Changing Neighborhood: Ethnic Enclaves and the Struggle for Social Justice

Michael Liu and Kim Geron

From the Journal Social Justice by permission of the authors, all rights reserved

Introduction and Overview
One of the legacies of the Asian American experience is the formation of distinctive ethnic neighborhoods. Today, new forms of enclaves have taken shape distant from the downtown locations of the traditional urban enclaves of Chinatown and Japantowns. Yet, since the late 1960s, it is within such urban sites that Asian Americans have most intensely mobilized and built their organizational resources for social justice. This article will focus on Asian American activism in urban communities, particularly traditional Asian ethnic enclaves, around land use, affordable housing, labor and community preservation. In doing so, we explore the questions of why struggles unfolded in enclaves, drawing and building activism within Asian American communities, and what the continuing relevance of ethnic enclaves is to Asian Americans' struggle to achieve social justice.

To understand the role that ethnic enclaves play in the economy and politics of the Asian American community, we provide a brief history and description of the types of Asian ethnic enclaves follows. We examine the historic intersection and evolution of enclaves and social justice organizing, the roles that community activists exhibited in ethnic enclave-based struggles, the contemporary state of enclave activism, and the prospects for continuing activism.

Ethnic enclaves, specific localities where ethnic minorities congregate, have been characterized as possessing three common features: co-ethnic owners and employees, spatial concentration, and sectoral specialization (Logan, Alba and McNulty, 1994). Viewed instrumentally, enclaves provide protection from hostile elements in society, aid in the retention of cultural norms (including language), offer work in, and sometimes the option of owning an intra-ethnic business, and allow for participation in community, religious and cultural organizations and residence with members of the same ethnic group.

Changing Character of Enclaves
Since ethnic enclaves have evolved from locations in central cities to suburban enclaves, it is necessary to develop a taxonomy of Asian American enclaves that illustrates the four distinctive types:

Traditional enclaves are neighborhood communities forged before World War II by Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants. Housing segregation and discriminatory laws forced Asian immigrants into urban ethnic enclaves. They created their own institutions and their own internal labor markets (Pascual, 1996). These communities evolved into centers for residential housing, community and religious organizations, ethnic shopping, and employment. Enclaves were a means for protection and survival; as such, members of the ethnic community defended them from extinction. Traditional Chinatowns, Japantowns, and the International District in Seattle are current examples of this form of enclave.

Satellite enclaves developed after the 1965 Immigration Act brought new immigrants in large numbers to urban centers. Traditional enclaves were already overcrowded, and the new immigrants formed these new enclaves to provide residential space and easy access to the traditional enclave for goods and services. The Richmond District in San Francisco, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and Quincy in Massachusetts are representative of this type of enclave. For example, Quincy is described as a “One-Step-Up” enclave that in the 1980s saw Asian Americans beginning to settle in this town located adjacent to Boston. The residents are mostly families, with middle class incomes, who maintain close ties to Boston’s Chinatown (Chung, 1995).

New Enclaves formed as new economic enclaves to fill a void for the new immigrant and refugee population. Ethnic entrepreneurs first create stores that provide goods and services to the ethnic community. These enclaves may or may not have a residential component. South Asians, Koreans, refugees from Southeast Asia have all built new enclaves. Often cities have encouraged the development of these enclaves as the new immigrants have revitalized blighted or underutilized land. Little Saigon in Westminster, California, and Little India in Artesia, California are examples of this form of enclave. 

Ethnoburbs are suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas. The local context of the ethnoburb characteristically has a strong ethnic economy, with strong ties to the global economy. Ethnoburbs are also multi-ethnic communities, in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration, but not necessarily a majority (Li, J., 1998). Most of these suburban communities changed demographically after the 1965 Hart Cueller Immigration Law. Monterey Park, California is a prototype of such a community. It has become a majority Asian American, primarily Chinese (Fong, 1994; Saito, 1998). Another example of an ethnoburb is Cupertino, California, located near San Jose. This city experienced rapid demographic changes in the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, with the Asian American population growing from 6.7% to 45% as large numbers of middle class Asian immigrants moved into the city for better schools and other quality of life issues (Lai and Geron 2006, pg. 67). In both of these communities, Asian Americans have built electoral coalitions to win local political office.

