Media Analysis Article
Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy:
Asian Immigrant Women Advocates
Our expression of our lives cannot be narrowly conceived, for we cannot
change our condition through a single-minded banner.
—Barbara Christian ð1987, 4Þ
I ntersectionality pervades the political imagination and the practical work
of organizations mobilizing for social justice, especially those organized
by women of color. Social movement groups embrace intersectionality as
a radical yet viable strategy because the core problems that women of color
face are themselves both intersectional and radical. Intersectionality helps
women of color invent and inhabit identities that register the effects of dif-
ferentiated and uneven power, permitting them to envision and enact new
social relations grounded in multiple axesof intersecting, situated knowledge.
They do not deploy intersectionality as a tool for self-discovery or as a means
for living more comfortably in this society as it exists but rather as a way of
turning what Ruth Wilson Gilmore ð2002Þ describes as “fatal couplings of power and difference” ð15Þ into actions that deepen democratic self-activity.
The history of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates ðAIWAÞ in Oakland and San Jose, California, over nearly three decades provides a vivid illus-
tration of social movement intersectionality in action, of the logic of in-
tersectionality inside an organized movement for social change, and of the
utility of intersectionality to expose the diffuse and differential nature of
interlocking forms of oppression. Established in 1983 in Oakland, AIWA
was one of the first community organizations created to address the pre-
dominance of Asian immigrant women employed in low-paid manufac-
turing and service jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area. AIWA’s work takes
place in no single physical locus because the problems that AIWA’s con-
stituency faces are not confined to the shop floor, the neighborhood, the
family, or the offices of governments. AIWA provides opportunities for
immigrant women workers to become active and visible leaders in move-
ments for social and economic justice, regardless of their prior educational
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 38, no. 4] © 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2013/3804-0006$10.00
J e n n i f e r J i h y e C h u n
G e o r g e L i p s i t z
Y o u n g S h i n
level, English-language ability, or position in the social, economic, and polit-
ical orders. Organized to advance the interests and aspirations of limited-
English-speaking, low-wage immigrant women workers, AIWA does not em-
brace intersectionality simply because its members have been wounded by
racism, sexism, imperialism, class exploitation, and language discrimination,
but because each realm of these experiences has helped the organization
to see how power works and how new identities are needed to combat its
intersectional reach and scope. This approach rejects the subordination of
one oppression to another. It does not focus solely on gender, class, race,
or language, nor does it organize along single-axis identities such as Chinese
or Korean or Vietnamese immigrants, Asian Americans, women, or workers.
Rather, it offers participants many different points of entry and engagement
at the intersections of their diverse and plural identities. In doing so, AIWA
promotes an approach to identities as tools to be used in complicated, flex-
ible, and strategic ways.
AIWA’s systematic approach to grassroots community organizing is de-
signed to enable participants to recognize, analyze, and address the overlap-
ping layers of marginality and discrimination in their lives. The community
transformational organizing strategy ðCTOSÞ, which AIWA pioneered after two decades of organizing Asian immigrant seamstresses and electronics
assemblers, establishes a clear and transparent framework through which
AIWA members can envision their transformation from a subordinated
state of voicelessness and devaluation into an empowered state of self-
representation and self-activity. By outlining the aims, expectations, and ac-
tivities of distinct stages of grassroots leadership development—both within
the organization and in the broader society—the CTOS model enables im-
migrant women to visualize how a simple decision such as taking an English
or computer class can lead to a community-driven campaign to improve
workplace health and safety conditions, ensure access to public space for
low-income communities, and reform state and federal health care policy.
The CTOS model also establishes new forms of relationality among immi-
grant women based on mutuality and respect rather than competition and
fear. Helen, one of AIWA’s most senior immigrant women leaders, moved
to Oakland from Hong Kong in 1988 and began working as a housekeeper
in one of San Francisco’s major corporate hotels. She recalled that before
joining AIWA in the early 1990s, she did not care whether she or her co-
workers were exploited or how low their wages were; she “just wanted to
take care of ½herself� and ½her� own income.”1 But, after having a chance to
1 In this article, we draw on in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted with thirty-
eight immigrant women who participate in AIWA programs and activities from four different
918 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
study and participating in numerous AIWA initiatives, including the Justice
for Garment Workers Campaign ð1992–98Þ, which demanded that cloth- ing retailers such as Jessica McClintock accept corporate responsibility for
violations of subcontracted workers’ rights, she realized that “the most
important thing is that we unite and work together to secure our rights.”
Another dynamic leader, Hai Yan, explained that when she first walked into
AIWA’s doors in 1996, she had a “very selfish mentality.” She was singularly
focused on keeping her job as an electronics assembly worker, which was a
step up from her previous jobs as a seamstress and a kitchen worker. She
started taking English classes at AIWA only so that she could learn enough
English to pass her US citizenship test, not to meet and socialize with other
Chinese immigrant women—an undertaking her relatives warned her
against. But, as she learned about the history of white settler colonialism,
the 1960s civil rights movement, and California migrant farmworker strug-
gles, she began to see her personal troubles as part of larger structures of
domination and oppression. Hai Yan was particularly moved by AIWA’s
seminar on English-language dominance, stating “Once I learned that En-
glish ½can be used� as a tool to oppress us, I had to figure out where the way out lies. I had to find my own way out.”
AIWA believes that these women’s experiences at the intersections of
sexism, racism, class oppression, nativism, and language discrimination
equip them with evidence, ideas, insights, and ambitions that can help
solve serious social problems. The group seeks not only to develop new
leaders but to create new definitions of leadership appropriate for an in-
clusive and democratic society. AIWA’s founding director, Young Shin
ð2010Þ, emphasizes the need for a “paradigm shift” in the way social move- ment organizations do social change work that entails more than simply
giving voice to the voiceless or reacting to every crisis women face: “It ½is� time for immigrant women to sit in the driver’s seat and be empowered to
bring positive change proactively.” Because everyday problems such as the
inability to speak English or time-consuming family obligations and work
schedules create barriers to participation, AIWA’s grassroots leadership de-
velopment model seeks to provide members with the practical skills, knowl-
ethnic groups ðChinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and LatinaÞ and fifteen AIWA staff, former staff, and allies. All interviews and focus groups were conducted by Jennifer Jihye Chun and took
place in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 2006 and August 2009. Interviews
and focus group meetings were transcribed and translated with the organizational support of
AIWA staff and members and with the research assistance of undergraduate and graduate
students from the University of British Columbia. Pseudonyms are used to protect anonymity
and confidentiality, except when interview participants gave voluntary consent to use their
first names. Interview transcripts are on file with Jennifer Jihye Chun.
