Asian American Research Journal

Existing research frameworks about Asian American panethnicity fall short in examining the contemporary university campus as a generative or negotiatory site for the ongoing development of Asian American panethnic identity. In this study, the author investigates via in-depth interviews how student organizers of Asian descent at the University of California, Berkeley, understand and employ Asian American panethnic identity as a potential tool for organizing today. 

This study centers U.C. Berkeley as a site of particular historical significance as the birthplace of the term "Asian American”, where student organizers first deployed a pan-Asian identity to unite disparate communities under a coalitional revolutionary politic during the civil-rights era. In light of the massive shifts in the demographic, socioeconomic, and political makeup of the Asian population in the U.S. since the political upheavals of the 1960s, this study aims to provide a longitudinal look at how student organizers at U.C. Berkeley today use panethnicity in ways that draw on, reimagine, or depart from this legacy on campus. 

The findings of this study will demonstrate how participants understand Asian American panethnicity in complex ways that mutually inform their work as organizers in various spaces on campus. Interviewees to date have expressed understandings of Asian American panethnicity as an externally imposed identity, normative cultural identity, or demographic identity, but also as a strategic political tool or a radically coalitional identity that they aspire to. Findings thus far have indicated a sophisticated awareness among participants of the internal tensions within an Asian American panethnic identity, noting how the broad net it casts often masks significant disparities in class, immigration history, and proximity to systems of power. For participants, panethnicity has proven to be a site of friction that informs how and when they choose to identify with singular ethnic identities, in smaller panethnic identities such as Southeast Asian or South Asian, or under the banner of Asian American. 

By examining the tensions between institutionalized definitions of Asian American identity, the heterogeneous realities of students, and of aspirations toward a truly coalitional Asian American identity, the author argues that the salience of panethnicity for student organizers is largely informed by reconciliation of internal hierarchy and contradictions that begins in their work on campus. Participants identify disaggregated approaches to student advocacy as an effective mechanism within panethnic projects. Furthermore, identification with deeply rooted systems of oppression, such as settler colonialism and racial capitalism, stand to reground panethnic identity in shared political struggle rather than a superficial or hegemonic cultural commonality. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.