Each of these types of enclaves has been the site of race-based campaigns for equity, representation and social change, but, for Asian American social justice activists, urban enclaves, particularly the traditional ones, have been the most crucial environments. In this paper we focus on the particular relationship between urban enclaves and Asian American activism.

Asian Immigration and Enclave Formation
Before the establishment of black communities in New York and Chicago, and in contrast to white immigrant neighborhoods that sprang up in the 19th century as transitional sites for acculturation into U.S. society, Chinese immigrants formed Chinatowns as defenses against racial violence upon their arrival in the 1850s. In the first part of the 20th Century, Japanese immigrants also built ethnic enclaves. These enclaves grew to become community centers where new immigrants lived and worked together, shared resources, built social and political organizations, and nurtured distinctive social and cultural lives. Ethnic enclaves are often initially located in neighborhoods in flux. Some evolve over time to be permanent; others are temporary and disappear as individuals from the ethnic group move away (Laguerre, 2000).

Until World War II, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos comprised the overwhelming proportion of Asian immigrants. They began arriving to the U.S. in significant numbers as laborers for the agricultural, mining, and the transportation industries in the latter half of the 19th century. They all encountered discrimination and physical violence and were forced to live in segregated housing and neighborhoods in cities, mining towns, and rural areas. They built enclaves to have a measure of relative safety. Yet, as early as 1871, a white mob attacked the Los Angeles Chinese enclave over a minor incident among the Chinese residents (Chan, 1991: 48). Some Chinese moved to avoid the violence and formed new Chinatowns in the Northeast region (Zhou, 2004).

Over time, Asian immigrants constructed extensive communities. Little Tokyo, a Los Angeles community that formed in the late 1800s near downtown, swelled to 30,000 residents by the 1930s, with thriving businesses, religious institutions, and community groups. The Japanese section of Seattle's International District included 45 restaurants, 20 barber shops, bathhouses, laundries, 30 hotels and lodging houses, four groceries, two newspapers and two monthly magazines (Chin, 2001: 27). In California, Stockton's Filipino community grew to thousands between World War I and II and was known as “Little Manila” (Laguerre, 2000). 

During World War II, Japanese community enclaves were virtually closed down and boarded up as Japanese Americans were shipped off to internment camps. When Japanese American merchants and residents returned, they found a significantly smaller geographic community, as others had taken over the land and property in Japantowns. Public redevelopment and urban renewal in the subsequent decades also contributed to the reduction and near elimination of these communities. One group of Asian enclaves had been seriously diminished.

Post-World War II Challenges to Survival
Following World War II, many of the remaining inner-city ethnic enclaves, located in close proximity to downtown financial and commercial districts, came under increasing threat of displacement by corporate interests and local governments. Urban renewal plans often targeted ethnic enclaves as redevelopment zones. Using the power of eminent domain, local governments forced residents and small businesses out to bring in capital investment, often international, to cater to tourists and implement urban gentrification plans.

In San Francisco, the financial district began to outgrow its original location in the 1960s; developers and city leaders sought to expand into ethnic enclaves including Chinatown, Manilatown, and the South of Market area to gain access to more land (Hartman and Kessler, 1978). For Manilatown, urban renewal transformed what was once a ten-block neighborhood, to one block, anchored by the International Hotel. As other hotels were closed down and were replaced with new developments, many of the older generation of Filipinos were forced to move out towards other parts of the city. Chinatown’s close proximity to downtown also made it a prime target for urban renewal. This same process of urban renewal was occurring in other cities as well. In Philadelphia, in 1964, the first of several efforts by urban renewal forces reduced the size of the Chinatown. Community residents resisted an effort in 1966 to place an expressway thorough the community. Community opposition stopped this as well as subsequent plans for local government and corporate entities to destroy the historic Chinatown. Nevertheless, a fourth of Philadelphia’s Chinatown’s land, housing and commercial activity has been eliminated by these efforts (Philadelphia Community Development Corporation). During this period, similar scenarios of urban enclave redevelopment took place in other East Coast Chinatowns, Seattle, and California cities.