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 919
edge, and experience needed to overcome the conditions of their every-
day exclusion. By directly challenging the values that shape who can and
should participate in changing our society, AIWA foregrounds the intersec-
tional optics of low-income immigrant women workers’ lives as crucial po-
litical resources that can reveal how power actually works and can pro-
mote struggles against power’s multiple and differentiated effects. From
their perspectives as eyewitnesses to low-wage labor, to war, empire, and mi-
gration, and to language discrimination, sexism, and racism, AIWA mem-
bers recognize that the identities that disadvantage and disempower them
in many different ways also position them to be at the center of meaningful
social change. They see how gender, immigration status, and poverty are used
to exacerbate labor exploitation; how language is used to confine limited-
English-speaking women to jobs below their skill levels; how gender hier-
archies at work and in the home hinder the development of women as
leaders. Through AIWA, they redefine their status from members of deval-
ued social groups into grassroots leaders with the experiences, skills, and
knowledge to change policy and spearhead innovations in the workplace,
industry, and broader society.
We argue for the importance of intersectionality as a social movement
strategy through an in-depth case study of AIWA’s organizing model and
campaigns. The first section discusses the origins of the concept of inter-
sectionality, both in scholarly circles and as part of a long history of social
movement struggle. The second section draws upon ethnographic and ar-
chival research to illuminate how AIWA has embraced intersectionality as a
vital part of the everyday work of social movement mobilizations. Intersec-
tionality is deployed in three key ways: as a framework for analyzing the in-
terlocking arenas of gender, family, work, and nation; as a reflexive approach
for linking social movement theory and practice; and as a guiding structure
for promoting new identities and new forms of democratic activity among
immigrant women workers.
Intersectionality, social movements, and women-of-color activism
As a category in scholarly arguments, intersectionality can seem abstract
and complicated. Many use the concept without specifying its definition
and emphasize its importance without clarifying its efficacy, resulting in its
“underutilized potential” as a robust mode of sociological analysis ðChoo and Ferre 2010, 130Þ. Its diverse and disparate applications also diminish its political orientations. It is often reinvented at the scene of argument,
embraced as a way for individuals to disidentify with larger collective strug-
920 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
gles, revised and refashioned with little regard for its origins in concrete
campaigns for social justice. Yet the action imperatives of intersectionality
that have not always been well understood in the academy have enjoyed a rich
and flourishing existence inside social movements—especially those orga-
nized by women of color.
Organizing and activism among women of color have long recognized
the importance of using the particular grievances of one group as a point of
entry into a larger struggle. In the nineteenth century, Anna Julia Cooper
insisted Black women should support every righteous cause that thus far
has “lacked an interpreter and a defender” and to speak up against “every
wrong that needs a voice” ðCooper ½1892� 1998, 122Þ. In the first half of the twentieth century, Claudia Jones, a Black communist, contended that a
combination of race, class, and gender oppression produced superexploi-
tation among Black women, a condition that could not be addressed suc-
cessfully by attending only to race, gender, or class in isolation ðBoyce Davies 2007, 12, 13, 39Þ. Chicana feminist mobilizations during the 1960s and 1970s mounted complex campaigns around issues of class, race, nation, gen-
der, and sexuality. These efforts helped forge the concepts of nepantla and
borderlands advanced by Gloria Anzaldúa and others as key instruments
for building what Maylei Blackwell identifies as a “both/and” rather than an
“either/or” approach to social identities ðAnzaldúa 2007, 237; Blackwell 2011, 208Þ. Asian American activist Miriam Ching Yoon Louie remembers how significant the concept of the “triple jeopardy” of race, gender, and class
formulated by the Third World Women’s Alliance was to her political de-
velopment in the 1960s ðLouie 2001a, 91Þ. In the 1970s, Black women ac- tive in campaigns against sterilization abuse, for reproductive rights, and
in support of women defending themselves from gender violence formed
the Combahee River Collective and issued a “Black Feminist Statement”
underscoring the interlocking nature of social identities ðCombahee River Collective 1995; Kelley 2002, 144–50Þ.
Ideas and understandings honed in the midst of social movement mobi-
lizations and struggles set the stage for subsequent theories by women-of-
color feminists in academia about intersectionality, interlocking oppressions,
differential consciousness, and hybridity, heterogeneity, and multiplicity.2
Scholars conceiving of gender not as a purely personal or biological state but
rather as “a routine, methodological and recurring accomplishment” ðWest and Zimmerman 1987, 126Þ created in interactional and institutional arenas credit “social movements such as feminism” for producing both the ideology
2 See King ð1988Þ, Crenshaw ð1989Þ, Collins ð1990Þ, Lowe ð1991Þ, and Sandoval ð1991Þ.
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 921
and the impetus needed to create more equitable and just social relations
ð146Þ. At the same time, decades of antiracist activism helped scholars to understand racial identities as constructed political projects rather than as
purely personal reflections on fears of difference ðOmi and Winant 1994Þ. In her ground-breaking work on reproductive labor, Evelyn Nakano Glenn
ð1992Þ emphasized that the race-gender nexus created troubling entangle- ments between white women and women of color. While it may be in white
women’s short-term interest to reinforce the racial division of labor, and thus
protect themselves against dirty and less desirable forms of reproductive la-
bor performed by women of color, Glenn argued that it is not in their long-
term interest given that the racial division of labor reproduces the gender
division of labor and reinforces the continued barriers that white women
face in accessing higher-paid and more desirable “men’s jobs” ð1992, 36Þ. Intersectionality emerged in scholarship as one of many responses in
different realms of society to the democratic and egalitarian social justice
struggles of the twentieth century. Although sometimes grievously mis-
interpreted in the academy as a tool for crafting a kind of personal designer
identity based on the complexities and contradictions of individual biog-
raphies, the concept of intersectionality emerged initially as a mechanism
for revealing that power works in uneven and differentiated ways. Its earli-
est iterations promoted expressly political resistance to the dangers posed by
the disaggregation and individuation that single-axis approaches brought to
collective struggles for social justice ðCrenshaw 2011; Lipsitz 2011Þ. The idea of intersectionality helped shift the focus of academic feminist and anti-
racist contestations away from preoccupations with intentional prejudice
and toward perspectives grounded in analyses of systemic dynamics and in-
stitutional power.
