Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:41:27.009Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Across the Divides: Beyond School, Nation, and the 1965 Immigration Act in the History of Asian American Education

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Stephanie Hinnershitz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The importance of education for Asian Americans looking to fight race-based discrimination, create a sense of community, and reclaim and establish an identity is well documented. In 1884, Mary and Joseph Tape, Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, sued the San Francisco Board of Education and the principal of the Spring Valley Primary School—Jennie Hurley--after Hurley denied their daughter, Mamie, admission because she was “Chinese” (though born in the United States). The Superior Court ruled in favor of the Tapes, but in 1885, the School Board appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of California where justices upheld the lower court's decision. Though Mamie would not be able to attend Spring Valley after the School Board successfully pushed for state-wide school segregation legislation, many “white-only” institutions began to admit Chinese American children after the Tape case.

Keywords

Asian American studentspost-1965 immigrationAsian American educationtransnational education
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 623 - 631
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For more on these examples, see Ngai, Mae M., The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Berard, Adrienne, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Hinnershitz, Stephanie, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Tamura, Eileen H., “Asian Americans in the History of Education: An Historiographical Essay,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 60–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” 65.

4 For more on social science studies on Asian American education, see Pak, Yoon K., Maramba, Dina C., and Hernandez, Xavier J., Asian Americans in Higher Education: Charting New Realities, ASHE Higher Education Report (San Francisco: Wiley, 2014), 1–136Google Scholar; Park, Clara C., Endo, Russell, and Goodwin, A. Lin, eds., Asian and Pacific American Education: Learning, Socialization, and Identity (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2006)Google Scholar; Obiakor, Festus E. and Hui-Michael, Ying, eds., Voices of Asian Americans in Higher Education: Unheard Voices (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2019)Google Scholar; and Kim, Heather, Rendon, Laura, and Valadez, James, “Student Characteristics, School Characteristics, and Educational Aspirations of Six Asian American Ethnic Groups,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 26, no. 3 (July 1998), 166–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The work is exhaustive and Tamura's article should be consulted for more examples.

5 Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” 69.

6 Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” 71.

7 Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” 69.

8 Tamura, “Asian Americans in the History of Education,” 69.

9 Blankenship, Anne M., Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee, Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

11 For more on Chinese and Chinese education in Mississippi, see de Sánchez, Sieglinde Lim, “Crafting a Delta Chinese Community: Education and Acculturation in Twentieth-Century Southern Baptist Missionary Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 43, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 74–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chan, Kit-Mui Leung, “The Chinese-Americans in the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Mississippi History 35 (Feb. 1973), 29–35Google Scholar; and Loewen, James W., The Mississippi Chinese: Between White and Black (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

12 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, “History without Silos: Ignorance versus Knowledge, Education beyond Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Aug. 2014), 350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Lomawaima, “History without Silos,” 349.

14 For more on post-1965 immigration generally, see Lee, Erika, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015)Google Scholar; and Hong, Jane H., Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 For more examples of using interviews and oral histories, see Ngo, Bic and Lee, Stacey J., “Complicating the Image of Model Minority Success: A Review of Southeast Asian Education,” Review of Educational Research 77, no. 4 (Dec. 2007), 415–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Liu, Amy, “Critical Race Theory, Asian Americans, and Higher Education: A Review of Research,” Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 5, no. 2 (June 2009)Google Scholar, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98h4n45j; Kim, Heather, Rendon, Laura, and Valadez, James, “Student Characteristics, School Characteristics, and Educational Aspirations of Six Asian American Ethnic Groups,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 26, no. 3 (July 1998), 166–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Seller, Maxine Schwartz, “Immigrants in the Schools—Again: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Education of Post-1965 Immigrants in the United States,” Journal of Educational Foundations 3, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 53–75Google Scholar. This is only a limited representation of the existing literature.

16 For more on the Asian American movement, see Okihiro, Gary Y., Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jung, Moon-Ho, The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Maeda, Daryl J., Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Wei, William, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

17 More work remains to be done on these movements in other regions, including the Midwest and the South. Andrew Urban wrote a useful article on a Korean student in the South during the late nineteenth century. See Urban, “Yun Ch'i-ho's Alienation by Way of Inclusion: A Korean International Student and Christian Reform in the ‘New’ South, 1888–1893,” Journal of Asian American Studies 17, no. 3 (Oct. 2014), 305–36.

18 Espiritu, Yen Le, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

19 Sarah M. Griffith, The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900–1950 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018). See also Hinnershitz, Stephanie, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Bu, Liping, “Confronting Race and Ethnicity: Education and Cultural Identity for Immigrants and Students from Asia” History of Education Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Nov. 2020), 644–656Google Scholar. For more on foreign students in the United States, see Bu, Liping, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003)Google Scholar; and Bu, Liping, “Education and International Cultural Understanding: The Elite American Approach, 1920–1937,” in Teaching American to the World and the World to America: Education and Foreign Relations since 1870, ed. Garlitz, Richard and Jarvinen, Lisa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 111–134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Oh, Arissa H., To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Choy, Catherine Ceniza, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Choy, Catherine Ceniza, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McKeown, Adam, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

22 Kurashige, Lon, ed., Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

23 For more on kibei students, see Azuma, Eiichiro, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.