūkoku Matsuri Daiko - Los Angeles Branch (RMD-LA) is significant for the community building and cultural perpetuation of the Okinawan American youth community in Southern California. While a global art form, eisā in Southern California has been greatly overlooked because of Japanese American community hegemony, rooted in longer legacies of colonialism, militarism, and imperialism. I trace the history and transformation of eisā as it traveled from Okinawa to the United States while simultaneously attempting to fill a gap in the literature of both eisā and the Okinawan American community in Southern California. I draw upon interviews with six prominent leaders and members of RMD-LA to examine major themes that encourage community building and cultural perpetuation within the community. Lastly, I put into conversation how a gap in the literature and the dedication of eisā practitioners manifest on Southern California stages in a choreographic analysis of RMD-LA’s 25th anniversary show entitled “Gajumaru.” Through this performance, an alternative way of history-making and history-learning is enacted as Okinawan history is remembered, reproduced, and transmitted.

This project investigates the carceral connections between two groups—Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps during World War II and Vietnamese refugees following the end of the Vietnam War. By looking at the wartime logic of these U.S. racialized wars in Asia that extended domestically to impact the Japanese American incarcerees and Vietnamese refugees, my research analyzes these camps as transitional spaces of racialization. The lens of food and foodways shows how camp food encoded the dehumanization of these racialized groups of people.

Centering camp survivor stories helps elucidate the lasting impact of the carceral experience and the ways that memories of food can become tied to traumatic experiences. As counternarratives to linear progressive narratives of history, memories of food and foodways retain the potency of these alienating experiences and demonstrate how incarcerees and refugees asserted their agency through food inventiveness and protests to maintain their humanity.