Migrant Labor and the “Poverty” of Asian American Studies

At the closing session of the 1984 meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies at UCLA, Lucie Cheng decried the “poverty” of the field. The “poverty” referred to by the longtime director of the country’s largest Asian American Studies program was the failure of scholars to develop significant theoretical and methodological tools for understanding our past and present condition. There is considerable merit to her assessment. Since its inception in 1969, Asian American Studies has not produced scholarship comparable to that of African American or Chicano Studies. We have yet to see the emergence of a prophet like W. E. B. Du Bois or a scholar/activist like Ernest0 Galarza. We have yet to challenge the conventions of the melting pot and nation of immigrants with the boldness of internal colonialism or an explication of race and class. (I am thinking here of the work of Robert Blauner, Frank Bonilla, James Geschwender, and Mario Barrera.) I must, however, disagree with Cheng at another level. Asian American Studies can lay claim to a stellar cast of writers and poets, and to a growing group of scholars coming into full bloom. I refer here to the depth of historical research manifest in the works of Sucheng Chan and Yuji Ichioka, and to the range in theory and evidence in the writings of Edna Bonacich, Michael Omi, and Ronald Takaki. Asian American Studies is not totally impoverished.