








view of the American founders. The expansion of the American regime across the continent, the importation of Asian workers, and the subsequent exclusion of Asians from the American polity are signs of the tarnished image and broken promise of refuge that America extended and then revoked. The Asian world is a composite of ethnicities and traditions ranging from the Indian subcontinent northeastward to China and Japan. The engagement of the United States beyond its continental limits brought American and Asian interests into a common arena now called the Pacific Rim. The most recent and perhaps most traumatic episode of this encounter was the conflict that erupted in 1941 at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Thus, examining the Asian relationship to America begins with the dual burdens of domestic exclusion and war.
The cultural roots and current interaction between the United States and Asia form a complex of concerns explored in this unit's articles. Understanding the cultural matrices of Asian nations and their ethnicities and languages initiates the process of learning about the Asian emigrants who for many reasons decided to leave Asia to seek a fresh beginning in the United States.
The population growth of Asian Americans since the  njm'grafon reform of 1965, the emergence of Japan and other Asian nations as international fiscal players, and the image of Asian Amencan intellectual and financial success have heightened interest in this ethnic group in the United States. The vanety of religious traditions that Asian immi grants bring to America is another dimension of cultural and moral importance. In what respect are non-Judeo-Chrfc tian-isiamic faith traditions issues of consequences  This aftermath of conflict and resulting analysis have riveted attention to the ethnic factor.	eted
The details of familial and cultural development within Asian Amencan communities compose worlds of meamng
that are a rich source of material from which botf and troubling questions of personal and group emerge. Pivotal periods of conflict in the dram American experience provide an occasion for le< much about ourselves as about one of the newes of ethnicities the Asian Americans.
One of the first large-scale interactions betv United States and Asia was with the Philippim and its populations. This experience of war ant and the attendant century-long process of mili defense relationships as well as the exportation tutions and cultural change have forged a unique tional-intercultural symbiosis. The role of the ethnit diaspora and the emergence of economic strength litical change in Asia suggest the globalization of tl factor. Even the name of this American ethnic pc has changed, as has its relationship to the island ancestry. There is new politicization of the future an Asian homeland and the diasporic remnant, ing leaders are fashioning a new consciousnes meaningful for its time and is inspiring artions articulate a most worthy future.
Looking Ahead: Challenge Questions
The public passions generated during Work ave subsided, and anti-Japanese sentiment is n card. Is this statement true or false? Why?
Under what circumstances and toward which could the snarls of ethnic hatred be renewed?
What impart did Asian Americans have on t dential elections? Are attitudinal and institution ces to inclusion such as contributions from associated with foreign interests and corporation matters of law or are they symptoms of prejud rears of ethnic politics?
How can inclusiveness as an American v aug t? What approaches are most promising?
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Article 33
Misperceived Minorities
 Good  and  bad  stereotypes saddle Hispanics and Asian Americans
Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Richard Lopez, 29, a fourth-generation Mexican American businessman from San Bernardino, Calif., grew up in what he called a  Brady Bunch  suburb, and learned Spanish only to communicate with his great-grandmother. He is mystified when Hispanic newcomers complain of discrimination and angry when whites assume he needed
special help to move up in American society.
 Nobody ever put a roadblock in front of me. I earned my way into college, and it offended me when people asked if I was receiving affirmative action,  he says in a telephone interview.  I think a lot of the whining about discrimination is blown out of proportion. The biggest thing holding a lot of Mexicans back here is their resentment against those who succeed. 
Ray Chin, 46, an insurance agent in New York s Chinatown, spent his teenage years washing bathrooms and delivering groceries in the city after his parents fled Communist China in the 1950s. Today he has earned the stature that often leads Asian Americans to be called the  model minority,  a phrase he views as more curse than compliment.
 Yes, we can successfully join the mainstream, but once we reach a certain level, we re stifled by that glass ceiling,  Chin says amid the din of a crowded Chinese restaurant.  People think we Asians can take care of ourselves, and they don t see the need to help us. But it s not true. We are still not included in things and we have to work three times harder to get to the same level as our co-workers. 
No matter how much personal success they achieve, Hispanics and Asian Americans say they must fight stereotypes that can undermine their confidence or limit their potential Whether  negative  or  positive -the lazy, welfare-dependent Hispanic or the shy, technically oriented Asian American-such perceptions can be equally harmful and unfair, members of both groups say.
Worse, they say, is that ethnic minorities in the United States sometimes come to accept others  stereotypes about hem, even when the facts and their experiences do not support those biases. For that reason, they may remain extremely sensitive to discrimination even when they have matched or surpassed white Americans in income and education.
From The Washington Post National Weekh, fm-   Reprinted by permission.	Edition, October
Such contradictions both in the views of other An toward Hispanics and Asian Americans and, at times views of those groups about themselves appeared thn a nationwide telephone poll of 1,970 people conducted Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and University.
Yet there is also enormous diversity of opinion an rience within these two ethnic categories, other surv interviews show. The perceptions of Hispanics and Asian cans about their opportunities and obstacles vary dramatii pending on their class, community and country of origii
 It s very misleading to talk about the views of wh: sus the views of minority groups like Latinos, beca cannot assume commonalty within those groups at a Rodolfo de la Garza, a professor of government at t versity of Texas in Austin. He says it is crucial to kn( language people speak, where they were bom and how li had been in the United States to accurately assess their
In a recent nationwide survey of 1,600 Hispanics Tomas Rivera Center in Claremont, Calif., for exan percent of Hispanics from Central America said they that U.S. society discriminates against Hispanics, but percent of Cuban Americans agreed. Just over half of 1 American respondents, by far the largest group of H in the United States, shared that view.
Poverty rates vary widely within both the Hispa Asian American communities, often depending on wl from what country, members emigrated. In Los Ange employment is only 4 percent among Korean America flocked to the United States in the 1960s, but it is 21 among newly arrived Cambodian refugees. In New 1 percent of Dominican Americans are poor, but only 11 of Colombian Americans are.
For Hispanics or Asian Americans who live in the of urban ethnic enclaves, it may take a foray into other to make them appreciate the prejudice faced by othe Santiago, 30, an office manager in the Bronx, N.Y. parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic, says 1 experienced discrimination growing up in his heavily 1 can neighborhood. Then he went out to New Mexico a man on a construction job.
All the workers were Mexican, and the white owi no respect for them. The work was very hard, the ]
1 995, PP- 10-11.   1995 The Washington Post.
166
33.	Misperceived Minorities
Poll
HOW HISPANICS, ASIANS SEE THEMSEIVES AND HOW OTHERS SEE THEM
aQ oil respondents were given a list of things some people have mentioned as reasons for 1 the economic and social problems that some Hispanics and Asian Americans face today and were asked if each one is a major reason for those problems.
1$ Ml a
Hispanics who said  yes 
Whites who said yes'
Blacks who said  yes 
 
