Collecting Community: Safeguarding Asian American History through Archival Precarity

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 11: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race, Culture and Politics

Abstract

“Chinatown is not for sale!” chanted hundreds of protestors outside of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). The July 2021 re-opening of MOCA after its COVID-19 closure should have been an event that welcomed back community members and tourists alike. Yet in the months following lockdown, MOCA came under scrutiny for alleged underhanded dealings with the city to secure a permanent home for the museum that in the eyes of activists also supported the construction of a new mega-jail in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
MOCA’s origins can be traced back to the early 1970s, derived from the Basement Workshop’s Asian American Resource Center (AARC). Basement was the first pan-Asian political and arts organization founded on the East Coast whose members were staunch advocates for community control–vehemently against police brutality, imperialism, and racism. The AARC, originally conceived as a store house for raw data about Chinatown, blossomed into a community-focused oral history project, and with grant support under new leadership, became the Museum of Chinese in America.
Through archival analysis and narrative interviews, I explore Basement’s creation of the AARC and how its growth and eventual metamorphosis into MOCA can be explained through a lens of archival precarity. Additionally, I situate the ways that various types of archives – institutional, personal, and community-based, that house ephemera related to Basement are used by community members and researchers, shaping how the organization’s political history, including that of MOCA, is told.

Author

• christina ong, University of Nevada-Las Vegas