Post '65 Enclaves and New Issues
As urban centers were being redeveloped, beginning with the liberalization of immigration law in 1965, new Asian immigrants from throughout Asia entered the United States. Though many were poor relatives of current residents, the country's post-industrial, globalizing economic needs also privileged those with professional and managerial skills in both immigration and education policy. As a result, traditional enclaves expanded or new enclaves were created by Asian Americans with economic resources to live in middle class areas. Also, residential and business location patterns led to the creation of new suburban enclaves for existing ethnic Asian populations by. Many Chinese, Filipinos, and other new immigrants, as well as people seeking to leave the traditional, urban enclaves, moved into suburban communities. In California, for example, Chinese and other Asian immigrants moved into several cities in the San Gabriel Valley area that lies east of Los Angeles; Japanese Americans congregated in suburbs such as Gardena, near south Los Angeles; while Filipinos were attracted to Daly City near San Francisco and Union City, in the East Bay.

The growing, relatively educated population that came through Korean immigration and created new enclaves. The Koreatown in Los Angeles is the largest Korean ethnic enclave in the United States. With its approximately 25 square miles, Koreatown is the commercial center for Koreans in Los Angeles. About 3,000 Korean-owned businesses were already located there in the early 1990’s (Min, 1993a). It became a site of mass looting and property destruction following the Rodney King police brutality verdict in 1992 (Lee, 2000). Refugees from Southeast Asia created another new set of ethnic enclaves including Long Beach's “Little Phnom Penh” (north of downtown and home to 50,000 Cambodians), the Vietnamese “Little Saigon” enclave in Westminster, California, and Fresno's Hmong concentration (Miyares, 1998).

Asian immigrants to the U.S. have created distinctive ethnic enclaves for a multiplicity of reasons that reflected the needs of the ethnic group and the political and economic realities of the time. Recently, new immigrants have built enclaves for reasons of economics, familiarity, convenience, and identity. They provide a central location for marketing goods and services to the ethnic community and preserving cultural identity. Often, they reflect the transnational character of Asian Pacific migration (Hu-DeHart, 1999) and grow with the support of a local government looking to revitalize parts of their city or county. Ongoing debates among scholars concern ethnic entrepreneurship and the ethnic enclave economy Min Zhou (2004) provides an excellent summary of the main issues.

The Historic Engagement of Activism and the Enclave
The Movement and the Place
Enclaves have become sites for oppositional resistance and the struggle for social justice. In the post World War II era, a strikingly similar pattern developed in urban Asian ethnic enclaves – rising land values, public-private cooperation to remove the enclaves, and the use of “eminent domain” eviction powers to force poor, elderly, working class immigrant residents from their homes and businesses. The Asian American Movement (AAM) emerged contemporaneously in the late 60s. Into these tenuous enclave environments, the early AAM activists gravitated.

The grievances and the infrastructure and symbolic potential of Chinatowns, Little Tokyos and Little Manilas in numerous cities channeled much of the early activism of the Movement. Developing badly needed service programs, advocating around issues of the enclaves’ working class residents, and promoting peace and international support, the activists rooted their organizations in the gritty streets of Chinatowns, Little Tokyos and Manilatowns. In casting much of its lot with the interests of these communities and its residential population of workers, shopkeepers, street youth and elderly, the Asian American Movement built, educated and significantly defined itself. I Wor Kuen, the Red Guard, Asian Law Caucus, Wei Min She, East Wind, J-town Collective, and Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) were a few of the many organizations that established roots in the enclaves. Among the deepest, learning experiences for activists were the omnipresent issue of development and the campaigns to defend ethnic enclaves. There have been several notable campaigns to preserve enclaves from physical destruction led by community grass roots movements. With the support of young Asian American student activists, tenants, community activists, and small business owners built fledging contra-development movements.

