Early Chinese-American Society as Portrayed in Chinese Letters of the Ah Louis Family of San Luis Obispo, California, usa早期美国华侨社会：美国加州,圣路易斯-奥比 斯波市-黄安家族的中文信件

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-215
Author(s):  
Joel Fetzer
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
English Language ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Report ◽  
San Luis ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Society

This research report presents the English-language translations of several hand-written, Chinese-language letters from the overseas-Chinese Ah Louis family of San Luis Obispo, California. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, when these letters were written, this medium-sized town on the Pacific coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles was home to hundreds of Cantonese immigrants. As unofficial “mayor” of San Luis Obispo’s Chinatown, the Guangdong-born Ah Louis interacted with a wide variety of merchants, employees, friends, family members, and officials. These documents discuss commerce in Chinatown, a legal case about local Chumash Indians, migration between China and the United States, family life in rural Guangdong Province, and labor relations in California, providing a near-unique window into ordinary Chinese-American life around the turn of the twentieth century. Extensive footnotes also place the letters in their historical and cultural context.

California’s Regulatory Leadership: Broader Implications

2019 ◽  
pp. 231-244
Author(s):  
David Vogel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Pacific

This concluding chapter reviews the key themes of the book and explores some of the broader implications of this analysis of California's regulatory leadership. Three points are particularly critical: the importance of the local dimension of environmental policies, the role of business in environmental politics, and the limits of environmental regulation. The chapter then discusses the increasingly important role states are playing in environmental protection in the United States and shows how California has economically benefited from its environmental policy leadership. One important reason why California has been able to consistently adopt more stringent regulations than those of the federal government and other states is that many of its improvements in local and state environmental quality have been a source of competitive advantage. The improvements it has made in air quality—most notably in Los Angeles—its protection of the trees in the Sierras and along the Pacific, and its land use controls along the coast and around the San Francisco Bay have all made California a more attractive place to move to, invest in, and visit.

Asian American and Pacific Island Modernist Art

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Wolf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
West Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
American Artists

Artists of Asian descent made substantial contributions to the artistic culture of the United States, incorporating practices that were different from the European-based traditions—like painting with water-soluble pigments rather than oil paint, choosing Asian subjects, and signing their works in the Asian fashion. Coming across the Pacific Ocean, some immigrants settled in Hawaii where Isami Doi, born of Japanese parents, became an influential artist. Doi typifies characteristics that are found in many Asian American artists in that he excelled at several media: printmaking, painting, and jewelry design. And he traveled extensively, spending time in Paris and over a decade in New York. The West Coast of the United States became a center for people coming across the Pacific, and major cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles developed Asian communities with active artistic cultures. Chinese immigrants were drawn to the San Francisco area because of the economic boom around the gold rush and the building of the railroads, but they also inspired prejudice, and harsh immigration laws were enacted in 1888. This halted immigration from China and bolstered it from Japan, until another law in 1924 restricted that as well. Yun Gee, of Chinese descent, in San Francisco made aggressively modern, brightly colored, and geometrically abstracted portraits before moving to Paris and then New York where his style became more expressionistic. The Asian communities in Seattle and Los Angeles included artists who worked in photography as well as painting, and some moved further east across the United States to pursue their careers in the Midwest or, more commonly, New York, the artistic center of the country. In the 1920s and 1930s, Yasuo Kuniyoshi became well known in the New York art world for his sensitively handled, sometimes humorous, sometimes erotic paintings and prints. Nevertheless, he and his peers who were born in Asia were forbidden by law from becoming citizens, something he desired, as his entire artistic career was in the United States. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi came to prominence after being nurtured by some of the Japanese American artists in Kuniyoshi’s circle, particularly Itaro Ishigaki. Noguchi is best known for the organically shaped carved stone sculptures he made after World War II, but he was also famous as a designer of modernist furniture and lamps using Japanese materials. Both he and Kuniyoshi suffered after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, while on the West Coast Japanese Americans were herded into detention camps, often losing their jobs and their homes in the process. Chiura Obata, for example, was removed from his prestigious teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley and put in a camp where he taught art. There he switched from making luminous landscapes of Yosemite to painting camp scenes of confinement and regimentation—once he was allowed to paint at all. The postwar years were a period of recovery, and new generations of Asian American artists emerged, exploring abstract styles and creating new incarnations of the multicultural art that was pioneered in the works of their Asian American predecessors.