] 53%
Lack of jobs
] 42%
74%  
Language difficulties
] 56%
59%	[
Lack of educational opportunities
51%
]46%
Breakup of the Hispanic family
45%
28%
38% B3 22%
Past and present discrimination
43%
31%
58%
29%
Lack of motivation and an unwillingness to work hard
41%
19%
r^32%
Those polled were asked the same question about Aslans.
reason for
Language difficulties
44%
Whites who sald yes'
Blacks who said  yes 
Hispanics who said  yes 
44%
52%
37%
Lack of jobs
M34%
31%
46%
43%
41%
31%

Past and present discrimination ^9 20%
31%
Lack of educational opportunities 1$ 17%
27%
35%
Breakup of the Asian family  14%
252 Hispanics. The minority groups were oversampledXfo tbe tour	in public opinion polls.
*US 3 percentage points The margins of samphng error "a, sources of error fa Hispanic subsample. Sampling error is only one of m y itv survey SOURCES: Washington PosVKaiser Famdy Foundation/Harvard Univers,
23%
20%
/ery and
0e*p!oit ere Was no overtime  he recounts.  They tried tani, lJntiltleh *0   ^Ut I knew my rights and I wouldn t let fen Was   then  1 never really understood what discrimina-
BUT LIFE INSIDE ETHNIC GHETTOS ALSO CAN CONFINE and isolate, discouraging immigrants from joining American society at large and reinforcing others  misperceptions about them. In interviews, many foreign-bom Hispanics and Asian
167
5. ASIAN AMERICANS
Americans said they cling to immigrant communities, speaking to bosses and salesclerks in their native tongues and rarely meeting white Americans.
Yu Hui Chang, 35, a waitress in lower Manhattan, N.Y., says she and her husband work 12 hours a day in Chinese restaurants and rarely see their young son. Speaking through an interpreter in the cramped office of a Chinatown labor union, the Shanghai-born woman says she feels trapped in her
community but is determined to succeed in her new country.
 It is very hard to be a woman in Chinatown,  says Chang, who emigrated in 1982.  My life is nothing but working, working all the time. In China, I thought America was full of gold, and I still have the dream of taking that gold back home, but I can never save any. 
Like Chang, the great majority of Asian Americans and Hispanics who responded to the Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll said they believe strongly in the American dream, but 46 percent of Asian Americans and 55 percent of Hispanics said they are farther from achieving it than they were a decade ago.
Both groups singled out hard work and family unity as keys to success here, and both singled out the same major obstacles: lack of good jobs, crime and violence, high taxes and the gap between their incomes and the rising cost of living. All agreed that learning English is crucial.
 You have to learn the language of the enemy to survive,  says Juan Garcia, a Dominican-born man who manages a discount clothing shop in Washington Heights, a largely Hispanic section of Manhattan.  I ve been here 13 years and my English is still poor, so I can t always defend myself,  he adds in Spanish, describing his humiliation at being turned away from a fast-food counter when he could not explain his order.
Nonetheless, Garcia says he would not want to give up the comforts of American life. His son, 16, is studying computers and dreams of becoming a doctor.  Once you become civilized, you don t want to go back to a village with no lig
