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How environmental activism in youth shapes political engagement and citizenship for Laotian American women
Laotian Daughters
Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice
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Bindi V. Shah
Honorable Mention, Asia and Asian America Section of the American Sociological Association, 2013
"Bindi Shah has written a lively and perceptive account of Laotian American youth, who were legacies of war and displacement but came of age through community organizing. This much-needed book reminds us that movement activism does more than counter injustice; it produces new knowledge, new subjectivities, and emergent cultures."
—Scott Kurashige, author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles
Laotian Daughters focuses on second-generation environmental justice activists in Richmond, California. Bindi Shah's pathbreaking book charts these young women's efforts to improve the degraded conditions in their community and explores the ways their activism and political practices resist the negative stereotypes of race, class, and gender associated with their ethnic group.
Using ethnographic observations, interviews, focus groups, and archival data on their participation in Asian Youth Advocates—a youth leadership development project—Shah analyzes the teenagers' mobilization for social rights, cross-race relations, and negotiations of gender and inter-generational relations. She also addresses issues of ethnic youth, and immigration and citizenship and how these shape national identities.
Shah ultimately finds that citizenship as a social practice is not just an adult experience, and that ethnicity is an ongoing force in the political and social identities of second-generation Laotians.
Excerpt
Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf).
Reviews
"Laotian Daughters convincingly argues that children of refugees embody a pivotal social location that allows for deeper, more complex insights into such pressing issues as cultural citizenship, political belonging, and national identity. Shah’s weaving together of social scientific research, cultural studies, and literary analysis is seamless. I am particularly excited by the incorporation of environmental justice literature into this mix, which is rare. The book’s greatest strength remains the young activists whose stories bring this book to life. Laotian Daughters is part of an important, growing intellectual body of research on the U.S. second generation, and this ethnographic study of Laotian teenagers fills a significant niche."
—Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and author of Consuming Citizenship: Children of Asian Immigrant Entrepreneurs
"Laotian Daughters tells an interesting tale about a handful of Laotian teens, who have an opportunity to hone their evolving political sensibilities in the company of others. Shah’s effort to 'explore identity based on politics rather than politics based on identity' is nuanced and rich. She successfully documents the complex divisions among a group of girls who, despite similar struggles, connect and incorporate ethnic, class, generational, and cultural diversity into their identities differently."
—Mobilization
"The book demonstrates quite effectively how environmental justice activism bridges questions of citizenship, rights, race, culture, and national identity.... [T]he best part of the book [is] the careful parsing of the potentiality and limitations of Asian Youth Advocates’s [AYA] intervention into the teens’ political subjectivity. [Shah] demonstrates the contradictions between prevailing liberal models of citizenship and existing inequalities based on group membership, as well as the partial and contingent success of AYA’s campaign to empower these young women."
—American Journal of Sociology
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. “Where We Live, Where We Work, Where We Play, Where We Learn”: The Asian Pacific Environmental Network
2. From Agent Orange to Superfund Sites to Anti-immigrant Sentiments: Multiple Voyages, Ongoing Challenges
3. New Immigration and the American Nation: A Framework for Citizenship and Belonging
4. The Politics of Race: Political Identity and the Struggle for Social Rights
5. Negotiating Racial Hierarchies: Critical Incorporation, Immigrant Ideology, and Interminority Relations
6. Family, Culture, Gender: Narratives of Ethnic Reconstruction
7. Building Community, Crafting Belonging in Multiple Homes
8. Becoming “American”: Remaking American National Identity through Environmental Justice Activism
Appendix: Socio-demographic Information on Second-Generation Laotians Who Participated in the Study
Notes
References
Index
About the Author(s)
Bindi V. Shah is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
Sociology
Women's Studies
In the series
Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
The "standard" written histories of Asian immigrants to the United States have been imbued with Western cultural biases. As a critique and corrective to earlier work, Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ, aims to develop a history of Asian Americans that is compatible with their own experience, that treats Asian Americans as agents of historical change and as creators of a new culture. In addition, this series intends to focus on the groups that are flourishing in the contemporary U.S.—Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese—about whom little has been written as well as to add to the substantial work done on the Chinese and Japanese in this country.