In the fiscal year of 2024, Georgetown was allotted $195 million in federal research support, which came predominantly from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the administration has made significant cuts in research and education funding. With a projected $35 million annual loss, many Georgetown research projects have been disrupted or terminated, and the university has eliminated some graduate fellowship programs. Georgetown is currently working to secure alternative research funding sources.
As part of the Professor Research Series, the Voice sat down with research professors across a variety of disciplines to discuss their careers and recent projects.
Crystal Luo, an Assistant Professor of Asian American History, studies how factors like class, race, and urban politics have shaped Asian American and Asian immigrant histories. In an interview with the Voice, Luo discussed her current project: she’s writing a book, titled Asiatowns, which explores Asian American communities and politics in the California Bay Area from the 1960s to 1990s.
This conversation was condensed and edited by the Voice for clarity.
The Voice: Tell me a bit about your current book project, Asiatowns. What are you researching and writing about?
Luo: It’s my first book, an outgrowth of my dissertation which I worked on in grad school, that studies Asian American politics in San Francisco and Oakland—that’s what I’m defining as the Bay Area for the purpose of this. I became interested in it because the Bay Area is such a kind of canonical epicenter of Asian American history, especially in the 20th century. A lot of Asian American activism has come out of there. It’s also just a large population center for Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian, South Asian Americans. So part of it was, this is very resource dense. If I want a good archive of Asian American political activity, this would be a good place to look, but it’s also so nationally significant—Asian Americans in other parts of the country know about and care about what’s happening in San Francisco and Oakland. It kind of defines everyone else’s experience. Also, I’m not from there, so I thought it might be good to come in as an outsider.
I came in as a grad student, thinking, ‘Oh, I want to write about radical youth politics and colleges and universities, and I’m still interested in that. But I had a kind of ‘aha’ moment when I realized also, simultaneous to all this left wing political activism that bubbles up in the late 1960s, you also get a lot of Asian capital driven real estate development and garment industry activity that’s happening. I became really interested in this question of wealth inequality within a single racial group. How does that shape the way that group relates within itself? And then, how does that shape the way the group relates to other racial groups?
For Asian Americans in particular, we have gone from being the racial demographic with the smallest internal wealth gap to the largest in the course of just about 50 or so years. That must have had consequences on how people related to each other, and it seems to be driven largely by global forces of capital and labor migration. So that’s how it’s come to be that Asiatowns is a project about the politics of globalization and wealth inequality in these two cities, and how they’ve shaped the way people identify and relate to themselves and each other.
The Voice: Do you think these stories, or stories about wealth inequality within Asian American communities, have been under-explored or under-researched in the past? Or are there gaps that you’re hoping this book will be able to fill?
Luo: I do think this particular way of thinking about Asian American communities is ripe for more exploration. I think often studies will focus on either one side or the other, and not so much on the contact, or really conflict, between the two. For instance, earlier on in the field of Asian American studies, there was a lot of great historical work done on Asian American workers, but it was usually Asian American workers of an earlier historical period when most Asian immigrants in the US were working class laborers. This period that I’m working on, from the late 1960s to the mid-to-late 1990s is kind of unique, because you also have these more skilled, high-paid white collar professionals either graduating from college or immigrating from other parts of the world, mostly East and South Asia, and so that’s creating a wealth disparity. And then on the more extreme high end of things, you have wealthy developers from Japan and Hong Kong and other parts of Asia coming to California and wanting to build luxury hotels and office buildings. That particular interaction is really what I’m interested in, not just focusing on one end or the other, but how they had to deal with each other, because they’re squeezed in these little neighborhoods of like, Chinatowns and Japantowns in the same cities, and they all have, you could say, legitimate claim to the category of Asian or Asian American—you can’t say, none of them count, right?
The Voice: So the question of, ‘what constitutes an Asian American?’ Can you elaborate on that? Or how does that identity get formed?
Luo: Totally. It’s not an objective category. No racial formation or racial identity can be objective in the way that we can objectively describe a physical object, like this table. I think one of the reasons why this time period attracted me is because Asian American gets coined as a political identity, racial identity, in 1968, at the tail end of the 1960s, to describe a particular set of left leaning, maybe even revolutionary politics. But the kind of social base for that politics to exist is mostly formed by a combination of college students and working class youth. That social base really transforms over the course of the next 30 years, as a result of, especially the college-educated youth, getting higher social mobility, and more and more working class immigrants arriving with limited English language ability, who have to be actively organized into, not just revolutionary politics, but American politics in general. So the applicability of this term, ‘Asian American,’ a lot of people have argued more recently that it really has come to only be a point of active self identification for a more educated, white-collar elite. I’m less sure about that—I think a term can be useful beyond whether or not people affirmatively self-identify with it, right? I think it also can describe an ongoing project, maybe a political project, to create or stitch together shared social and political interests among people who maybe have some things in difference, but also lots of things in common.