The core problems that intersectional analysis initially addressed came
directly from engagement with the problems faced by members of aggrieved
groups in concrete social movement struggles. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
introduced the term “intersectionality” in a pair of law review articles in
1989 and 1991. These essays were not philosophical ruminations about
identity but rather empirically grounded analyses and critiques of the ways in
which antidiscrimination law impeded efforts by Black women workers to
secure better employment opportunities and the ways in which activist cam-
paigns against rape and battering wrongly assumed a common experience
amongallwomenandfailedtotakeintoaccountthecumulativevulnerabilities
faced by Black women and immigrant women of color. To be sure, the argu-
ments Crenshaw advanced had important philosophical and theoretical
implications, but she came to these important ideas by identifying with—and
922 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
seeking to help—women directly involved in political struggles. Inter-
sectionality emerged out of and spoke to those struggles. It primarily con-
cerns the way things work rather than who people are. As Crenshaw explains,
“My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to
account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social
world is constructed” ð1991, 1245Þ. In both academics and activism, the concept of intersectionality can be
used to clear up the confusions about sameness and difference that domi-
nant ways of knowing both permit and promote. It can be a tool for refining
understanding of the relationships that link individuals to social groups. No
individual lives every aspect of his or her existence within a single identity
category. Every person is a crowd, characterized by multiple identities, iden-
tifications, and allegiances. Yet the process of racial formation set in motion
by dominant racial projects brings individuals together in particular groups
with shared and linked fates ðOmi and Winant 1994Þ. Collective political struggle requires the creation of strategic group positions adaptable to forg-
ing coalitions within and across identity groups. These positions are always
partial, perspectival, and performative. They never encompass all dimensions
of people’s identities. Yet as an analytic tool intersectionality can be used
strategically to take inventory of differences, to identify potential contradic-
tions and conflicts, and to recognize split and conflicting identities not
as obstacles to solidarity but as valuable evidence about problems unsolved
and as new coalitions that need to be formed. Group identities are vital for
collective mobilizations for rights, resources, and recognition, yet every col-
lective identity expressed through solidarities of sameness runs the risk of oc-
cluding differences within the group. In its most sophisticated articulations,
intersectionality acknowledges both the plurality and diversity of identities
that comprise any group and the common concerns that create aggregate
identities. In Crenshaw’s deft formulation, the utility of intersectionality
flows from its ability to mediate “the tension between assertions of multiple
identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics” ð1991, 1296Þ. Without intersectionality, group unity threatens to degenerate into a
compulsory uniformity that benefits some members of the group at the ex-
pense of others. For example, employment opportunities and promotions
for Black workers do not necessarily provide justice for Black women. Anti-
racist organizing can be uncritical about misogyny. Homophobia can seep
into feminist and antiracist mobilizations alike, while race and class privilege
can be unexamined within queer politics. Still, Crenshaw does not advo-
cate the abandonment of identity categories and the embrace of a disem-
bodied universalism. Instead, she recognizes that identities can contain sit-
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 923
uated knowledges with valuable vantage points on power. In the tradition of
Aimé Césaire, she rejects both parochial particularism and disembodied
universalism. Instead, she argues for a “universal” that is contingent, provi-
sional, and rich with particulars, that entails the dialogue of all, the autonomy
of each, and the dictatorship of none ðCésaire 2000, 25–26Þ. Crenshaw’s intersectionality promotes struggles that are race-based but not race-bound,
feminist but not essentialist, always pro-Black and pro-woman but never
only pro-Black and pro-woman. Seeking unity without uniformity, mobi-
lizing identities without demanding that people be identical, intersectionality
matters from Crenshaw’s perspective because it is an indispensible tool for
creating new democratic institutions, identities, and practices.
AIWA and the movement work of intersectionality
The ideas and experiences of AIWA can help us reconsider the relation-
ships between intersectional activism and social theory. They help us see
that intersectionality not only has credibility among academics as a vital
analytic tool but that it is also applied every day to the concrete problems
that aggrieved groups face in their struggles for social justice. The Asian
immigrant women workers who participate in AIWA’s activities do not hold
socially validated roles as theorists, but the practical needs of struggle com-
pel them to engage in theoretical work. All of the organization’s projects
have revolved around the idea of intersectionality as it has been developed
and refined inside the democratic dialogues, deliberations, and actions re-
quired by the CTOS process. As the concrete manifestation of AIWA’s theo-
retical work, CTOS is the organization’s attempt to “develop a science out
of ½their� grassroots leadership model”—a science that is both reflective and systematic, as well as potentially reproducible, “encouraging other groups
to adapt it” so that grassroots leadership development becomes a priority of
social movement organizing, not just token lip service ðShin 2010Þ. As a systematic approach that links the organization’s programs and
activities to a broader process of individual and collective change, CTOS
seeks to move AIWA members through a series of incremental transfor-
mations based on their everyday struggles around low wages, job insecu-
rity and job loss, gender and household burdens, access to health care and
housing, public safety, and anti-immigrant sentiment and racism. AIWA
members begin to embrace collective engagement and public action as ve-
hicles for social change, not only due to their participation in political edu-
cation seminars or skills and capacity building workshops but also as a result
of their exposure to the leadership of other immigrant women. The CTOS
924 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
model trains veteran members to teach classes, facilitate trainings, and lead
strategy sessions with new recruits, who then become veterans training oth-
ers. New members also witness veteran leaders speaking out at public rallies
and marches, giving presentations in university classrooms, making demands
to elected politicians and government officials, collaborating with public
health experts and other recognized public leaders, and winning prestigious
awards in front of multiracial, cross-class, and multilingual audiences—all
providing immigrant women with actual examples of CTOS’s benefits. From
AIWA’s activism we can see that activism is not an alternative terrain un-
related to social theory but rather a productive generator of ideas dialectically
and dialogically related to theory. The intersectionality that guides AIWA
primarily focuses on power rather than personal identities; it neither evades
nor embraces social identities in the abstract but promotes thinking strate-
gically and situationally about which differences matter and why.
