Week 12 — Three Roads, Not One Story: Reopening, Movement, and the Pacific on the Timeline — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — place this week's laws and movements on the timeline, read two accounts beside the record, and explain to someone who has it wrong why Asian American and Pacific Islander histories are not one story.

This week you met the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Asian American movement and the term Asian American, the model-minority image and its critique, Southeast Asian refugees and the Refugee Act of 1980, and the history of Native Hawaiians from the overthrow to the apology. In this assignment you work four short problems on the timeline, interpret each one, and explain this week's ideas to someone who has them wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Community History Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 3's line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples, on Week 9's Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), and on Week 11's Immigration Act of 1924 and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The task

The law-and-case timeline is the course's list of dated laws and events, each year taken from the issuing body's own page, and the cross-group threads trace one kind of law or movement across groups. The course's running archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection built for this course; its excerpts are identified by role and decade and are not real people's words. Its E3 excerpt comes from a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 immigration law, interviewed in the 2010s: the nurse came alone in 1972, sponsored a sister five years later, the sister later sponsored her husband, and the family's chain took twenty years. Its E5 excerpt comes from a woman who resettled as a refugee in the early 1980s, interviewed in the 2010s: her family waited two years in a camp before a church group sponsored them, and when she names this town as where she is from, people ask again.

A coworker at an illustrative public library is drafting a heritage-month display titled "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: One Immigrant Success Story." Your job is to answer the way an ethnic studies reader would, starting from a few plain dates on the timeline.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

On the law-and-case timeline, the Immigration Act of 1924 built the national-origins quota system, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished it. How many years did the quota system last?
On the movements thread, Petersen's article usually credited with popularizing the model-minority image appeared in 1966, and the Asian American Political Alliance coined the term Asian American in 1968. How many years apart are the article and the term?
On the law-and-case timeline, the first refugees from Southeast Asia were admitted through presidential action in 1975, and the Refugee Act came in 1980. How many years after the first admissions did the Refugee Act come?
On the law-and-case timeline, the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown in 1893, and Congress apologized to Native Hawaiians in 1993. How many years passed between the overthrow and the apology?

Beside each count, add one brief interpretation:

Problem 1: place the archive's E3 excerpt (illustrative) on the timeline and name one thing E3 shows that the text of the 1965 law leaves out, and explain why the 1965 law was not a law about Asian immigrants alone.
Problem 2: explain what the term Asian American was coined to do, and apply one part of the field's three-part critique to show why the model-minority image is a stereotype rather than a description.
Problem 3: place the archive's E5 excerpt (illustrative) on the timeline and explain how a refugee's road differs from an immigrant's under the 1980 definition, and name the stereotype in the question E5 hears again.
Problem 4: explain that Native Hawaiians are a colonized or incorporated people who became part of the United States by annexation in 1898, not immigrants, and say what the 1993 apology resolution says it does not do.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your coworker's display title treats many communities as one immigrant success story. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains that the term Asian American was coined in 1968 to join communities with different histories, that the model-minority image is a stereotype the field critiques rather than a description, and that Native Hawaiians are not immigrants at all but the Indigenous people of islands the United States annexed in 1898. Name one limit, such as that a single display cannot tell every community's story, so it should name specific communities by their own names. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who says every song on a playlist labelled with one region's name must come from one tradition. Model message: "The label tells you how the playlist was sorted, and that is a fair place to start. But a region holds many languages and histories, and a song from one corner can sound nothing like a song from another. One honest caveat: a label is a shortcut for the listener, so read the song credits before you decide where a song comes from."

Use that pattern for your coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Your reflection. After you check your draft, write two or three sentences on one of these, your choice: (a) which source, the dated record or the E3 and E5 accounts, changed your thinking more, and why; or (b) which word or phrase in your first draft you replaced, and what the new wording gets right.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the four counts, each with the years and the arithmetic shown, and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to your coworker, explaining the coalition behind the term, the stereotype, and the annexation, with one limit;
your reflection, on the option you chose; and
a one-line restatement of the years you used, so your counts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch with a short explanation. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Describe E3 and E5 only as the course describes them, name people only by role, name groups as their members most commonly name themselves, and never present a stereotype as a description of any group. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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