AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

This article is a case study of a protracted struggle to establish a branch campus of the San Francisco Community College in Chinatown for thousands of immigrants and working-class adults, focusing mostly on the period since 1997 when the community was slowly politicized and mobilized to fight for their educational rights. Although educational researchers continue to pay close attention to Asian American fights against discriminatory admission policies among the nation’s top colleges and universities, an urgent need to pay more scholarly and political attention to the neediest, poorest, and powerless among Asian Americans clearly exists. To this segment of the Asian American population, access to community college education is a matter of acquiring tools of survival in America. The study illustrates the equal significance of race and class in understanding the development of Asian American communities, how each can be used to obfuscate or disguise the other, and how both can be easily obscured by other issues, especially “progressive” issues or organizations. Asian American community activists and scholars need to pay more attention to class and class conflict with the communities and between the communities and the mainstream society.