03 • Where Do We Fit In as Asian Americans?
15m 09s
Where we are today in 2022 and histories of resistance and resilience within Asian American communities. A look into the future for the oral history program through Self Evident's vision.
LESSON OUTLINE
1. Where we are today in 2022
2. Looking back on where we’ve been
3. Looking ahead with this oral history program
LESSON REFERENCES
Dragon Fruit Project - Lavender Phoenix (fka APIENC)
South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
Welga Archive - Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies
TRANSCRIPT
Lesson 03: Where Do We Fit In as Asian Americans?
Hello, and welcome back to Self Evident's oral history training and archiving program. This is Lesson 03: Where Do We Fit In as Asian Americans? In today's lesson, I'll walk you through first, where we are today in the year 2022. Then we're going to look back on where we've been. And then finally, we're going to look ahead with this oral history program.
Where we are today in 2022
So, where are we today in the year 2022? Oh my gosh. It feels like it's so much going on. We are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, where we've seen a rise in violence, xenophobia, discrimination, harassment, particularly against Asian communities. We've seen that our elders and women and queer folks are fearing for their safety in their everyday lives in the streets. We've also seen this pandemic disproportionately impacting communities of color, working class communities, LGBTQ communities, disability communities. We've also seen this pandemic disrupting our connections with each other, whether that's from being socially distant or being completely virtual, or just a higher, a bigger reliance on our technology.
We've also seen and continue to see in 2022 continued policing and violence against Black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian communities. We've seen this in the murder of George Floyd and continued police and state violence against Black bodies. We've seen this in the deportation of Southeast Asian communities. We've seen this in seeing Afghan refugees being turned away at our borders.
At the same time, we've seen incredible examples of communities rising up in resistance and resilience to look out for each other. We've seen this through grassroots organizing. We've seen it through mutual aid networks, where people are delivering food and groceries to their neighbors. We've seen it through phone banks just to check up on each other, see how they're doing. We've seen it in collective actions together in the streets and in our communities.
We've also seen a continuation and rise in multiracial intersectional solidarity. We've seen this through the Black Lives Matter movement. We've seen this standing up for trans lives. We've seen this even in our conversations. We've seen a rise in young, Asian community members having intergenerational conversations with their elders and with their families and their loved ones about anti-Blackness. In all of this, we have seen the rise of emerging leaders coming together with longtime leaders and organizers, who have been building with their communities for so long.
Looking back on where we’ve been
So in the mix of all of this, it feels like so much is going on, it's such a whirlwind. And it sometimes feels so overwhelming, like it's never happened before. We just don't know what to do.
But really, when we look back at our histories in this country, we see that this is not the first time that Asian communities have experienced this violence and discrimination in this country. We've seen this in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first federal law that banned an ethnic group from coming into the U S. We also saw this after 9/11 with an incredible horrible rise of Islamophobia and violence against our Muslim and South Asian communities. We also saw this during the Vietnam War, when there was so much violence happening, not only in Vietnam, but also when refugees made it over here to the U.S. and were not given the services and the support they needed to live their lives sustainably. We also saw it during the Japanese internment during World War II, when the Japanese were shipped off to camps in the middle of the country and forced to leave their homes and everything behind them, because they were seen as a national threat to security.
But just like we're seeing today, we also see countless examples of communities fighting back, sparking movements, and fostering resilience through their grassroots organizing, multiracial solidarity, and emerging and longtime leaders coming together. We saw this with the formation of the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 at the San Francisco State University. This group brought together, Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous groups and students to call for campus reform for ethnic studies. And it was one of the longest student strikes in U.S. History.
We also saw this in the Delano grape strike, which started in September 1965, which brought together an alliance between the Filipino and Mexican farm workers and was a strike that lasted for five years. And through their grassroots efforts of consumer boycotts, marches, community organizing, and nonviolent resistance, they pushed to unionize farm labor and revolutionized the farm labor movement in America.
