Asian American Studies: History, Migration, Labor, and Racial Formations

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the social constructs of race, legislative exclusion, panethnicity, labor migration models, racial triangulation, and ethnic niches within Asian American studies.

Cultural Hegemony

The complete domination of the ruling class's world view such that it becomes the cultural norm, whereby others view it as natural, inevitable, and beneficial for everyone rather than questioning it as an artificial social construct.

Asian American Studies

An interdisciplinary field that examines the history, identity, culture, and experiences of Asian Americans.

Asian Americans

A label that originally served as a political term for self-empowerment, but is now used as a demographic term referring to anyone of Asian descent in the United States.

Race

A socially constructed biological classification based on blood quantum, genetics, ancestry, and skin color generalizations that an individual is born into.

Ethnicity

A cultural, religious, and geographic classification representing subgroups that may share biological race but differ in language, geographic origin, or culture.

Ethnic Group

People who perceive themselves as biologically and historically connected to one another and are seen by others as connected.

Arthur de Gobinau's Racial Classification

An early white supremacist eugenic classification that attempted to 'measure' race by claiming Whites are smarter and creative, Asians are naturally less aggressive but deviant, Indians are disorganized and linked to nature/animals, and Blacks are dark-skinned, sexual, violent, childlike, and suited for big-muscle labor.

Asian American Panethnicity

A political identity that emerged out of an Asian American coalition after arrival in the United States, based on the principle that ethnic similarity does not automatically equal ethnic solidarity.

1790 Naturalization Act

Legislation establishing that only free white people were permitted to become naturalized US citizens.

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Treaty under which Mexicans were legally classified as White.

1875 Page Act

Federal legislation that banned the entry of Asian women into the United States.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act

Federal legislation barring Chinese laborers from entering the US, requiring immigrants to undergo interrogation and detention at Angel Island, and driving the formation of bachelor societies.

Bachelor Society

A gender-imbalanced community composed predominantly of low-wage, working-class single Asian male laborers, created because Asian women were barred from entering the United States.

1907-08 Gentlemen's Agreement

An informal agreement that stopped Japanese laborers from immigrating to the US, while allowing Japanese women to arrive for marriage, permitting the formation of families.

1913 Alien Land Act

Legislation dictating that only individuals eligible for citizenship could own land, barring non-white Asian immigrants from land ownership.

1922 Ozawa v. US

A US Supreme Court case that legally established that Japanese people are not White and are therefore ineligible for naturalization.

1922 Cable Act

Federal law that revoked the US citizenship of American women who married non-citizens ineligible for citizenship.

1923 US v. Thind

A US Supreme Court decision ruling that South Asians are not legally White, denying them the right to naturalize.

1924 Johnson-Reed Act

The second immigration quota act in the United States, which established strict national origin immigration quotas.

1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act

Legislation establishing that Filipinos were no longer considered US nationals and subjecting them to an annual immigration quota.

1942 Executive Order 9066

A presidential executive order resulting in the forced relocation and imprisonment of approximately $112{,}000$ Japanese Americans into War Relocation Authority camps.

1952 Walter-McCarran Act

Legislation that officially eliminated race as a barrier to naturalization, allowing Asians to become naturalized US citizens.

1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act

Legislation that repealed the national origins quota system, establishing a limit of $20{,}000$ immigrants per country per year and prioritizing family reunification and skilled professionals.

Black Power Movement

A radical civil rights movement marked by a geographic shift to northern cities and a tactical transition from civil rights nonviolence to community control and self-determination, revealing systemic American oppression.

SF State Strike

The largest student strike in US history, led by the Third World Liberation Front, which fought for ethnic studies, self-determination, and coalition building across racial minority groups.

I-Hotel Evictions

An interracial and transnational housing struggle centered around the 'Serve the People' ethos, unifying activists against racism, imperialism, and gentrification.

Development of Labor Migration Model (Fig. 1.1)

A structural model showing that capitalist development causes imperialism and distorted development in the Third World (1A) while generating cheap labor demand in advanced capitalist nations (1B), which together prompt worker importation/immigration (2A, 2B), fueling further capitalist expansion (3A) and ongoing third-world underdevelopment (3B).

1960s Capitalist Crisis

An economic downturn marked by declining corporate profits and increased competition from Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs), prompting corporations to roll back modern welfare state protections.