To further elaborate AIWA’s reflexive approach to intersectional or-
ganizing, the following subsections discuss first, the interlocking arenas of
gender, family, work, and nation with women’s self-development; second,
the relationship between collective action campaigns and grassroots leader-
ship; and third, the significance of peer leadership models for immigrant
women worker’s activism and democratic participation. All three dimensions
highlight how a commitment to intersectional organizing exposes shifting
lines of solidarity and tension among and between AIWA’s grassroots mem-
bers, staff, and supporters in ways that continually deepen democratic prac-
tice. The empirical data were collected between 2007 and 2010 and draw pri-
marily upon twelve focus groups conducted with thirty Chinese, Korean, and
Vietnamese immigrant women and fifteen in-depth interviews with AIWA
staff, former staff, and supporters, within the context of a collaborative self-
study that AIWA initiated to evaluate the impact of its organizing workover
the past twenty-five years. This academic-community research collaboration
follows the tradition of participatory feminist action research ðSmith 1987Þ and decolonizing methodologies ðSmith 1999; Sandoval 2000Þ.
Interlocking arenas of gender, family, work, and nation
AIWA mobilizes around the panethnic marker of Asian identity rather than
the ethnic-specific categories of being Korean or Chinese. Yet the organiza-
tion connects its general Asian identity to specific subgroups: immigrants,
women, and workers. Garment factories in Oakland were one of the first
points of entry for Chinese immigrant women moving from Hong Kong
and the southeastern coastal regions of mainland China. Many women said
they were told prior to moving that “if you came to the U.S., you either sew
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 925
or wash dishes.” In San Jose, the slogan “small, foreign, and female” was
Silicon Valley’s “simple formula” for hiring Asian and Latina women work-
ers in the low-paid electronic assembly industry ðHossfeld 1994, 66Þ. In San Francisco’s corporate hotels, Chinese and Korean immigrant women, among
other groups of immigrant women of color, were concentrated in the “back
of the house” as hotel maids, while white, college-educated receptionists and
restaurant servers worked the “front of the house” ðLouie 2001b, 204Þ. From the very start, AIWA prioritized the needs of immigrant women
workers. Organizers, who at the time were mostly college-educated, 1.5-
and second-generation Asian American women, traveled to garment fac-
tories, restaurants, and hotels in the region to ask immigrant women about
what kinds of programs and activities would best address their needs.3 Dur-
ing a workplace outreach, Young Shin recalls that she was initially surprised
to hear about the significance of learning English for immigrant women
workers: “I still remember talking to a Chinese seamstress who was having
her lunch on the doorstep outside of her Chinatown garment shop. When
we asked what kind of program she would like to see for immigrant women
like her, she said, ‘learning English.’ I wondered where she would speak
English since she worked 8 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, shopped in
Chinatown, and hung out with her Chinese friends and families. I soon
realized and understood that learning how to speak English was a symbolic
need for some women to feel like they were part of their adopted country,
the United States” ðShin 2010Þ. Soon AIWA began offering workplace literacy ðWPLÞ classes. In addition
to offering basic English-language education, AIWA developed a curriculum
based on popular education principles that sought to educate women about
their rights as workers, as women, and as immigrants. While some women
were motivated to study English to improve their job prospects, others em-
phasized the importance of knowing English as a form of self-defense and
self-affirmation. One Korean immigrant working as a room cleaner in an op-
ulent San Francisco hotel explained that she wanted to learn English “so
we can tell the boss to stop yelling at us. We are not machines but human
beings who deserve some respect” ðShin 2000Þ. By challenging employers’ assumptions that workers with limited mastery of the English language will
not talk back, make complaints, or file written grievances, Asian immigrant
women workers begin to disentangle the nexus between language ability and
workplacediscrimination.
Once women set aside a few hours per week for their own self-education,
small shifts begin to take place in AIWA members’ everyday lives. Many
3 The so-called 1.5 immigrants come to the country of arrival as children or teenagers.
926 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
women describe AIWA classes as a rare opportunity to break the monotony
and isolation of their daily routines, which consist primarily of waking up,
going to work, preparing dinner for their families, and going to sleep. They
also describe AIWA as a place where women can forge relationships outside
of work and family life. Fan moved from Hong Kong to Oakland in 1975 to
join her husband’s family, who were already living in the United States. Like
many of her peers, she worked in a garment shop before getting a job as a
cafeteria worker in a local school. Her husband’s family advised her not to
discuss any personal matters with neighbors or coworkers to avoid getting
into trouble. Her suspicious attitude, however, slowly began to change after
she started taking classes and leadership trainings at AIWA. She explains:
“AIWA creates an open environment for women to come closer and to
understand each other more. So it’s friendlier at AIWA. There’s a difference
between work and AIWA. There’s always competition at work. It’s a ma-
terialistic world, but at AIWA, we participate in activities that lack that kind of
competition.” Fan especially enjoyed the opportunity to share experiences
with her peers about a range of dilemmas, from problems with supervisors to
difficulties raising children in America. By creating social settings that are
not mired in competition and unequal power dynamics, AIWA promotes
cooperative and supportive relationships, laying the groundwork for new
ways members can relate to each other and, eventually, new ways of working
collectively on community-driven campaigns to improve workplace and in-
dustry conditions and change public policy.
Working together with other women also helps immigrant women work-
ers craft new understandings of gender. The second shift is an omnipresent
reality for most AIWA members, who are expected to cook, clean, and care
for their families, including extended family members, in addition to their
waged work. The long hours they put in on the job can isolate them from
the broader life of the community, as well as restrict their sense of self and
identity to their care-giving roles. Participating in AIWA activities offers
women opportunities for purposeful and caring relations with other women
who are not blood relations, building a new sense of personhood and pos-
sibility among women accustomed to pressures to define themselves exclu-
sively in relation to family roles and identities. Sunhee, one of the most se-
nior Korean immigrant women leaders, explains:
I think I discovered what “woman” was after coming ½to AIWA� and that empowers me. If I tell people to educate themselves and hear
them reply that they should stay home to cook, I tell them “Put aside
only two hours a week for your own sake. Come for your own good.”