Defending the Enclave from Dispersal and Destruction
Save the I-Hotel Campaign
Among the most significant campaigns was the struggle around the International Hotel in San Francisco. In 1968, efforts by the owners of the International Hotel to evict elderly Filipino tenants sparked one of the longest-running urban struggles in the post World War II era. After tenants successfully stalled the initial eviction efforts, the building, already a community center for the Filipino community, was transformed into a thriving movement center as grass roots community organizations, arts and cultural groups, and a bookstore moved into the street level storefront of the hotel (Rodan, 1970; Dong, 2002).

Until 1977, the International Hotel tenants and their community supporters rallied thousands of people to stop the evictions and demand the preservation of low-cost housing. A broad coalition of forces led by the International Hotel Tenants Association but also including Asian community activists, students, affordable housing advocates, gay and lesbian activists, trade unions, women, and other progressive groups, waged the campaign to preserve low-cost housing for Filipino and other tenants at the International Hotel (Solomon, 1998). Literally thousands of people became I-Hotel supporters and signed up to defend the hotel and the tenants from eviction (Kordziel, 2001). People were educated about the power of capital, the power of organized resistance by the people, and the government’s role in preserving property rights over those of tenants and people. In 1977, despite numerous legal maneuvers, and mass protests, the tenants were forcibly evicted in a chaotic confrontation between a human barricade of thousands and the city’s police and fire departments. The efforts to preserve the hotel and the adjoining storefronts profoundly affected local development policy. No city administration dared build upon the site until affordable housing and a community center was proposed twenty five years later. Asian American ethnic neighborhood preservation campaigns spread throughout the country as community activists drew inspiration from the International Hotel campaign.

Sun Hotel Struggle in Little Tokyo
Another mobilizing struggle began in the 1960s in Los Angeles. The city sought to transform Little Tokyo from a historical, residential community into a tourist attraction for wealthy Japanese businessmen. In 1976, the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization (LTPRO) formed to unite tenants, small businesses, and community supporters to defend the community from government sponsored corporate takeover. LTPRO became the focus for a number of local movement organizations (Masaoka, 2004). The organization was determined to stop the removal of residents and small businesses to make way for a large tourist hotel. The community activists dramatically occupied buildings like the Sun Hotel to stop the evictions. They succeeded in bringing together different classes within the Japanese American community to work against a perceived "second mass eviction" (the first mass eviction being the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II). 

While ultimately unable to stop the construction of the hotel, they succeeded in mobilizing the larger Japanese American community in efforts to save the enclave. Due to such grass roots efforts, much of the physical community still remains, providing small business services and some affordable housing, primarily for elderly community members. It also retained its identity as a center for social, cultural and religious activities and community organizations for future generations. This organizing effort also evolved into the fight for redress and reparations for Japanese Americans. The LA activists became a critical contingent of the Japanese American activists all over the country who successful took up the issue of demanding compensation from the U.S. government for its mass incarcerations of Japanese Americans during World War II (Nikkei 1980).

Other Enclave Struggles
Catalytic, mobilizing campaigns took place all over the country in Chinatowns in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, Nihonmachi in San Francisco, and the International District in Seattle. In each case, grassroots organizations organized around issues related to development, sank roots in the community, and continued to take up other community or social issues (Liu, 1999; Kwong and Miscevic, 2005; Chin, 2001; Lin, 1998). 

The Contemporary Role of Enclaves
Asian American urban enclaves, particularly historic, older enclaves, today continue to be mobilizing sites critical to Asian American struggles for social justice. This is true for several reasons – numerous grievances, the concentration of resources, the culture of resistance, and the availability of framing symbols. This pivotal role may increasingly migrate from older to more recent urban enclaves as organizations, community institutions and community activists migrate to these locations.

Grievances
The urban transformation of the cities that began in the 50’s has continued unabated, creating the conditions for ongoing grievances and confrontations between development capital and residents. Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Philadelphia have followed post-industrial development paths or pursued post-industrial economic futures that emphasize downtown areas to nurture corporate headquarters, law firms, and financial services and their concomitant elites (Sassen, 2001). These areas are precisely where many older enclaves are situated (the New York, San Francisco, Boston Chinatowns, and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles). The contemporary attraction of urban sites for the post-World War II baby boomers and younger professionals has contributed a second exacerbating factor that affects newer enclaves. Over the past decades, newer enclaves have revived neglected areas, making them more attractive to other, more advantaged populations. Thus the construction of financial centers, hotels, shopping malls, sports pavilions, upscale housing, hospitals and universities and all the physical manifestations of globalizing cities have often occurred on the rubble of enclaves. In 2001, Boston Chinatown, for example, enumerated thirty developments proposed or under construction in its environs (Boston Transportation Department. 1999). 

