Cambodian New Year's celebration, Trairatanaram Temple, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1988

Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence

Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
Site of the September 17, 1963 bus and freight train collision near Chualar, California, which killed 32 Mexican migrant farmworkers

The Tragedy that Transformed the Chicano Movement

In 1963, more than thirty Mexican guest workers died in a terrible accident in California. The fallout helped turn farmworkers’ rights into a national cause.
A Punjabi-Mexican American couple, Valentina Alarez and Rullia Singh posing for their wedding photo in 1917

The “Mexican-Hindus” of Rural California

Anti-Asian immigration restrictions led male Punjabi farm workers in California to marry Mexican and Mexican American women, creating new cultural bonds.
Tiburcio Parrott

Birth of the Corporate Person

The defining of corporations as legal “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment rights got a leg up from the fight over a California anti-Chinese immigrant law.
Immigrants View The Statue Of Liberty, 1887

Birth of A National Immigration Policy

Until the Civil War, regulating immigration to the US was left to individual states. That changed with Emancipation and the legal end of slavery.
Visitors at the Richmond night market near Vancouver

Traveling Through Time and Space in the Richmond Night Market

A night market in suburban Vancouver originated with Chinese immigrants, but its structure and management have raised questions over its supposed authenticity.
Pat McCarran

The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion

The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.
Lee Kwong family photo, ca. 1907. Standing (l.-r.): Aurelia, Percy, Carmen, and Luisa. Seated (l.-r. ): Concepcion, Lai Ngan, Teresa, Frank, Lee Kwong, and Marian.

From Bond Maid to Pioneering Chinese Businesswoman

Raised as a servant girl, Lai Ngan grew up to become a cigar maker, own a boarding house, and run grocery stores in the American Southwest.
Saad Almontaser, 1, of Brooklyn, waves an American flag over his father Ali, from Yemen, as protesters hold a rally outside of Manhattan Federal Court on June 26, 2018 in New York City.

How Arab-Americans Stopped Being White

With the emergence of the US as a global superpower in the twentieth-century, anti-Palestinian stereotypes in the media bled over to stigmatize Arab Americans.
The covers of Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker (2004), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

American Immigrant Literature Gets an Update

Despite the historical gulf between canonical and recent immigrant writing, one constant is the mark that new immigrant artists leave on US literature.