We are too full with our families, children. . . . Yes of course, we have
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 927
our duties. I don’t mean you should neglect them. But if you can
spare just two hours for yourself, life will be more beautiful. “Find
yourself” is what I always tell people. And when they do, they tell me
they feel so good. To come here for two hours’ English lessons, for
their own sake. Learning English is not necessarily the only purpose.
When you come here you discover yourself.
AIWA has been especially attentive to the intersections that complicate
women’s status as workers with their socially defined roles as mothers and
wives. Participating in AIWA activities often requires women to persuade
children and spouses to shoulder more domestic responsibilities. For some
women, the lack of support from family members prevents them from
becoming more involved in leadership activities. For other women, family
members play a crucial role in supporting women’s self-development. Soon-
kyung attended WPL classes every Wednesday night with other Korean im-
migrant electronics assemblers at AIWA’s San Jose office. When she first
began taking classes, she recalls feeling guilty about leaving her husband and
children home alone for dinner. She explained that she would “rush home”
after finishing her shift at 3 p.m. and picking up her children, and meticu-
lously prepare dinner “much better than usual, wrapping the plates in plastic
wrap, setting the table, even folding the napkins.” But, after one particularly
grueling day at work, she recalls: “As soon as I was done at work, I picked
up the children and was about to make dinner really fast and go. My chil-
dren knew it was too much, and my husband knew it too. So, my husband
said, ‘You don’t have to worry too much . . . because ½the children� could just order pizza or go buy burgers.’ ½I said,� ‘But how can I let you eat Mc- Donald’s after a long day of work?’ He just replied, ‘One doesn’t die from
eating McDonald’s once in a while.’. . . So now, I take it easy on Wednes- days. I leave home with confidence.” Building confidence translates into
new sources of empowerment for many immigrant women who routinely
feel devalued by their inability to speak English, their low-paid jobs, and nor-
mativegenderroles.
Participating in activities outside the spheres of work and home results
in unexpected shifts in the relationship between immigrant mothers and
their children. Working-class immigrant children often shoulder extensive
responsibilities early in life as English-language translators for their par-
ents, inverting prevailing patterns of authority and respect between parents
and children. Activism in AIWA allows some women to challenge these
inversions. Jinmee moved to Santa Clara from Korea with her husband and
two children in the mid-1980s and began taking WPL classes soon after.
928 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
Assigned to write a short paper about the experiences of Rosa Parks in the
1955 struggle to desegregate public transportation in Montgomery, Ala-
bama, the woman asked her daughter, who was in high school at the time,
to proofread her paper for spelling and grammatical errors. The daughter
noticed something more important than the typos, however; her mother
remembers: “She read it over and asked ‘Do you always read stories like
these in class?’ And I said, ‘Oh, so you know Rosa Parks?’ It was shortly
after I heard what the story meant to her that I felt really warm inside. My
daughter saw that her mom was learning about such good stories and has
backed me up since then. Till then, my husband didn’t really care, but my
kids now got to see it differently. So then the kids gave me support and
then my husband started to show support.”
Creating spaces that allow women to renegotiate their relationships in
multiple arenas emphasizes the intersecting nature of their lives as women,
workers, mothers, wives, and immigrants. Getting men to accept changes
in domestic responsibilities; winning new respect from children for develop-
ing new knowledge and skills; viewing their roles as mothers, wives, daugh-
ters, and sisters as important conditions of existence rather than their total
identities; and developing trusting, purposeful, caring relations with people
outside their families all contributed to building a new sense of personhood
and possibility. Just as Crenshaw uses the particular experiences of Black
women to show that they do not experience discrimination as a simple and
singular event but as a product of the ways in which patterns of power
converge, AIWA uses its privileged composite identity as a starting point for
critique and contestation and as a unique and generative space from which
power can be challenged in multiple sites and on multiple scales—from the
body and the household to the workplace and the broader life of the com-
munity.
Recentering grassroots leadership in workers’ collective action
campaigns
AIWA’s intersectional optic operates as a crucial mechanism for exposing
how power works in uneven and differentiated ways, but it also discloses
new dimensions of political struggle, reveals new targets for collective strug-
gle, and activates new solidarities and affinities across race, gender, social
status, and generation. The group’s earliest experiences organizing in the
garment and high-tech industries highlight the specific dilemmas that Asian
immigrant women workers faced when trying to exercise their rights, and
these experiences emphasize the need to develop alternative solutions situ-
ated in everyday experiences of marginalization and oppression. In the gar-
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 929
ment industry, AIWA quickly recognized the consequences for individual
workers who tried to demand their legal rights. After learning about what
the minimum wage was during a WPL class in Oakland, one Chinese im-
migrant garment worker asked her boss to pay her the minimum wage,
only to be fired the next day. This incident highlighted the dangers of sim-
ply informing workers of their legal rights without transforming broader so-
cial, economic, and political structures. The lack of basic worker protections
in Silicon Valley’s high-tech assembly industry also exposed the limits of con-
ventional union approaches to organizing immigrant women workers. Al-
fredo Avila de Silva, a veteran organizer with the Texan Farm Workers Union
and a former organizer at the Center for Third World Organizing ðCTWOÞ in Oakland, recognized AIWA’s novel strategy toward approaching anti-
union electronics assembly factories. He explained:
When union organizers were trying to penetrate the high-tech in-
dustry ½in Silicon Valley�, a union organizer would appear ½on com- pany grounds� and within days, they’d be closed out of the plant and access would vanish. They would hit this wall; they just had no access
to the workers. . . . Those few workers that they would find would be quickly isolated and the union campaigns would sputter and go out
because they just weren’t able to reach enough of the workers. . . . Very interesting enough, when AIWA would approach factories about
teaching onsite English classes, the employers, the subcontractors, ac-
tually invited ½AIWA� in. . . . No one understood what was going to be the impact of these classes, right?