The population of poorer residents in urban enclaves also experiences a constant stream of other grievances around labor conditions, housing, education and services. They are consequently a constituency open to mobilization. Enclaves tend to house the most-exploited, least-advantaged sectors of the Asian American populations. Southeast Asian populations in urban enclaves tend to have particularly low socioeconomic indicators (Ong and Hee, 1994; Lai and Arguelles, 2003), and the influx of immigrant workers, many with low educational attainment and uncertain legal status, has led to numerous labor abuses.

Multiple Repertoires of Contention
The history of organizing in such enclaves has also created a culture of resistance and mobilizing traditions. To enclave residents engaging in petitions, protests, and rallies, these actions do not appear to be as great a risk as they did in the past. The familiarity of such tactics, including occasional acts of civil disobedience, removes obstacles to their application in mobilization. The repetition of protest tactics also opens communities to less familiar ones. Thus, in 2004 CPA Boston was able to lead a community sit-in at the Mayor's office, the only time an Asian American group has done so. In doing so, CPA built upon its two-decade history of grassroots organizing through protest politics.
Newer enclaves have had shorter histories of resistance opposing government and private institutions and mobilizing challenges to corporate and government policies. Issues such as development and youth organizing, however, have mobilized these new enclaves.

Community Resources
Having built up a concentration of service, advocacy, and social change organizations since the 1960’s, enclaves have the most developed community infrastructures within the Asian American communities. Boston Chinatown, for instance, has seventy-five organizations on the twenty-five square blocks that comprise this small neighborhood (Liu, 1999). This creates a force willing to confront threats to the neighborhood. This concentration also aggregates and often supports Asian American activists through opportunities for staff positions and voluntary committees and boards. When grievances arise, often there's an organization willing to respond and organize around it. Depending on the issue, grassroots groups can draw upon the support and resources of other parts of the community infrastructure. 

A particular feature of Asian American enclaves has been the development of community-based labor organizations, such as the Chinese Workers and Staff Association in New York, Asian Immigrant Worker Association in Oakland, and the Korean Immigrant Workers Alliance, which began in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s respectively. These organizations and other worker centers have waged numerous campaigns to defend low-wage immigrant workers who work and often live in ethnic enclaves. The demands of food industry, construction, and light manufacturing workers for solidarity and labor protections and the labor movement’s reluctance to organize these workers, eventually led to the development of such community-labor centers who generally seek to improve working conditions and build worker power (KIWA 2007).

New urban enclaves and ethnic Asian communities have also catalyzed structures of social justice organizing, though less extensive than those in older enclaves. Enclaves that house the Southeast Asian populations tend to the more disadvantaged, with lower socioeconomic indicators, and more significant youth violence. This situation generates a larger number of grievances. While their community infrastructure is not as extensive that of as older historical enclaves, they are nonetheless significant. Many activists from Asian American communities are working in these ethnic Asian enclaves, whose communities historically have had limited access to resources and organizational development. Groups like the Asian Pacific Environmental Network have established work with the Laotian community in Richmond and Oakland, and the Coalition for Asian and Pacific American Youth work with Khmer and Vietnamese youth in Greater Boston. 

Framing of Issues
The complex economic development and community struggles have also functioned as a training ground for activists in class dynamics, institutional roles, and organizing strategy and tactics. Enclaves are multi-class structures, primarily involving small business owners, professionals, workers, and sometimes, criminal elements. In larger enclaves, transnational corporations and larger capitalists are also involved. Mobilizing the community often requires confronting class conflicts and relations. How to develop a particular piece of land often hinges on competing, class-based visions of a community. In Boston Chinatown, the conflict around the construction of mixed-use, mixed-income, 30-story tower on a contentious parcel of land involved differing visions of a working-class Chinatown or a multi-class “new urbanist” neighborhood. (Leong, 1997; Lowe and Brugge, 2007).

