(Il)Legible Solidarities: Building Cross-Racial Youth Power in a Dystopian City

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: Asian American Youth Activism and Cultural Empowerment

Abstract

This paper is focused on lifting up the community organizing work of the San Francisco-based Asian American Organizing Collective (AAOC). Through the difficult and contradictory dynamics of youth organizing and solidarity building, I interrogate how Asian American youth organizers grapple with their own structural positions and dominant narratives of model minorities through forms of refusal, compliance and accommodation. Secondly, I illustrate how engaging with the realities of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism shaped Asian American youth organizers’ organizing efforts in engaging with the state.

Author

• Miguel N. Abad, University of California - Los Angeles