scholarly journals DREAM Act-Eligible Poised to Build on the Investments Made in Them

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Kerwin ◽  
Robert Warren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
English Language ◽  
Administrative Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dream Act ◽  
Metro Area ◽  
Permanent Resident ◽  
Made In

This paper presents the results of a study by the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) on potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act of 2017 (the “DREAM Act” or “Act”). The study reveals a long-term, highly productive population, with deep ties to the United States. In particular, it finds that: • More than 2.2 million US residents would qualify for conditional residence under the DREAM Act. • An additional 929,000 — who are now age 18 and over — arrived when they were under 18, but have not graduated from high school and are not enrolled in school and, thus, would not currently qualify for status under the Act. • The DREAM Act-eligible can be found in large numbers (5,000 or more) in 41 states and more than 30 counties, metropolitan areas, and cities. • Potential DREAM Act recipients have lived in the United States for an average of 14 years. • Sixty-five percent (age 16 and above) participate in the labor force, with far higher rates in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Utah, Arkansas, Illinois, Tennessee, and Oregon. • This population works heavily in sales and related occupations; food preparation and serving; construction and extracting; office and administrative support; production; transportation and material moving; and building/grounds cleaning and maintenance. • Many of the DREAM Act-eligible are highly skilled and credentialed. • 70,500 are self-employed. • Eighty-eight percent speaks English exclusively, very well, or well. • 392,500 have US-citizen children, and more than 100,000 are married to a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. • Twenty-nine percent has attended college or received a college degree. • The DREAM Act-eligible include 50,700 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras, 45 percent of whom live in the Miami metro area, Los Angeles County, the Washington, DC area, Houston, New York City, the San Francisco metro area, and the City of Dallas. The study also underscores the immense investment — $150 billion — that states and localities have already made in educating these young Americans. It argues that over time and with a path to citizenship the return on this investment will increase by virtually every indicia of integration — education levels, employment rates, self-employment numbers, US family members, and English language proficiency.

Asian Americans: Filipinos

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula T. Morelli ◽  
Alma Trinidad ◽  
Richard Alboroto
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Filipino Americans ◽  
Social Work Practitioners

Filipinos are the second largest group of Asians in the United States; more than 3.4 million Filipino Americans live primarily within the largest U.S. continental cities (including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York) and Hawaii. Annexation of the Philippines, following the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), granted Filipinos unrestricted immigration to the United States as “American nationals” without right to U.S. citizenship. Throughout this more than one-hundred-year relationship, Filipinos in the United States endured discrimination, race-based violence, and a series of restrictive federal legislation impacting civil rights and immigration. Filipinos may present with a distinctly Western orientation in areas such as values and contemporary ideas; however, their traditional social and cultural characteristics contrast considerably with mainstream American culture. This entry provides a brief historic, geopolitical and cultural context to facilitate the work of social work practitioners.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Educational Meaning Making and Language Learning: Understanding the Educational Incorporation of Unaccompanied, Undocumented Latinx Youth Workers in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072199600
Author(s):  
Stephanie L. Canizales
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
English Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Immigrant Youth ◽  
The United States ◽  
English Language Learning ◽  
Youth Workers ◽  
K 12

Immigration scholars agree that educational attainment is essential for the success of immigrant youth in U.S. society and functions as a key indicator of how youth will fare in their transition into adulthood. Research warns of downward or stagnant mobility for people with lower levels of educational attainment. Yet much existing research takes for granted that immigrant youth have access to a normative parent-led household, K–12 schools, and community resources. Drawing on four years of ethnographic observations and interviews with undocumented Latinx young adults (ages 18 to 31) who arrived in Los Angeles, California, as unaccompanied youth, I examine the educational meaning making and language learning of Latinx individuals coming of age as workers without parents and legal status. Findings show that Latinx immigrant youth growing up outside of Western-normative parent-led households and K–12 schools and who remain tied to left-behind families across transnational geographies tend to equate education with English language learning. Education—as English language learning—is essential to sobrevivencia, or survival, during their transition to young adulthood as workers and transnational community participants.

