Lecture: Asian American and Pacific Islander Experiences II: Reopening, Movement, and the Pacific
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 12
Opening
Picture a family reunion in a park. Someone goes around the picnic table asking the same question: "Where are you from?" The grandmother names a town across an ocean. Her son names the city where he grew up. His daughter names the street she lives on, and the person asking says, "No, where are you really from?" Three answers, and every one of them is true. You may have heard that question yourself, or asked it. In this lecture, I want you to hear the history behind each answer.
Here's where we are. In Week 3 you learned the line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples. In Week 10 you read the Delano grape strike. And in Week 11 you read the closed door: the exclusion laws, the Immigration Act of 1924, and Executive Order 9066.
This week the door reopens, and the story widens. We'll walk through seven ideas: the immigration law of 1965, the name "Asian American", the model-minority image, refugees and the law of 1980, Native Hawaiian history, the apology of 1993, and the federal categories. One word about names first. "Asian American" is a political term coined in 1968. Specific communities are named by their own names. And Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are their own group, not folded into Asian American.
1. The door reopens in 1965
Imagine a club with a guest list. Each member may bring only a set number of guests, and the number depends on where the member's family came from. Some families can bring many. Others can bring almost none. Then one year the club throws that list away and says: bring your close relatives, and bring people with skills we need.
That's the change you're about to read. A national-origins quota is a yearly cap on the number of immigrants admitted, set by the country a person comes from. That system was built in 1924. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is the federal immigration law, signed in October 1965, that abolished the national-origins quota system and gave preference to family reunification and to skilled workers. Family reunification means admitting an immigrant because a close relative already lives in the country as a citizen or permanent resident.
Count the years. From 1924 to 1965 is 41 years of deciding who could come mostly by where a person was born.
Now let's meet the course's running archive. It's an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, and its excerpts are constructed for this course. E3 is a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s after the 1965 law, interviewed in the 2010s. The nurse says there was hardly a way in before 1965. After the new law, hospitals needed nurses, and the nurse's training counted. The nurse came alone in 1972, 7 years after the law. Five years later, in 1977, the nurse sponsored a sister. Later the sister sponsored her husband. And the nurse says it took the family 20 years, so the chain ran from 1972 to 1992.
Here's what I want you to notice. People see that big family now and think they all came at once. They didn't. The skilled-worker preference brought the nurse, and family reunification brought the sister. The family came one sponsorship at a time.
Pause and try this. E3's family came under the 1965 law. Which of the law's two preferences brought the nurse, and which brought the sister?
Match each person to one preference.
Here's the answer. The skilled-worker preference brought the nurse, because hospitals needed nurses, and family reunification brought the sister, because the nurse sponsored her. One family used both doors in the same law.
And one more thing about the 1965 law. It wasn't a law about Asian immigrants only. The quotas it abolished had covered many nationalities, European ones included. So it changed the rules for immigrants from many parts of the world.
2. Many communities, one chosen name
Think of a campus club that brings students of many backgrounds together under one name. One member's family is from the Philippines. Another's is from Korea. A third member's grandparents came from China. They pick one name so they can speak louder together, and none of them stops being who they are.
That's what happened with the words "Asian American". In 1968 the founding members of the Asian American Political Alliance at Berkeley, including Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, coined Asian American as a political and cultural term to join communities with different histories. That was 3 years after the 1965 law.
Now put it on the course's movements thread. The San Francisco State strike began in November 1968, the same year. Then in 1969 a Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley, co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance, pressed for ethnic studies there. That's 1 year after the term was coined. The group that named itself was helping to build the field you're studying.
And call back Week 10. The Delano grape strike of 1965 was begun by more than 800 Filipino farmworkers, and Mexican American farmworkers joined them. Filipino Americans were organizing before the name "Asian American" existed. The name gave communities like theirs a way to stand together. The Asian American movement is the campus and community organizing of the late 1960s and after that joined people of many Asian communities under one political name to press for ethnic studies and civil rights.
Pause and try this. A classmate says "Asian American" names one group with one history. What was the term made to do instead?
Think about the campus club.
Here's the answer. It was made in 1968 to join communities with different histories, not to erase their differences. So you use it for the coalition, and you name the specific community when you mean one.
3. A stereotype that sounds like praise
Has anyone ever praised you as part of a group? "You people are always so good at this." It sounds like a compliment. But it says nothing about you as a person, and it quietly says something about everyone outside the group.
A stereotype is a fixed, oversimplified belief about a whole group that is applied to each of its members, whatever the person in front of you is actually like. The model-minority image is the stereotype that pictures Asian Americans as one group that succeeded through its own effort and needs no help. An article by Petersen, from 1966, called "Success Story, Japanese-American Style", in The New York Times Magazine, is usually credited with popularizing the image. That's 2 years before the term "Asian American" was coined.
I'm going to teach this image as a stereotype to examine, never as a description. The field's critique has three parts. First, the image flattens many communities into one. Second, it hides poverty and discrimination within them. Third, it's used to blame other groups, as if unequal outcomes came from effort alone and not from laws and institutions.
Here's a short story to hold onto. Picture a tutoring business that prints a sentence on its brochure: "Asian American students prove that any group can succeed without help." Read it against the three parts. Which communities? It names none, so it flattens. What about the students in those communities who need help? It hides them. And what does "any group can succeed" say about everyone else? It blames them, and it skips every law you've read in this course.
Pause and try this. Which part of the critique does the phrase "any group can succeed without help" show most directly?
Ask whom the phrase is aimed at.
Here's the answer. It shows the third part, blaming other groups. It implies that groups with unequal outcomes failed by their own fault, which leaves out the laws and institutions that shaped those outcomes.