Although the high-tech industry proved to be much more resistant to
AIWA’s community organizing approach, the organization’s analysis of
masked employment relations in the garment industry resulted in historic
victories against sweatshop labor abuses. AIWA’s growing profile as an im-
migrant workers’ rights organization in the early 1990s led twelve seam-
stresses from Oakland’s Chinatown into AIWA’s office seeking assistance for
unpaid back wages. While the nonpayment of wages was not an uncommon
story for garment workers, AIWA saw its opportunity to support a coura-
geous group of garment workers in demanding that clothing retailers such
as Jessica McClintock acknowledge corporate responsibility for wage theft
in the garment industry, even if they were not the immediate and legally ac-
countable employers. To expose how the subcontracted structure of the gar-
ment industry squeezed the labor of garment workers, AIWA drew upon
participatory action research methods. AIWA staff organized a field trip to
the Jessica McClintock boutique in San Francisco’s Union Square. When
women spotted the dresses that they had previously sewn with extravagant
930 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
$175 price tags, Shin recalls, “it did not take too much calculation nor ex-
planation to see that someone was making a huge profit while these seam-
stresses were not even paid at all” ð2010Þ. AIWA’s Justice for Garment Workers Campaign ð1992–98Þ activated a
dense network of movement allies and student activists both locally and
nationally to publicly shame Jessica McClintock for refusing to take re-
sponsibility for sweatshop labor abuses. Gary Delgado, the founding di-
rector of the CTWO and the Applied Research Center and a former orga-
nizer with the National Welfare Rights Organization and the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now ðACORNÞ recognized AIWA’s pioneering approach to worker and community organizing. He stated:
This was a women’s campaign. It was different because most of the
other ½campaigns� were owned and operated by men. You not only had a multiracial constituency of Asian women, which is hard for
people to wrap their heads around, but you would go to college
campuses and people would be doing stuff. The external campaign,
which Helen ½Kim� had a fair amount to do with, was very important and impressive. It was prior to all the sweatshop stuff. It’s what a
bunch of young Asian women activists cut their teeth on, trying to
throw off the “model minority” yoke and all that. Not only was it a
very interesting campaign, straight up, in terms of the ethnic bosses
against McClintock, it also inspired a large constituency: people who
saw their mothers in the thing.
Overlapping lines of similarity and difference were especially vital to
mobilizing second-generation Asian American youth in support of Chi-
nese immigrant women garment workers. Vivian Chang, who worked as a
campaign coordinator and whose own grandmother from Taiwan was a
garment worker, explained that when she made campaign presentations to
high schools, universities, and support groups, she would start by asking,
“who here has a family member that is employed in the garment industry?”
Helen Kim, a 1.5-generation Korean American woman, and Stacy Kono,
a third-generation Japanese American woman, were also key AIWA staff
members centrally involved in the campaign. While neither directly had
family members who were garment workers, each emphasized the im-
portance of multiple points of entry and identification, especially for those
who grew up in immigrant families. When describing the enormous sup-
port AIWA was able to generate among Asian American students from
Los Angeles to Chicago to New York to Atlanta, Kim explained, “I think
people related to the difficulty and sacrifice of the first-generation immi-
grants. So even if their direct family didn’t work in the sweatshops, they
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 931
could certainly identify with both the discrimination and lack of opportu-
nities.”
AIWA’s public and dramatic three-and-a-half-year campaign resulted in
new standards and protections in the garment industry. In February 1996,
AIWA and Jessica McClintock signed a cooperative agreement with the
assistance of Robert Reich in the US Department of Labor that established
a garment workers’ education fund and a toll-free, multilingual, and con-
fidential hotline for garment workers in the United States. In 1997, AIWA
secured the participation of three more clothing retailers, Esprit de Corp,
Byer California, and Fritzi of California, to establish hotlines for subcon-
tracted garment workers to report labor violations. However, as the organi-
zation began to wind down from an intense period of crisis-driven organiz-
ing, staff leaders began taking inventory of the campaign’s strengths and
weaknesses. Although the courage and resilience of immigrant women work-
ers, who testified at public hearings and spoke at public rallies and marches,
formed the heart of the public campaign, they played limited roles in the ac-
tual resolution of the campaign. Moreover, given the importance of broad-
based mobilization in support of the campaign’s message, much of AIWA’s
time and resources were spent on escalating the public drama rather than
on developing the capacity of immigrant women to advocate on their own
behalf. To refocus organizational activities on its core mission, AIWA shifted
from an issue-based to a relational approach for organizing. The relational
organizing approach does not prioritize “mobilization on issue campaigns,”
as Mark Warren ð1998, 87Þ explains, but rather involves the deliberate build- ing of relationships and the sustained participation of community actors “for
the purpose of finding common ground for political action” ð86Þ. Between 2000 and 2006, AIWA engaged in innovative efforts to fore-
ground the active participation of immigrant women workers in collec-
tive campaigns for social change. At an annual membership retreat in 2000,
AIWA members identified the need to address the chronic pain and injury
of workers whose bodies were deteriorating after years spent sewing in gar-
ment shops. Building on its peer health promoter network, which involved
members in identifying and challenging occupational health and safety haz-
ards in the workplace, AIWA established a garment workers’ clinic in Oak-
land’s Chinatown. The clinic not only provided immigrant garment workers
with basic health services and screening of occupational injuries, it also cre-
ated new collaborations that placed immigrant women garment workers
in more horizontal and collaborative relationships with medical profession-
als from the University of California, San Francisco, and public policy officials
from the California State Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Immigrant women used their situated knowledge as workers who had ac-
932 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
cumulated years of backaches, repetitive stress injury, eye strain, and head-
aches to design a model ergonomic garment work station. AIWA launched
its ergonomic improvement ðERGOÞ campaign to convince subcontracted garment shops to upgrade their work stations through the installation of
ergonomically engineered chairs, tilt tables, foot rests, and tool kits at work-
stations aimed at combatting the painful injuries workers routinely suffered
in the garment industry.