Applied Comparative Law: Researching Foreign Law in an Imperfect World

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Law ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
English Language ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal System ◽  
Anglo American

I admit that I am an addict, a compulsive user of libraries and especially law libraries. As a comparative lawyer I need to investigate foreign law, which for me is the law of jurisdictions outside the United States. Since I believe the social and cultural context in which law operates is important to its understanding, I must leave the relative comfort of United States libraries and venture abroad to learn about the features of legal systems not adequately described in books. Beyond common law countries, as the IALL 20th Annual Course illustrates, the language of law is something other than English: yet another hill to climb to understand foreign law. For most of you, United States law is foreign law, which is the other side of the same issue. In addition, public international law lawyers could benefit from the comparative approach. This is particularly true for those from the Anglo-American world who rely almost exclusively on English language materials in their research. This narrow perspective undercuts the fundamental premise of universality behind a truly international legal system.

Werner Herzog

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad Prager
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Werner Herzog ◽  
Wim Wenders ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Grand Prize

Werner Herzog was born in Munich in 1942. Before the end of World War II Herzog’s family moved to Sachrang, a small town in Bavaria not far from the Austrian border. Herzog started making films in his late teens with a camera he claims to have stolen from the Munich Film School. After making several short films and his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968), his work connected with that of filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who were of the same generation and who also began making films at a young age. He has expressed respectful words for these other auteurs, but he has rejected most direct association with them and with the New German Cinema movement, underscoring his independence, his reluctance to lend his name to political causes, and his identification not as German but more regionally as a Bavarian. Herzog received international recognition for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and won the Jury Grand Prize at Cannes for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). He encountered intense criticism for Fitzcarraldo (1982), for which he was rumored to have harmed the native Amazonians who participated in his project. Herzog countered these accusations, but the air of controversy lingered. A documentary made about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982), showcased Herzog as a charismatic performer and mesmerizing speaker. Throughout the following years Herzog worked less and less in Germany, ultimately resettling in California in the 1990s, first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then in Los Angeles. During his time in the United States he continued to make both documentaries and feature-length fiction films, including Rescue Dawn (2006) and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call—New Orleans (2009). He received widespread acclaim for his documentary work, particularly for Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), the last of which was a much praised foray into 3D filmmaking. Herzog was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary feature Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Although he remains well known for the bold exploits connected with his early works, his tumultuous relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski, and his willingness to push cinematic boundaries, he is best known for his capacity to express himself philosophically on a wide range of topics and for his sage Germanic voice, which he has lent to diverse projects.

Global China in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunny Xiang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Chinese Descent

Contemporary English-language prose and poetry writers, primarily of Chinese descent, are employing a range of stylistic strategies and exploring increasingly diverse themes in their representations of China and Chineseness. Through these representations, these contemporary writers build on, adapt, and contest a historically complex relation between “global” and “China” within an American imaginary. Twenty-first-century literary novelists and poets raise many questions about this relationship. These literatures of and about “Global China” both extend from and depart from, a “Chinese American” literary tradition. For instance, writers such as Jenny Zhang, Sharlene Teo, and Wang Weike are reworking long-standing narrative tropes such as intergenerational strife and transforming conventionally ethnic genres such as the autobiography. Contemporary literary works also take more heterogeneous approaches to referencing the United States and even “the West” more generally. And, unlike a prior tradition of Chinese American literature, these works open us to consider multiple kinds of China that far exceed the putative origin point of Mainland China (the most famous instance is Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which features Singaporeans of Chinese descent). On the flip side, representations of “Global China” may lack representations of identifiably “Chinese” characters (for instance, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin). In other cases, Chinese characters may be relegated to a role, or Chineseness may be insignificant to a story’s plot. New themes and topics are emerging, most notably adoption, biraciality, mental health, and return-to-Asian journeys. Finally, the literatures of Global China include robust outgrowths of genre literature, ranging from speculative fiction to detective fiction. Writers of genre fiction include Ovidia Yu and Ted Chiang.

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