Participants in enclave struggles learn the fundamental importance of organizing those with a direct stake in the outcome including residents, workers, small businesses, and proceeding from a popular base. They also learn the role of coalition building both within and beyond the immediate community, and the strength and constraints of cross-community alliances. Short-term, immediate concerns must be balanced against long-term needs for structural change. Struggles rooted in the socio-economic problems in enclaves offer a great deal of material for working out ideological frames and messaging. 

Contemporary Enclave Campaigns
Enclaves are sites where activists repeatedly mobilize, with contemporary struggles taking a variety of forms. Development struggles dominate many enclave agendas and are closely related to housing struggles against exploitative rent increases and evictions. Enclaves also host a range of other issues such as ovr political power, labor, environmental justice, immigration, and police abuse. Recent development struggles have become a survival issue for smaller ethnic enclaves such as Japantowns and East Coast Chinatowns.

In the year 2000, Asian-American activists and mainstream community groups successful defeated a proposed professional baseball stadium on the northern border of Philadelphia Chinatown. United against that development was a spectrum of organizations that believed the stadium threatened the future of the 12-block neighborhood,. They mobilized one thousand people for rallies and packed the city hearings, successfully defeating the stadium proposal (Asian Week, 2000). 

Los Angeles' Little Tokyo is one of the three such remaining Japanese enclaves, along with San Francisco and San Jose. Each has fought for survival by focusing on rebuilding their neighborhood, while fending off further encroachment. In Los Angeles, activists have united around a multi-year battle to construct a gym that is considered essential for reviving community life in the area. Their rallies and attendance at hearings have brought together students, basketball kids and their families, residents from affordable housing, seniors, and martial arts enthusiasts. They have come into conflict with city cultural institutions opposed to the siting of the gym and the proponents of new jails and city police institutions (J-town Voice, 2003).

Boston Chinatown faces similar issues and has organized against luxury developments through community referendums, sit-ins and traffic tie-ups (Leong, 1997; Fight Liberty Place, 2002; Lowe and Brugge, 2007). In San Francisco’s Japantown, activists have fought to ensure community influence over access to and retention of a local shopping mall and theatre after the sale to non-Japanese developers (Buttress, 2006; Said and Zito, 2006).

Development campaigns include those enclaves attempting to rebuild themselves as well as newer ones facing similar pressures. Although nearly all the original Manilatowns had been redeveloped into oblivion, Filipino activists have taken a proactive strategy to re-establish an enclave in San Francisco. The memorializing of the International Hotel site through the Manilatown Center and the attempt to reconsolidate an urban enclave in the South of Market Area in San Francisco speaks to such sites’ unique roles in mobilizing young activists and community elders. Thus young activists are staffing community development entities that are developing housing and reviving community rituals such as the Flores de Mayo, a religious observance (Matthews, 1998). 

New urban enclaves face similar problems but have fewer social justice organizations. They often turn to more established tactics used by others. In 2007 in Seattle's Little Saigon, a plan to build a major mixed-use development of big box retailers, luxury condos, and parking threatened scores of Vietnamese businesses. Mobilizing efforts demanded hearings and meetings. During the rebuilding of New Orleans, Louisiana, however, strong grassroots protest politics emerged. Vietnamese living in the New Orleans East community successfully fought off a new landfill to locate waste from Hurricane Katrina. 

In larger urban enclaves. including New York, San Francisco, and Oakland Chinatowns, population growth has assured an indelible presence for Asian Americans. Within them, organizing around development in them focuses on the character of the enclave. Campaigns centering on affordable housing and associated evictions of poor and elderly tenants mark efforts to maintain their role as working-class communities. In Oakland, for example, since 2003, the Pacific Renaissance Plaza has been at the center of a community fight to preserve affordable housing for the Chinese community. In April 2003, several community-based groups formed the Stop Chinatown Evictions Coalition and sought to stop evictions of residents of the 50 units of affordable housing. (Wu, 2005). 