The ERGO campaign combined key elements of AIWA’s grassroots or-
ganizing approach. After women identified ergonomics reform as the main
issue, they were responsible for studying the topic and carrying out the cam-
paign from beginning to end, responding to setbacks and devising inno-
vative solutions. One of the most unexpected alliances occurred between
AIWA, subcontracted employers, and local city government. When immi-
grant women first approached employers about the need to make ergo-
nomic reforms to garment workers’ stations, employers balked at the cost of
purchasing $250 ergonomic chairs. Just as AIWA developed an innovative
approach for demanding corporate responsibility in the garment industry,
AIWA worked with subcontractors to lobby the City of Oakland and Ala-
meda County to allocate taxpayer dollars to improving health and safety
conditions for its low-income residents.
Immigrant women workers’ participation in every aspect of campaign
development and implementation defied conventional wisdom about the
limits of grassroots organizing. Few AIWA staff organizers imagined at the
beginning of their health and safety work that AIWA members would be-
come the experts and innovators who improved ergonomic conditions in
garment shops; yet through the self-education, strategic planning, outreach,
and training of campaign leaders, garment workers made ergonomic reform
a key change in the local industry. Campaign leader Kwti Fong Lin stated:
“We’ve done something we never thought we could do. The workers in
Oakland now know there’s an ergonomic chair that’s good for their health.
Everybody’s talking about the chair” ðRomney 2004, 126Þ. Although the ERGO campaign did not force subcontractors and retailers to create healthy
work environments on their own, the practical dilemmas of implementing
ergonomic reforms did generate new analytics on how to hold local com-
munities accountable for workplace standards in a transnational industry.
Immigrant women workers as peer leaders
In both individual and collective strategies for social change, the role of
immigrant women as mentors and peer leaders was essential for re-
configuring more subtle and invisible forms of marginalization and sub-
ordination. Almost all of AIWA’s leaders emphasized that when they first
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 933
moved to the United States, they were not interested in joining organi-
zations and becoming involved in broader efforts to enact change. This did
not mean that they anticipated that their new lives would be free from
difficulty. Contrary to the idea that immigrants move to the United States
for a better life, few Chinese immigrant women we interviewed perceived
the United States as a place of economic opportunity. Stories frequently
circulated in newspapers in China and Hong Kong about the miserable
and tragic lives of new immigrants, and many expressed that they were
aware that moving to the United States meant a life of isolation and
hardship working long, grueling hours for low wages.
AIWA’s leadership development trainings sought to expand immigrant
women’s reference points and provide concrete examples of alternative ways
of living one’s everyday life. Hai Yan used the metaphor of a cup to explain
how AIWA changed her life, stating: “If I never came to AIWA, I would
still be stuck in a cup. Now, I’ve stepped outside of the cup to the outside
world.” When asked to elaborate, she explained: “What is life like in a cup?
Eat, sleep, go to work, finish work, come home. It’s that simple. But since
coming to AIWA, I meet a lot of people, come into contact with people
from other racial groups, go into different groups and organizations to give
speeches. Grassroots women like us have the courage to go to places like
Berkeley to give presentations to students. And if we see something that is
unfair, then we will fight to change it.”
While deepening understanding of social, political, and economic in-
justice is a vital component of individual transformation, the direct expe-
rience of new forms of connection and solidarity with other immigrant
women workers generated more flexible and strategic identifications across
existing lines of similarity and difference. Chung Hee and Hung Ja, two of
AIWA’s senior trainers, traveled from San Jose to San Francisco to lead an
English dominance workshop for the members of Mujeres Unidas y Activas
ðWomen united and active; MUAÞ, an ally organization aimed at empower- ing low-income, monolingual-Spanish-speaking Latina immigrant women
workers. As monolingual Korean speakers, Chung Hee and Hung Ja had
facilitated AIWA’s English dominance workshop for many of their peers
going through the CTOS leadership development process. However, they
had never trained immigrant women workers who spoke another language.
The twenty MUA participants were all monolingual Spanish speakers. Ex-
cept for the translators, everyone at the workshop had only limited facility
with English. Yet the workshop proved to be a great success. Despite the
cumbersome process of having to wait for Korean-to-English-to-Spanish and
Spanish-to-English-to-Korean translations, participants savored the new
934 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
recognition of what they had in common as limited-English-speaking, low-
wage, immigrant women workers. Participants enjoyed speaking to and hear-
ing from women who had come from different parts of the world, who spoke
different languages, and who shared similar, although not identical, experi-
ences. Perhaps most important, every aspect of the workshop, from setup
and facilitation to discussion, was directed by limited-English-speaking, im-
migrant women, who were low-wage workers like the workshop participants
themselves rather than the college-educated, native-English-speaking staff
members or external consultants that typically characterize hierarchies in so-
cial justice organizing.
Seeing other immigrant women in action reframes workers’ expecta-
tions of themselves and others. Chao Ju recently moved to Oakland from
Guangzhou and did not see herself as a leader at the time of our focus
group in 2009. But she recognized that she, too, could become a leader by
learning from her peers at AIWA. She explained: “Like me, personally,
right now I am not a leader. I am just a participant. I feel that the expe-
rienced instructors have a skill. So for now, I have to slowly learn from
them.” The transparency of the CTOS model revealed how immigrant
women could engage in their own process of transformation. Chao Ju
explained: “If you have a chart, it’s easier for people to understand and
to see. It makes things simple ½and gives women� something to compare ½themselves� to, like ‘Oh, I’m at level 3 right now. If I learn this much more over the next few months, I will be at level 4.’” Another AIWA leader recalls
feeling encouraged by the creation of a clear, simple, linear approach to
membership participation, stating: “Hey, this is pretty good, I thought. We
can follow ½the CTOS model� and do things levelby level. This helps to giveus a system to do things.”
Betty’s ability to provide a quick explanation of the CTOS model
highlights the model’s accessibility and transparency. Pointing to a copy
of the CTOS chart hanging on AIWA’s office wall, she said:
This chart, if you look at it, looks like a spider’s web, it’s very com-
plicated. But, actually, when we explain the structure carefully, then
new members understand that AIWA proceeds and plans according
to this structure. The first level is getting to know AIWA and giving
more women the chance to participate in AIWA’s activities. Second,
after they have learned about AIWA, the second step is participa-
tion in some beginner’s training classes, community outreach and
activities, stuff like that. Then, we move from participation to educa-
tion. Women get together to share their work experiences or inter-
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 935
esting things that have happened in their daily lives. . . . ½For example�, the English class isn’t there for them to learn English, it’s to teach
them what kinds of words and phrases they can use to fight for their
rights.