So to give an example, a landlord who’s Chinese might say to their tenants, ‘listen, aren’t we all Asian American here, or aren’t we all Chinese American here? Isn’t there something of bonds of ethnic obligation?’ Or an employer might say that to their employees. And we can say that that has a kind of negative valence to it, or kind of oppressive valence to it. But you can also see how maybe a college educated union organizer might be able to say to a Chinese or Vietnamese garment worker, ‘I know we have all these things that are different between us. But also, my family went through the same things that the two of you are going through. And there’s something shared in our history and in our kind of interests, despite some of our social differences, and can we draw upon that to come together.’ And that’s also a kind of Asian American struggle, or Asian American identity formation. So I feel like the thing I see is this term being mobilized in all sorts of contexts to do all sorts of things. That itself is interesting to me, how flexible it is, and all the unusual places you can see it popping up, like in calls for more policing and also calls for less policing, calls to build the hotel, calls to not build the hotel. Every side has its own relationship to this category.
The Voice: Do you have any particular findings, primary sources, or stories that you’ve come across in your research that stand out as particularly interesting or surprising?
Luo: I’m always looking for political activity among recently immigrated immigrants as a sign of, what kinds of political traditions are they maybe bringing from Hong Kong or Taiwan or Vietnam, and then in this new context, what are they absorbing?
One case that I am really fascinated with is in the early 1970s, San Francisco, the city, was like, ‘we’re gonna desegregate our public schools.’ They’re not formally segregated, but they are in practice. We’re going to try and implement a busing program to bus students from really racially segregated communities and integrate them. Chinatown is, in some ways, alongside predominantly African American parts of the city, one of the most racially homogenous, ethnically homogenous neighborhoods in the city, and recently immigrated Chinese parents really come out strongly against busing. This cuts against some of our maybe more contemporary ideas about people of color as a kind of block with shared interests against the white mainstream. But this really wasn’t the case, and there were also plenty of Black parents who didn’t want their kids to be bused out of their neighborhoods either. It ended up being a much more complicated issue.
I found these testimonies from a handful of Chinese immigrant women talking about why they didn’t want their kids to be bussed, because they were part of this court case. And you might worry or expect to find some evidence of anti-Black racism, and I’m sure that that played into some of them, but for them it was important that they, as garment workers with unusually long shifts in Chinatown, would be able to take a break in the afternoon, walk to the neighborhood school and bring their kids to Chinese school, drop them off, and then go back to work to make more money to support their family. It was as much about being able to economically, financially survive as newly arrived immigrants who depended on this enclave for basically everything, to have their kids go to a neighborhood school. This gets spun by elite members of the Chinese community as, ‘oh, look at how much they value Chinese culture. They really want to send their kids to Chinese school.’ I’m sure that’s part of it, but logistically speaking, these women, some of them were single moms, they were like, ‘I just need to go pick up another few hours at the factory. I can’t have the kids alone at home.’ This, to me, really highlights how class shapes the way people relate to something like Chinese culture, even just Chinese school. We might make assumptions of, ‘yes, these parents valued education, and that’s why they wanted to send their kids there.’ But in the limited voices of these women, you can also see moms just really struggling to make it work, and that practical element of the story I really think gets left out in the way people have tended to talk about this as a story about language access rights.
The Voice: What challenges have you faced while writing this book?
Luo: Definitely trying to hear directly from working class immigrants is challenging. Even in their own languages, often, they didn’t leave behind much of a written record. Like this woman, her name was Yung Ngoi Toy, the only reason I know about her is because she gave an affidavit in a court case, and it wasn’t even really her own words that were used, she gave very rote answers to a fixed set of questions that her lawyer asked her. So oftentimes, trying to extrapolate the lives of wage workers and restaurant workers and stuff like that is quite challenging.
Another thing—this isn’t quite a challenge, but it’s a consideration—is a lot of these actors are still alive. This is relatively recent history, and a lot of these political questions are still very relevant and actively being worked out. I think a historian’s job is to catalog and assess the whole breadth of evidence that we can access and try to make sense of it. But understandably, there are people, myself included, who want to draw political conclusions from some of this. So trying to navigate what my responsibilities are to the whole range of actors that I want to talk about, while also not trying to achieve this falsehood of neutrality—which is also relevant In journalism—and also trying to respect the people whose whose voices and stories I need in order to write a kind of comprehensive account, and who sometimes I’ve interviewed and spoken to. Trying to balance all of that is like an ongoing struggle.
The Voice: What are you hoping that readers will take away from Asiatowns?
Luo: I think one thing for people who maybe don’t know much about the place or Asian American history is just, most people know about San Francisco Chinatown, for instance. They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of it,’ but the idea that it has internal politics and internal conflict might be somewhat unusual to people, and the fact that it often breaks down along class lines, I think, might also be somewhat unfamiliar. So just raising that point and trying to draw people’s attention more to the idea of economic frictions within a single, seemingly homogenous racial community might be of use and of interest.
The other concept that most people probably will be already familiar with, to some extent, is globalization, which we often talk about as a very high level thing. You think of globalization, you think of institutions like the World Bank, you think of international trade. But the idea that it also was something that was worked out through local politics, because immigrants and overseas developers all had to participate in these local processes, might be somewhat unusual to people. So the idea that globalization is happening all around us, in these little interactions all the time, is also something that I would want people to take away.
This semester, Professor Luo is teaching two classes: “Asian American Labor History,” in the History department, and “Images of Internment,” in the American Studies department. She will be on research leave during the fall 2026 semester, but will be back in spring 2027, where she’ll most likely teach “Asian American Labor History” and an American Studies seminar again.
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