Enclave-based mobilization has also focused on housing and labor issues. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston all have variants of community-based workers centers, which are waging fights over withheld wages and working conditions and launching unionization drives. These organizations have battled runaway shops, taken on sportswear manufacturing over severance settlements, electronics assembly plants over health violations, and generally sought union contracts. A typical struggle, involving employment of workers in marginal light manufacturing, was a demand for severance with the South Boston Proman factory. The owner laid off all of its 40 Chinese and Latino workers, some who had worked for decades at the plant (which was slated for closure), but offered no severance or notice. In another notable campaign, Korean Immigrant Workers Association has organized the sixty primarily Latino workers of Assi Market in Koreatown in a unionization drive that has lasted over four years. The Rhee brothers, local Korean Americans owned Assi Super. In both housing and labor issues, the class conflicts within the enclave and community at large have emerged. Owners of abusive shops are often leaders or influential within the community, 

Other work includes electoral influence and fighting police brutality and hate crimes. Despite the low voter registration rates in enclaves, the concentrated population is sufficient to create an electoral base for political office and referendums. For example in 2005, the Chinese Progressive Association (San Francisco) was part of a successful campaign to increase the minimum wage in the city in 2005. In terms of police abuse, in the 1970s and 1980s New York’s Chinatown became a hotbed of protests against police beatings of local motorists. In Boston Chinatown, the case of Long Guang Huang, an immigrant beaten by an undercover police detective, proved to be a watershed in catalyzing a sense of basic rights among the Chinese population. The community developed a successful yearlong campaign to suspend the officer. Within this enclave, the Asian American Resource Workshop organized against hate crimes, particularly with respect to the murder of Southeast Asians in the Greater Boston area.

Limits of Asian Enclave Organizing
Among the major trends that have mediated social justice organizing in the enclaves are the consistent rightward trend in the U.S. since the late 1970's, the growth and development of the non-profit sector, and the changing nature of Asian enclaves. Since the 1970s, the ruling class has successfully imposed a muscular neoliberal ideology, increased profits by attacking the conditions and rights of the working class and people of color, and reasserted its global hegemony. Challenging the neoliberal agenda in urban communities has been extremely difficult due to limited resources and alternative visions of how to solve longstanding social ills. The call for the fundamental redistribution of power, the elimination of social inequalities, challenges to class hierarchies, and ending the system of racial oppression remain the purview of a small cadre of community activists who are committed to deep societal transformation. 

At the same time overall the Asian American organizational infrastructure continued to expand and adopt the tax-exempt 501©3 organizational model to address the growing Asian American populations. This has both served and delimited organizing. It has meant that at least a small number of organizations constitute a reserve for hosting organizing around social justice. However, by primarily working through that structure, such organizations have at least minimally accepted significant formal and legal limits on their political activity. 

The example of Asian Americans For Equality (AAFE) illustrates this institutionalization and retreat. Having built its reputation on a militant mobilization for construction jobs and its open association with a Marxist organization, over time it has become a multi-million dollar community development corporation. Rather than being critical of the system, it has growth has been predicated on working closely with local and state government, becoming dependent on foundation and public funds. Its primary political efforts are concentrated on electoral politics, and its former presidents have run for political office a number of times. One indicator of its changing stance was AAFE’s decision to better position its president, Margaret Chin, for election to the city council. It lobbied for redistricting district lines so that Chinatown would be connected with the wealthy and white downtown area rather than with a predominantly Latino and poorer area in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In effect AAFE’s vision for the enclave shifted from alliances with disadvantaged communities of color to one with an elite sector to achieve electoral aims (Lin, 1998; Cho, 1994; Hevesi, 2003).

Lastly, the changing nature and diversification of enclaves are also critical factors. Over the decades, the results of campaigns to improve the prospects of ethnic enclaves have been uneven, and changing demographics and residential patterns of the Asian American population have diminished the singular importance of traditional ethnic enclaves in Asian American political dynamics. Moreover, newer urban enclaves such as Little Saigon and New Phnom Penh more sharply encapsulate some of the structural issues. Southeast Asian populations tend to be more disadvantaged, with lower socioeconomic indicators, increased social problems such as significant youth violence, and deportations of immigrant youth. This situation generates a sharper set of grievances. 

