From Margin to Mainstream
January 19, 2007
Last Friday’s official opening of the OCA National Center for APA Leadership in Washington, D.C., is a major accomplishment not only for the Organization of Chinese Americans but for the APA community as a whole. It represents a quantum level of achievement that will assure our community’s place at the centers of power for generations to come.
In Professor Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams, he reminded us that American history is the opposite of the “great white men” view of the world, where students are forced to memorize the names of presidents and kings. Minorities who seem to be advocating for better lives for themselves were really defining the limits of liberty and defending freedom and equality for all of us.
When viewed through this lens, the new Organization of Chinese Americans building is more than a piece of real estate situated on Dupont Circle, where lobbying firms, think-tanks, and power brokers from every sector congregate. It represents a physical manifestation of our having made it from the margins to the mainstream.
When the first APAs jumped off Spanish galleons in Louisiana over 300 years ago, it was all they could do to just survive. Later generations brought over as railroad builders and agricultural workers were kept in an inferior status by several layers of exclusion.
On a legal level, federal laws were passed in many states to define Asian newcomers as aliens and prevent them from becoming naturalized citizens. Alien Land Laws in the early 1900s were passed by many states to prevent these aliens from owning property. When the children of aliens were born on American soil, the laws were amended to prevent them from owning land as well.
Meanwhile, many early APA immigrants moved into an ethnic enclave for safety, camaraderie and access to goods and services. Whatever monies were earned often were sent back to their Asian countries of origin.
After the immigration law changes of 1965, many more APA children were born here as American citizens. Doctors, scientists and others who came here as workers and students were able to become naturalized citizens. And the doors to home ownership and even organizational building ownership were opened.
The APA arts, service, law, health and other community groups that grew up in the 1960s, through 1980s rarely started in a building of their own. I still remember the iron bars across the second floor windows of the rented Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund office on New York’s Canal Street in the 1970s.
While a few groups like the Japanese American Citizens League managed to raise the money to buy buildings such as their headquarters in San Francisco, most early APA groups could barely make ends meet. The community itself did not have enough means or a tradition of giving to those who were less fortunate, and the corporate and foundation givers were under the mistaken impression that APAs were a model minority and did not need as much assistance as other minorities.
Today, there are APA groups focused on housing and community development issues in many big cities, and an umbrella organization, National CAPACD, which is focused on building capacity for APA community development all across the nation. As a significant aside, it is worth mentioning that many leaders of this community development movement are women, as have been many of the leaders of the OCA (including current Board President Ginny Gong, former executive directors Daphne Kwok and Christine Chen, and Claudine Cheng, who headed the committee to purchase the new D.C. headquarters).
OCA has always had a very pan-APA approach to its internship programs, leadership summits and educational programs. They recognized that a community without a significant pool of public policy experts, organizational leaders and government officials had to start by creating and nurturing this resource.
With the opening of this new National Center for APA Leadership in the heart of the nation’s capital, the vision of OCA’s founders has been realized. As any business owner will tell you, owning your own building is the best way to hold down costs and benefit from the efficiencies of permanence.
As APAs continue our march from the margins to the mainstream of American culture, the OCA National Center for APA Leadership will be a source of strength and stability for generations.
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