APA speech inspires crowd

Karin Aguilar-San Juan challenges students and administrators

Students, faculty members and administrators crowded into Wilder 101 last weekend to hear Brown University Sociology Professor Karin Aguilar-San Juan speak on "Asian America."

Standing-room-only at 11 a.m. on a Saturday was testimony to the crowd's eagerness to hear the keynote speaker at the 10th biennial midwest Asian Pacific American (APA) conference.

The conference was organized by members of the Oberlin South Asian Students Association (SASA), the Asian-American Alliance (AAA) and the Oberlin Korean Students Association (OKSA).

Aguilar-San Juan spoke on this year's APA theme, "Strategies of Resistance: Reclaiming the Past, Challenging the Future." Part of the future's challenge, according to Aguilar-San Juan, is to convince colleges everywhere of the need to develop Asian American Studies departments and curricula.

"The promise of Asian American Studies is not so much the facts you learn but the possibility of opening up new worlds, the promise of who we are and who we can become," Aguilar San-Juan said. "Asian American Studies challenges the parameters of traditional classes in ways that keep them true to furthering the knowledge of academia."

She told the audience of the recent victory at California's Claremont Colleges, where she is currently a visiting professor. Administrators at the cluster of five colleges finally decided to develop an Asian American Studies program several years after students banded together to actively fight for one.

Aguilar San-Juan said the victory was perhaps a small one, since the program currently consists of one staff person, one class and a small budget, but a greater battle was won.

"The biggest gain for the students was not the budget, but the experience of mobilizing together, of becoming responsible for the future of their own education. It gave the students an incredible experience on what social movement can be about," she said.

Aguilar-San Juan also told the story of her experience in a "Filipina/o-American Experience" course at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was invited to the course as a guest speaker and asked students to read the story of a Filipina-American woman struggling to survive sexual harassment at work.

The students were angered by the ending, in which the heroine quits her job to spite her boss. Aguilar-San Juan offered an interpretation of the story in which the main character took charge of her life through the mechanisms she used to tell the story, but said some class members were still dissatisfied.

"The students really took this to heart. One student e-mailed me to express how angry she was both at the story and at the interpretation I gave," Aguilar-San Juan said. "I really enjoyed the e-mail; I wrote her back and said, 'This is the kind of dialogue you should be having. That's the kind of dialogue Asian American Studies needs to be having and that's the kind of dialogue Asian American Studies activists need to pursue.'"

At the conclusion of her story Aguilar San-Juan asked audience members to discuss with each other their strategies of resistance. She then offered people the opportunity to share their ideas with her.

Ramon Nayar, a senior at Michigan State University who came to Oberlin for the conference, said he wanted to see high schools revise their text books to include Asian American experiences.

"I really hope my children can have a more complete understanding of history that's more diverse. Although I'd like to see high school textbooks change, I guess for now it has to start at the college level," Nayar said.

Susan Dominguez, Oberlin's American Indian Literature ExCo teacher, took a more proactive approach. "If you wait for academics to make changes it will take a really long time," she said. "You shouldn't wait; you can go to a local junior high school and offer to give a corrected lecture on history. People love that kind of community service."

Sophomore Johanna Almiron, co-chair of the APA planning committee, had a different strategy of resistance. "I think it's about recognizing that we're fighting for scraps and that we're in the struggle together," she said.

One student from Case Western Reserve University said he wasn't sure what to fight for. "I'd question the purpose of having an Asian American Studies department," he said. "Are you going to tell people, 'this is what Asian American culture is like,' or are you going to open up the door and let people explore?"

Aguilar-San Juan offered some strategies of her own. "This isn't just about one person, or about getting 15 minutes of fame by speaking up," she said. "It's not just about getting your piece of the pie but about asking, 'Why was the pie so small? Why did I only get one piece? Why was it even cut up that way?'"

She emphasized speaking up as a key method of resistance. "We need strategies of articulation, for learning, for interaction, for the community, for challenging some institutional practices," she said.

Aguilar-San Juan also told audience members that the questions they face in their future strategies of resistance have no easy answers. "What does Asian American activism really mean anyway?" she said. "I'm not here to tell you what it means. I'm just here to give you a little bit of inspiration so you can figure it out for yourselves."

The keynote address was one of many activities in which students, faculty and administrators participated last weekend. Other events included workshops on such topics as film and culture, community organization, environmental justice, labor organizing and gendered identities, as well as movie screenings and a coffeehouse.

Assistant Dean of Students Shilpa DavŽ, who helped coordinate the conference, was pleased with the conference's turnout. "I thought it went very well. The key thing is that we had staff, administrative and student support," she said.

DavŽ said students from many universities, including Michigan State, Case Western Reserve, Denison, and University of Wisconsin (Oshkosh), attended the conference.

"That was really rewarding," she said. "I guess what this conference showed was support from all the different parts of the community for Asian American Studies. I hope people take the opportunity to research more about Asian American issues."