AIWA’s emphasis on grassroots leadership development may seem to
signal an overemphasis on individual or personal concerns at the expense
of more explicitly oppositional and political ones. But AIWA rejects this
false binary. The underrepresentation of Asian immigrant women workers
as equal partners in social justice work is not a symptom of who they are;
it is a product of how power operates in multiple arenas to devalue their
full worth and potential. The “lack of parity of participation,” as Nancy Fraser
puts it, is a product of intersecting injustices in the economic, cultural, and
political spheres ðFraser and Honneth 2003, 36Þ. Asian immigrant women workers’ subordination in the economic sphere denies them basicresourcesto
participate as peers in movement work, institutionalized hierarchies of value
in the status order deem them inferior, and their inability to exercise equal
voice in public deliberations and democratic decision making results in a
pattern of systemic misrepresentation. Fraser asserts: “On the view of justice
as participatory parity, overcoming injustice means dismantling institution-
alized obstacles that prevent some people from participating on a par with
others, as full partners in social interaction” ð2008, 404Þ.
Conclusion
Asian immigrant women employed in low-paid and socially devalued jobs
such as garment sewing, electronics assembly, nail care, and home-care
work witness the cumulative effects of colonialism, war, racism, sexism, la-
bor exploitation, and language oppression every day of their lives. The Cold
War and hot wars in Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia have shaped the experiences, aspirations, and social reception of all
Asian groups in the United States ðKim 2010Þ. Hate crimes and housing discrimination alike evidence “racial lumping” through which hostility to
particular Asian nationalities is generalized to all ðSaito 1998, 60Þ. Women in AIWA realize that some of the discrimination and harassment to which they
are subjected comes simply from being targeted as women, yet their em-
bodied identities and personal histories with war, empire, and colonialism are
saturated with intersecting oppressions: the racially specific legacies of sexual
racism that pervade the practices and processes of imperial conquest and
domination, the images disseminated by the culture industry for amusement
936 y Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin
and entertainment, and the ways employers utilize gender as a mechanism for
augmented class exploitation. Their problems cannot be addressed by single-
axis struggles for national liberation, peace, feminism, class justice, or mul-
tilinguality, yet every disempowerment they face reveals a different dimension
of how inequalities are created and maintained.
Race, gender, class, and other situated identities do not become parts of
a vague composite in AIWA’s activism. Differences still make a difference.
As Crenshaw argues, the advantages of intersectionality need to be tem-
pered by recognition of the positive achievements of expressly race-based
and gender-based politics in building intellectual, social, and political re-
sources among aggrieved groups ð1988, 1991Þ. If used correctly, delin- eations of difference can well become sources of social empowerment and
reconstruction under some circumstances. This stance was historically im-
portant in the 1990s, and it remains equally significant today in the face of
searing critiques of the narrow nationalisms and gender essentialisms that
many scholars associate with identity politics. These scholars argue that di-
viding people into groups on identity grounds weakens progressive forces
and inhibits the development of a universal perspective capable of advancing
the emancipation of everyone ðGitlin 1995; Rorty 1998Þ. To be sure, there has never been only one way to be a man or a woman, straight or gay, white
or not white. Progressive politics do not flow magically from aggrieved iden-
tities. On the contrary, it is important for progressive politics that people de-
rive their identities from their politics rather than their politics from their
identities, that activists recognize the need to give progressive new meanings
based on political principles to embodied social identities. All politics are iden-
tity politics. All struggles over power concern the social meanings applied to
constructed identities and identifications to some degree. The rights-bearing
subject of law, the self-interested market subject of economics, the citizen
subject of politics, the interior subject of psychoanalysis, and the working-
class subject of Marxism are no less socially constructed than the woman of
feminism or the raced subject of Black Power. Crenshaw argues that the
problem with identity politics is not that it fails to overcome difference and
create universal unity but rather that the partial unities it establishes ignore
differences within groups ðnot all women are white, not all Blacks are maleÞ and the discrete political agendas it promotes for specific groups can come at
the expense of others and can ignore the interests of people with membership
in both groups ð1991, 1242Þ. Gender- and race-based movements like AIWA seek to give identity a
political definition, to unite groups around common beliefs and experi-
ences rather than common phenotypes or biological characteristics. As
S I G N S Summer 2013 y 937
Robin Kelley observes, successful race-based mobilizations have in reality
been less concerned with shared bloodlines than with shared histories of
blood spilled ðKelley 1999, 7Þ. Politicized social identities are intentional creations, what Chela Sandoval calls “consensual illusions” ð2000, 63Þ. Positions and politics belittled as identity politics actually entail necessary
efforts by aggrieved groups to turn negative ascription into positive affir-
mation. Identity-based mobilizations are tactical moves that draw their
determinate logic and social force from the utility of emphasizing the things
that unite a group rather than the things that divide it. They invite constit-
uencies to inhabit the identities that have been imposed upon them in order
to work through them. As Judith Butler explains, “The terms by which we
are hailed are rarely the ones we choose ðand even when we try to impose protocols on how we are to be named, they usually failÞ; but these terms we never really choose are the occasion for something we might still call
agency, the repetition of an imaginary subordination for another purpose,
one whose future is partly open” ð1997, 38Þ. Yet because every invocation of sameness covers over the realities of differences, race- or gender-based
movements always run the risk of reifying the differences they seek to
deconstruct.
The new democratic institutions, identities, and practices that are emerg-
ing in AIWA’s organizing and mobilizing are part of a broader shakeup in
society. All around the world, small social movement groups like AIWA are
engaged in projects of political education and contestation. The concept of
intersectionality permeates their work, enabling the creation of new iden-
tities and identifications that can serve as important models for others aim-
ing to deepen democracy and transform the unjust and increasingly indecent
social relations of our time.
Department of Sociology
University of Toronto Scarborough ðChunÞ Department of Sociology and Department of Black Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara ðLipsitzÞ Asian Immigrant Women Advocates ðShinÞ
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