Monday, 6/2/97 Students lead forum on Asian American activism in
U.S. ASIAN-AMERICANS: Discussion encompasses many issues of
minority community
By Hannah Miller Daily Bruin Senior Staff Would Chairman Mao
have listened to consciousness-raising hip-hop? For a Charles E.
Young Grand Salon-full of Asian American activists, students and
interested parents, the task was a difficult one: To reconcile
revolutionary principles handed down by the 1970s Asian-American
movement with the modern "Era of Booty-Shaking," as one speaker
dubbed the 1990s. The first UCLA course taught on the
Asian-American movement culminated in a student-led forum on some
very diverse topics. Some students discussed socialist methods of
achieving equality and freedom, some the complexities of gender
within Asian American communities, and some became aware that the
movement existed at all. "When I graduated from UCLA about 15 years
ago, I wasn’t aware of any (Asian American) groups on campus then,"
said Carol Furutani, an employee at Hughes Aircraft. Furutani, like
many others, grew active in community politics after her college
days, and now belongs to an Asian/Pacific Islander group at Hughes.
But for the veterans of political activism, like instructors Glenn
Omatsu and Steve Louie, their careers have integrated both
education and activism. An involved member of many struggles for
Asian American rights and freedoms since the late 1960s, Louie has
mounted a massive research project on the period. Echoes of that
age were evident in pamphlets exhibited on the side walls, some
reading "Asians Support Black Panthers," ringing with idealism. "It
was a different time," said Kenwood Jung, an attendee of the forum.
"Revolution was happening around the world, and especially for
people of color." In comments during a workshop, Jung took some
time to blow up some Generation X stereotypes. "It’s easy to say
that students are apathetic today," Kenwood reflected. "But if this
were the ’60s, half the students in this room would be radicals."
Half of the students in the room would probably define themselves
as such – but in a different fashion. For UCLA student and forum
presenter Jose Buktaw, social change can happen through beats,
spoken-word and aerosol art. Buktaw is a member of the Foundation
Funkollective, a multi-racial, multimedia, multi-faceted
revolution-in-disguise. "We’re a bunch of disillusioned underground
hip-hop artists," Buktaw said, grinning slightly. "We try to
communicate a message through our events. "I call this time the
booty-shaking era because it’s all about about having fun without
thinking of the consequences," Buktaw said. After forcing shy
attendees to write and perform some impromptu poetry, he and
co-presenter Pa Xiong mentioned a laundry list of concerns: Sexism,
racism, police power, the prison-security industry and the
disappearance of a living wage in a service economy. As Xiong and
Buktaw mentioned, the Foundation Funkollective strives to be a
solution to some of the many problems that keep Asian Americans
from demanding change with a unified voice. And one of those
problems is money. As a group, "we don’t do enough class analysis,"
said Jennifer Sun, a 1995 UCLA graduate. In a workshop on Mao, Sun
spoke of the division between middle-class and poor Asian
Americans. "It is class difference that keeps us from uniting. The
two factions haven’t been brought together to discuss things like
affirmative action or sweatshops," she added. Trends in immigration
to the United States have largely been responsible for this
division. The bulk of Asian immigrants in the 1960s and early 1970s
were more wealthy, well-educated Asians fleeing the Chinese
Communist revolution. Immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in the
1970s and 1980s were more predominantly from Southeast Asia, and
were poorer than their earlier counterparts. They are the
generation, for example, that has been victimized by
garment-industry sweatshops in Los Angeles. The forum, subtitled
"Learning from the Past, Organizing the Present for the Movement of
the Future," addressed these different generations with a modern
theme: Self-determination. "We need to focus on three things,"
Louie said in closing remarks. "(Those are) building a mass
movement, articulating our vision for the future, and changing
ourselves to change society," he added. The forum was an effort
towards the last of these goals, as a project designed, written and
presented by undergraduate students. The last student speaker,
Roseanne Gutierrez, touched on some final, and personal themes.
"It’s scary to get involved, to care so much," she said. But this
action is necessary, Gutierrez said, "because we are not going to
be the model minority."