We also see this in the New York Taxi Workers Alliance founded in 1998 to build worker power among New York City's taxi drivers. It then successfully bargained the first union charter for non-traditional workers since the farm workers in the 1960's. And was the first one ever of independent contractors, raising wages for their workers and providing support for these workers who are driving our taxis everyday here in New York City.
We also saw the rise of the Asian American Movement following the horrible murder of Vincent Chin in 1982.
So why have we never learned about these histories? I never learned about the Third World Liberation Front or the Delano grape strike during U.S. history classes. I never learned about this in movies or on TV. So let's think back again to what we did learn in school. Think back even harder this time for a time when you learned about any Asian person in school. I can say honestly that I can't remember learning about a single Asian person in any of my U.S. History classes or in my science or math or any other classes.
But we know that they were— we know we're here. We know that these stories and histories happened, but why haven't we seen them in our schools, in our museums, and TV?
Looking ahead with this oral history program
But even though I haven't learned any of these histories in school, I have been so lucky to be able to learn these histories from my neighbors, from my family, from my community members, directly from them. And I've seen how, and I've heard how these stories connect back to mine and to a larger history in this country. And I've heard these stories through these oral histories. And in this process, I've seen the way that oral histories can be used, not only to fight injustice, but also to ignite new ideas and action, like this program. And it also allows the space to bring together intergenerational conversations.
Oral history projects we admire
There have been so many examples of oral histories that have been used to ignite new ideas, social change, and we are so inspired by them. Just a handful of them are the Dragon Fruit Project, now a podcast by Lavender Phoenix, previously known as APIENC. In this project, they train young queer Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to interview and conduct oral histories with queer API elders in the Bay Area to learn about the history of activism in their neighborhoods.
We are also inspired by the South Asian American Digital Archive that encourages people within the South Asian diaspora to submit their own stories to their community archive, to piece together this larger picture of South Asian American history in this country.
We're also inspired by Vietnamese Boat People that invites survivors and refugees from Vietnam to talk about their experience coming to the U.S. and connecting those stories into a larger history.
We've also been so inspired by Disability Visibility Project that amplifies and celebrates the culture of the disability community.
We also are so inspired by the Bulosan Center's Welga Archive that so carefully documents and preserves the histories of Filipino communities during the Delano grape strike and beyond.
So we encourage you to look into and learn from these oral history projects that continue to inspire us in our oral history program today.
Our oral history program
So here we are back in 2022, but we're not just staying here. We're looking into the future, while bringing our past and present generations with us. With this oral history program, we’re really looking to enable a diverse range of Asian Americans to build the relationships and technical skills needed to document and preserve these significant histories within our communities, because we see all of us as storytellers with stories worth sharing in our day-to-day lives.
This archive aims to become a growing primary resource of firsthand experiences for unfiltered representation from the grassroots, from our everyday lives — from longtime Asian Americans learning about traditions and history brought over from Asia, to recent Asian immigrants articulating how they experienced that same history being made in the present, to potential immigrants accessing a more direct understanding about how life can be in the United States, and to Asian Americans across this entire spectrum of heritage navigating what it means for them to live as Americans moving forward.
We imagine all of these stories being integrated into school curricula, television, movies, radio, media for people far beyond Asian American communities to learn firsthand about the wide range of experiences of Asian Americans. So this oral history program is a statement that we belong here in this country, in history, and in the archives — and that we've been here all along. And we look forward to building and growing this oral history program with you.
Before the next lesson
So before you jump into the next lesson, take some time to look up these past examples of Asian American histories that you may never have learned about before, but continue to inspire us in our work. Events like the Third World Liberation Front, the Delano grape strike, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the Asian American Movement, Vincent Chin. And also think about what other events in this country's history are significant to you and your community.
And then dive into exploring these Asian American oral history and storytelling projects that inspire us in our oral history program. Like the Dragon Fruit Project Podcast, the South Asian American Digital Archive, Vietnamese Boat People, Disability Visibility Project, Bulosan Center's Welga Archive. And then, what other oral history projects do you love and are inspired by? We'd love to hear about them.
And then when you're ready and so excited and amped up to be part of making this history, then you can dive into our next lesson: Preparing Yourself as the Interviewer.