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Article Excerpt
My idea of a perfect school is a school that has money, has all available school materials, can afford to go to field trips where students can learn with a "hands-on" experience, a school that has very good, intelligent, fun, and humorous faculty, a school that has counselors who guide students to their goals and to the right direction; a school with clean bathrooms, no graffiti; and a school with students who do not discriminate, no bad attitude, and students who are just there to learn and have fun (Cuo, journal entry, July 2, 1999).
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At various times and in a range of contexts, second-generation Laotian women in the United States are portrayed as a model minority, as refugees and perpetual foreigners, as "problems," and at-risk of becoming single mothers. In this article, I demonstrate the ways in which teenage second-generation Laotian girls challenge these discursive delineations through their participation in a leadership development and community-organizing program established by the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) in Contra Costa County, Northern California. I draw on qualitative data from my doctoral research to provide a detailed discussion of the young women's involvement in a campaign to improve academic counseling services in their high school. I also analyze the strategies and practices that arise from such struggles for social justice, and document the generation of new social capital, networks, trust, information channels, and norms that encourage and facilitate greater community involvement in collectively solving the social problems young Laotians face. In so doing, I make visible the community activism of young Asian Pacific American women, but also argue that through their participation in an environmental justice organization, which links grass-roots activism concerning environmental protection to issues of economic development, racial and social equality, and community empowerment, they demonstrate a struggle to "'win' a sense of citizenship from below" (Mac an Ghaill, 1999: 98) rather than that which is conferred by the state.
Analytical Framing
Several aspects of second-generation Laotian women's identities are salient in the context of this discussion on the politics of race and education: their identities as Asian Pacific Americans (APAs), as members of a refugee community and one of our newest immigrant groups, as well as their class, gender, age, and generation. I first briefly discuss the dominant discursive representations that shape the life experiences of this group and introduce the ways in which second-generation Laotian women transform wider frameworks of social justice, rights, and citizenship.
With respect to Asian immigrants and APAs, discourses of new scientific racism and eugenics have intersected with an orientalist (1) discourse that defined Asians as culturally and racially "other," as a "yellow peril," and as the "foreigner-within," even when born in the United States and the descendants of generations born here (Lowe, 1996: 4-6). These discourses have been the ideological underpinnings of a series of legal exclusions, disenfranchisements, and restricted enfranchisements of Asian immigrants and have resulted in the enduring images of the nation ordered around the black-white axis. In this bipolar racial order, Asian immigrants and APAs have been either positioned as "near blacks" (as in aliens ineligible for citizenship but seen as cheap exploitable labor), or "near-whites" (as in model minority) (Espiritu, 1997: 109).
In the latter case, APAs are ideologically constructed as "model minorities" because commentators view them as more socially and culturally integrated into mainstream America than are other racial and ethnic groups. (2) They "seemingly embody the Protestant work ethic to achieve their American Dream" (Ho, 2003: 149). Though this image may seem positive and laudatory, it has multiple consequences. The trenchant American belief in fairness, in socioeconomic mobility for all irrespective of race, ethnicity, or nationality, is closely linked to another enduring American myth of abundant opportunity (Wong, 1999). Thus, it thwarts any demands for social justice and pits minority groups against each other (Zhou and Lee, 2004: 18). In fact, APAs are seen as passive and as refraining from confrontation. At the same time, the model-minority image occludes the severe social class disadvantages and conditions of the Laotian community described below.
Educators have also widely portrayed APA youth as the "model minority," while peers often derogatively stereotype them as "nerds" or "geeks." As such, APA youth are seen as deviating from "normal" teenage Americans (Ibid.: 1). Beyond being stereotyped as the "super" other, APAs also experience racialization as the "foreign" other (Ibid.: 17; see also Ancheta, 1998; Gotanda, 1999). And as foreigners, APAs are seen as unassimilable and outside the United States' national imaginary, outside the hegemonic culture. In this article I demonstrate the ways in which young Laotian women challenge these culturalist constructions of Asian immigrants and APAs as foreigners and/or as the model minority through their struggle for equal social rights and claiming a sense of belonging in the American nation.
In Rethinking Youth, Wyn and White (1997) identify three approaches that remain central to youth research: youth development, youth subcultures, and youth transitions. The concept of youth development is derived from psychological theories of human development, which construct normative expectations of young people. Youth who do not conform to these norms are identified as those at-risk, requiring specific programs and practices to help them meet these expectations (Ibid.: 51-52). Kelly (2000) has also observed the tendency to construct youth as "at-risk" of delinquency, gang involvement, and teenage pregnancy. As the statistics presented below suggest, some Laotian youth have been similarly categorized.
The youth transitions approach has drawn greater attention in Europe as a "response to the failure of traditional pathways towards achieving adulthood" (Wyn and White, 1997: 94). In particular, this approach focuses on the education system and the labor market, as well as the ways in which these institutions are failing to offer all young people real pathways to adulthood and becoming productive citizens. My aim here is not to evaluate these approaches. Instead, I highlight that both perspectives view youth as passive, with their lives determined by individual psychological development and/or social institutions. Young people in general, and the children of immigrants in particular, are rarely portrayed as actively constructing their own life patterns and experiences, albeit within specific material and cultural contexts, and relations of power (for exceptions, see Alexander, 2000; Nayak, 2003).
In contrast, the wealth of studies on youth subcultures demonstrates young people's active role on the production and consumption of culture and processes of identity formation. In the 1970s, the British Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) especially influenced cultural analysis of young people. The detailed ethnographic studies associated with CCCS were, for the most part, focused on young, working-class, heterosexual white males. They adopted a Marxist conception of cultural production and redefined youth as cultural producers and consumers, rather than as delinquents and deviant, which in the United States had its antecedents in research that emerged from the Chicago School in the postwar period (Zhou and Lee, 2004: 3-7). The concept of resistance offered in these ethnographic studies viewed working-class men as agents rather than as recipients of a dominant culture and highlighted the practices, fashion, and styles of expression in their everyday lives that subverted aspects of the dominant culture (Wyn and White, 1997: 24), such as mods, Teds, skinheads, and punks.
Much of the U.S. research on youth has tended to focus on youth cultures or subcultures, such as hip-hop artists and rappers, hippies, skinheads, punks, graffiti writers, low riders, ravers, or suburban "mall rats." Zhou and Lee (2004: 1) argue that these popular images seem to exclude Asian American youth. Young Asian
Americans are celebrated as the "model minority," rather than perceived as consuming or producing youth subcultures in the way "normal" teenage Americans are perceived to do. At the same time, studies on youth subcultures have tended to equate "resistance" and "struggle" with boys, according to Gelder (1997: 86). (3) Lee and Zhou's edited volume, Asian American Youth (2004), goes some way to redress the marginalization of women in research on youth cultures. This article also contributes to filling this gap by examining young Laotian women's "resistance" and "struggle" in relation to issues of class and race.
Another aspect of many of the ethnographic studies emerging...
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