As a class, we have encountered various narratives that demonstrate how people living in California enact mobility—individually, community-wise, and nationally—to enact place in their respective environment(s). Crucial to facilitating a holistic comprehension of Latina/os in the 20th century is a historical understanding of how Latina/os existed in relation to other ethno-racial communities. Much like the revisionist underpinnings of Matt Garcia’s 2012 book From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, my project strives to re-situate our understandings of the UFW with an eye to the prevalence of Asian/Latino solidarity. As such, the focus of this literature review is to illuminate how multiple thinkers and mediums engage with Latina/o and Asia confluence, from academics to curators to the general public. Over the course of this review, I examine two nodes of scholarship: Asian/Latino relational studies and theories of multiculturalism. In selecting these bodies of work, this historiography completes a two-pronged objective: one, to discern how the social relationship between Asians and Latinos—historically and in the contemporary moment-- is rendered in discourses of the day, and second, the extend to which the various mediums of these sites facilitate accessible knowledge.

Asian/Latino relational studies: The burgeoning scholarship on relational histories of Asians and Latina/os seeks to demonstrate how this phenomenon is both historically situated and relevant in the contemporary moment. As demonstrated in books like Don Mitchell's The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Mexicans and Filipinos have been laborers in California for decades. Moreover, solidarity between the two ethnic groups and the ability to collectively strike occurred during the 1920s and 30s across the state, particularly in regions like the Imperial Valley (Mitchell 1996). Natalia Molina’s 2006 book Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 demonstrates how the ability of public health discourse to police Mexican Americans in 20th century Southern California was dependent on synergetic relationships with how other minority groups, and in particular Chinese and Japanese migrants, were ostracized. Her book demonstrations how racialization of these groups by a white majority often utilized similar rhetorical strategies and logics of exclusion. This recogntion of Asian/Latino linkage continues in Wendy Cheng’s The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (2013). In her writing, Cheng goes against normative understandings of suburban life as exclusively white, middle/upper-class enclaves by describing the multiracial hierarchies and lived experiences of ethnic groups living in the West San Gabriel Valley (SGV), a region of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area with substantial Asian and Latina/o populations. For the Cheng book, the relationship between these two communities was situated in a discussion on how ethnic communities inhabited suburban life. Her rendering of Asian/Latino sites of contestation and collaboration are made all the more stronger by her ethnographic work, which allows the voices of a multiracial SGV residents to actively depict and theorize their experiences.

Multiculturalism: The term multiculturalism, while used ubiquitously in the contemporary moment, gained initial traction as part of K-12 education reform that advocated celebration of all diverse peoples and cultures. Its universal application in schools, governmental policies, and other institutions across the country was met with intense criticism from academia. Often branded as critical multiculturalism, this wave of radical scholarship admonishes generic conceptualizations of multiculturalism by constructing forms of interpretation couched in all expressions of difference. Paul Gilroy, for example, advocates for a type of cosmopolitan multiculturalism, or conviviality, in which cohabitation and acceptance of difference (in all of its permutations) is the norm. Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World cites recognition of the synergy between local and global as instrumental in determining how racialized communities can co-exist. These analyses incorporate both the politics of multiculturalism in macro processes of cultural erasure and sterilization, as well as the socio-historical context of the city’s ethno-racial communities. Moreover, scholars like Lisa Lowe, for instance, calls to attention the inability of multiculturalism to address “historically differentiated forms of empowerment” intrinsic to Los Angeles’ unique political and economic landscapes.Her analysis of the tensions between Korean Americans, Blacks, and Latina/os places their differences not in terms of the congenial banality of routine multiculturalism, but rather from a locus of contradiction that functions as “a site for alternative histories and memories that provides the ground to imagine subject, community and practice in new ways (Lowe, 1998, 84).Her extended usage of contradiction, while specific to the 1992 riots, is useful for delineating the manifest ways in which the Mexican and Filipino solidarity in the Delano Strikes operated on an unequal field of representation.