Bimodal / Duality Economy

An economic structure divided into high-level services (such as finance, engineering, insurance, and healthcare) and low-level services (such as hospitality, building cleaning, and food service) following de-industrialization.

Colonialism

The exercise of full or partial political control over another country in order to occupy its land, open trade and commerce, and extract resources and capital.

Neocolonialism

The continued indirect exercise of economic, political, or cultural domination over former colonies after they achieve nominal political independence.

The White Man's Burden (19C)

A 19th-century euphemism for Western imperialism that framed colonization as an alleged moral duty to impose European culture, law, and civilization onto 'less developed' societies through assimilation.

Colonial Mentality

The internalized perception of ethnic and cultural inferiority developed under foreign rule, manifesting as personal shame, embarrassment, and self-doubt regarding one's own culture.

Yellow Peril

A xenophobic racial trope and colonial discourse depicting East Asians as a threatening, encroaching danger to the Western world.

The Model Minority Myth

A divisive stereotype that frames Asian Americans as hardworking, law-abiding, and academically successful to deny systemic racism, valorize them over Black Americans, and mask community disparities.

Field of Racial Positions

Claire Jean Kim's two-axis model mapping racial groups, where Asian Americans are positioned relative to Whites and Blacks along a vertical axis of relative valorization and a horizontal axis of civic ostracism.

Relative Valorization

The vertical process in racial triangulation where the dominant white group valorizes Asian Americans relative to Black Americans to argue that Black disadvantage is cultural rather than structural.

Civic Ostracism

The horizontal process in racial triangulation where Asian Americans are constructed as unassimilable perpetual foreigners, barring them from full insider status within the body politic.

Brain Drain

The emigration of highly educated, credentialed professionals from developing countries to advanced economies that absorb their intellectual capital without bearing their educational costs.

Forever Foreigner Stereotype

The persistent assumption that Asian Americans are outsiders who do not genuinely belong in the United States, regardless of citizenship, generational status, or degree of assimilation.

Miscegenation

Marriage or sexual relations between individuals belonging to different racial or ethnic classifications.

Dalip Singh Saund

The first Asian American individual elected to the United States Congress.

Patel Motels

A family-run motel enterprise developed through chain migration, resulting in Indian Americans owning approximately $50\%$ of all motels in the United States.

Chain Migration

A migration mechanism wherein earlier immigrants facilitate the arrival, transit, housing, and employment of relatives and acquaintances.

Delano Manongs

Elderly Filipino agricultural laborers, including leaders such as Larry Itliong, who organized alongside Cesar Chavez in the United Farm Workers (UFW) to fight exploitative stoop labor.

Pink-Collar Labor

An employment sector consisting of service and care-work jobs that have historically and structurally been dominated by women, such as nursing and domestic care.

Ethnic Niche

The marked concentration and overrepresentation of a specific ethnic minority group within an occupational sector, often expanding into a transnational enterprise.

The Golden Venture

A smuggling ship carrying undocumented Chinese migrants that ran aground in 1993, resulting in prolonged immigration detention for the majority of the survivors.

1.5 Generation

Immigrant individuals who were born in another country but moved to the host country at a young age.

Satellite Babies

Children born in the United States to immigrant parents who are sent back to their parents' home country to be raised by extended family until they reach school age.

Ethnoburb

A suburban, multiethnic residential and business cluster in a major metropolitan area where a specific ethnic minority group maintains a significant population concentration.

Vincent Chin

A Chinese American draftsman murdered in Detroit in 1982 by autoworkers who conflated him with Japanese competitors, sparking nationwide panethnic Asian American organizing.

Pre-1965 vs. Post-1965 Structural Transition

A historical shift from race-based exclusion, bachelor societies, and manual labor niches to country caps, family reunification, skilled worker preferences, gender balance, and a bipolar labor market.

Cycle of Scapegoating

The recurring pattern in US history wherein Asian Americans are targeted during national crises, moving across economic anxiety (1880s Chinese laborers to 1980s Japanese auto rivalry), national security threats (1940s Japanese internment to post-9/11 profiling), and disease nativism (19th-century Chinatowns to the COVID-19 pandemic).

The Subservient Worker Concept

A racialized labor concept presuming Asian laborers are inherently docile, detail-oriented, and averse to collective union organizing, which funnels them into low-advancement and high-stress positions.