Saving Japantown, Serving the People: The Scalar Politics of the Asian American Movement

Abstract

This paper uses the case of the Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction's mobilization against urban renewal in San Francisco's Japantown to examine the scalar politics of the Asian American Movement (AAM) between the late 1960s and early 1980s. The AAM was born on West Coast campuses as part of multiracial struggles to establish ethnic studies departments and create community-oriented higher education. It drew its influences from the antiwar movement, Third World decolonization struggles, the women's movement, and the Black Power Movement. Like other antiracist movements of color at this time the AAM eventually shifted its activism from campuses to include struggles in racialized communities. The AAM's politics, however, were focused on more than the local or community scale. Instead, the AAM attempted to broaden its struggle, ie, ‘jump scale’, through its alliances, worldview, and organizing tactics and was ultimately enmeshed in a larger network of late-1960s and 1970s progressive mobilization and revolutionary nationalism that operated at multiple scales.

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