New enclaves also possessed their own distinct dynamics and issues. The sudden entry of large number of Southeast Asian refugees brought a wave of hate crimes and killings in the early years of their settlement. That newer enclaves had relatively limited numbers and their community resources were still emerging, presented difficulties for organizing around these issues; moreover, political struggles at times centered on homeland issues. The reasons for this are complex. For example, many of the original community leaders, were closely associated with the U.S. in the Southeast Asian wars. Their community leadership structure tends to remain conservative and some harbor strong anti-communist sentiments. They lack a common experience working within the larger Asian American community and with other racial minorities to achieve social justice goals. This is particularly pronounced among the traditional leadership of the Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian communities. Nevertheless, the emphasis of enclave-based organizing will probably shift increasingly to these newer enclaves, given the significant social problems that must be addressed.

Conclusion
We have described how Asian American enclaves became ongoing, potent sites of engagement for Asian American activists. Within these enclaves, you will find social justice groups such as Asian Immigrant Workers Association, Asian Pacific Environment Network and Churn Jun Wor Ping (Oakland Chinatown), Nosei (San Francisco Nihonmachi) J-town Voice and Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (formerly the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations in Los Angeles Little Tokyo), Korean Immigrant Workers Association (Los Angeles Koreatown) Chinese Workers and Staff Association and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities (New York Chinatown) and Chinese Progressive Association (San Francisco and Boston Chinatowns) and Asian American Resource Workshop (Boston Chinatown), Asian Americans United (Philadelphia Chinatown) and Chinatown Center for Collective Action (Los Angeles Chinatown). While some like Chinese Progressive Associations and NCRR-LA have roots in the 70’s, others are more recent activist groups.

Contemporary enclaves engage such groups and activists because, as a nexus of big and small capital exploitation, they generate ubiquitous neighborhood tensions, Situated within localities of the global movement of capital, their proximity to downtown and convention centers leads development capital to view Asian ethnic enclaves as expendable, blighted areas that can be transformed into various forms of capital investment. Yet, significant social movement elements reside in these communities, with organizational and social resources, a culture of resistance, grievances, and relatively clear structural contradictions. Thus, enclaves exist in a physical environment where land usage versus community control is contested. This contest has inspired the formation and expansion of groups. J-town Voice formed to revive and preserve Little Tokyo (Yoshimura, 2004), while CAAAV expanded their work to Chinatown to confront the issue of gentrification (Bai, 2004).

Because of the value of enclaves as centers of community history, cultural pride, and community life and economics, Asian Americans nationwide have organized in their historical communities. Asian Americans have been able to take up a wide spectrum of social justice issues – environmental justice, workers’ rights, immigration, women’s, particularly working women’s issues, as well opposition to war - by building temporary and more permanent community-based organizations that reflect their communities' interests and cultural roots. Young activists have been instrumental in constructing many of these organizations and in infusing older community organizations with new energy and new ideas reflecting today’s 21st-century sensibilities. The combination of immigrants, American born, young and old, male and female is a powerful weapon in the hands of the Asian American community to build a culture of resistance and struggle in enclaves.

Enclaves concentrate and forge a critical mass of social justice activists, yet social justice work faces significant obstacles in the rightward trend of the country, the institutionalization of the non-profit sector, and changing demographics of the Asian American population. The existence of enclave activism does not ensure their transformation into a sustained social movement. Social justice movement building must also adapt to a new environment. In the near future, older enclaves will remain the sites that primarily nurture Asian American activists, yet student, community, and labor activists must increasingly shift their attention to new enclaves and link these efforts to overarching organizing efforts in Asian immigrant communities.

Furthermore, the framework for a strategy and vision for that movement may arise from these sites, but could surface elsewhere. In fact, the overwhelming nature of day-to-day demands is a major obstacle for developing a broader perspective. In the 1960s a dynamic interaction between community and campus – think of the Black Panthers or the origins of the Asian American Movement itself – incubated the dominant alternative visions. Organizing within enclaves must develop as part of a larger movement involving multiple social sectors to realize these sites’ potential as bases for social justice organizing.

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