4. Refuge is a different road
Now picture a family that didn't plan to move at all. One season they're at home. A few months later they're in a camp in another country, waiting for someone to say they can go somewhere safe. That's a different road from the nurse's.
A refugee is a person who flees their country because of persecution or the fear of it and is admitted under refugee law. According to the National Archives, between 1975 and 1979 about 300,000 refugees from Southeast Asia were admitted through presidential action. We say that figure in words, with its source. Then the Refugee Act of 1980 defined a refugee as a person with a "well-founded fear of persecution" and created the Office of Refugee Resettlement. That came 5 years after the first admissions.
The archive has a voice for this, too. E5 is 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. At school, she was seated in the back with a dictionary. One teacher stayed after class to help her with English. By her last year she was translating for her parents at the doctor and the bank. And when people ask where she's from and she names this town, they ask again.
That last line names something. The perpetual-foreigner stereotype is the belief that some Americans, whatever their birthplace or citizenship, are always from somewhere else. You hear it in the follow-up question, "where are you really from?" It's the same question the granddaughter heard at the reunion.
Pause and try this. E5 names her town and gets asked again. What belief does the second question reveal?
Listen to the word "really" in your head.
Here's the answer. It reveals the perpetual-foreigner stereotype, the belief that she must be from somewhere else no matter where she lives. The question had already decided she couldn't be from here.
5. The border moved over Hawaii
Imagine your town stays exactly where it is, but the border moves. One year you live in an independent country with its own government. A few years later you live inside another country's territory, and you never packed a bag. That's what annexation does: one country formally takes another territory into itself.
The Kingdom of Hawaii was the independent Native Hawaiian nation that governed the Hawaiian Islands until it was overthrown in January 1893. The United States annexed the islands by joint resolution in July 1898, 5 years after the overthrow. A joint resolution is a measure passed by both houses of Congress that, once approved, has the force of law.
So where do Native Hawaiians belong in the field's map? They are the Indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, a colonized or incorporated people who became part of the United States through annexation rather than immigration. That's Week 3's line. And there's a comparison across groups. In Week 9 you read the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, from 1848, when the border moved over Mexicans in the ceded lands. The annexation of Hawaii came 50 years later. Neither people immigrated. The border moved over both.
One more rule. Native Hawaiians are not a people of the past. They live in Hawaii and across the country, and we speak of them in the present tense.
Pause and try this. A summary calls Native Hawaiians an immigrant group. Using Week 3's line, how do you fix it?
Ask who moved: the people or the border.
Here's the answer. Native Hawaiians are a colonized or incorporated people, the Indigenous people of the islands, who became part of the United States when it annexed Hawaii in 1898. They didn't immigrate; the border moved over them.
6. Reading an apology
Think of an apology you got that came with nothing else. Someone said they were sorry, and that was all. Then think of one that came with something repaired. Both were apologies, but they did different things.
In 1993, Congress approved a resolution that apologizes to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. That's 100 years after the overthrow. Let's read it in the field's order. What does it say? It apologizes for the overthrow. Who made it? Congress, by joint resolution. Whom did it affect? Native Hawaiians, a people who live in Hawaii and elsewhere. What does it leave out? Its last section says that nothing in it is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.
And what does a comparison add? In Week 11 you read the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It apologized for the incarceration of Japanese Americans and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person who had been incarcerated. The apology to Native Hawaiians came 5 years later. One apology came with a payment; the other says it settles no claims.
I'm not going to tell you what any apology should have included. That's not this course's job. Your job is to read what each text says and does.
Pause and try this. What is one difference between the 1988 law and the 1993 resolution?
Think about what came with each apology.
Here's the answer. The 1988 law paired its apology with a payment of 20,000 dollars to each survivor, while the 1993 resolution apologizes and says it settles no claims. An apology names a wrong, and what it does about the wrong is a separate question.
7. Counted apart on the form
Picture a form with one box that holds two different groups at once. Anyone who checks it is counted the same way, whatever their history. If you belong to the smaller group, your community disappears inside the larger one in every count.
That's what the 1977 federal categories did. There were 4 race categories, and one of them was "Asian or Pacific Islander". In the 1997 revision, that box was divided into "Asian" and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. So the count rose by one, from 4 to 5 minimum race categories. That was 4 years after the apology. And in 2024 the combined question lists "Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander" among 7 minimum categories.
Remember Week 2's rule. A federal category is the issuing body's category, not a biological group. The office that sets them, OMB, called its 1997 categories a social-political construct. So when a box splits in two, the people didn't change. The form did.
Pause and try this. In 1997 the federal categories went from 4 race categories to 5. Which box was split, and into what?
Think about which groups shared one box.
Here's the answer. The 1977 box "Asian or Pacific Islander" was split into "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander". That change let Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders be counted as their own group.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The 1965 law abolished the national-origins quotas after 41 years and favored family ties and skills, for immigrants from many parts of the world. E3's family came one sponsorship at a time over 20 years. In 1968 the Asian American Political Alliance coined "Asian American" to join communities with different histories. The model-minority image is a stereotype that flattens, hides, and blames. Refugees from Southeast Asia came by a different road, and the Refugee Act of 1980 defined that road; E5's story shows the perpetual-foreigner stereotype. Native Hawaiians are an incorporated people, overthrown in 1893 and annexed in 1898. The 1993 resolution apologized, and its own text says it settles no claims. And from 1997, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have their own federal category.
Later in this module, the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz let you work with these ideas yourself. The Community History Workshop then asks you to compare the two apologies on your own. Next week, in Week 13, the course traces immigration, citizenship, and belonging across groups, starting with who could become a citizen under the first naturalization law.
Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com