In chapter 9 of this text, Peter Kwong proposes that in order for the Chinese community to demand the respect of their local government authorities and ensure that their interests are being served by those who represent them, the first step is the breaking down of a longstanding tradition of monopoly associations. The standing monopoly on power has made it historically difficult for grass-root organizations to have a significant influence. To adequately examine the way in which a tradition group allegiance to an organization with a lot of power prevents the people of Chinatown to become a united front for change is illustrated by the focus on one particular organization in this chapter, the I Wor Kuen group. The group started their work in Chinatown and went against the longstanding practice of refusing to sell and display materials from the People’s Republic of China (for fear of retaliation from anti-Communist Chinatown establishments). I Wor Kuen began to reestablish ethnic pride in the community by featuring movies from the PRC on a weekly basis, distributing news that celebrated the PRC’s achievements, and organizing public celebrations for China’s national day. These efforts broke the “community taboo on public expression,” and in doing so allowed a sense of pride to return to those who wished to celebrate their Chinese origins. Organizers also used their resources to provide free medical care and legal assistance to the people of Chinatown, and educate the masses to teach them how to make their government representatives work for them. Unforeseen loyalties to another group that already had somewhat of a monopoly on activism in the community, however, sharply curtailed the I Wor Kuen group’s efforts by creating an image of the people of Chinatown as “militant in fighting for its rights,” but without the consistency necessary to make a real difference.

The associations already forged undermined the aims of activist groups, a concept made clear by the activist groups who protested the use of tourist buses who ran tours designed to allow out-of-towners to “gawk at the Chinese as if they were freaks in a circus”, being threatened by a Chinatown tong who had an agreement with the bus company regarding the souvenir shop the tourists were brought to at the conclusion of each tour. The system in place of monopolizing power in Chinatown was contrary to the aims of reform for the people that allowed them to escape prejudice and racism. Though a political shift in leadership toward the left part of the spectrum and the emerging number of Chinese Americans becoming elected government officials have certainly helped the activist groups’ cause, some standing community ties still stand in the way of creating more rights for the people of Chinatown. A community so deeply seated in tradition needs to transform the way that business is done if the want to stop being exploited and abused by their employers and outsiders of the community.

The final chapter of “The New Chinatown” goes on to explore the detrimental effect that new immigrant communities have had on the already saturated labor market and economy of Chinatown. Illegal immigrants arriving from Malaysia and coastal regions of mainland China, for example, flock to Chinatown in desperate search of the numerous low-wage jobs and a cover for the human-smuggling networks that are allowing these illegals to enter the country. These immigrants, known as the Fuzhounese, are said to be “obsessed with earning money” and often are identified as “snake people… who wiggle their way through”. These people are blamed for many of the wrongdoings in Chinatown and constantly targeted by their smugglers, who use the price of their journey to amass a debt owed to them by these people, who are not protected by the rights of legal American workers. This allows for a form of indentured servitude to emerge in which peoples’ debts render them basically slaves to their lenders. The obviously inhumane treatment and exploitation of these people, who come to New York and subject themselves to this treatment to escape rough economic times in homeland China and Malaysia, create an economic situation that is horrific for both legal and illegal workers, benefitting seemingly only those who are operatives in the human-smuggling rings. The betterment of conditions for these people again ties back to the reform groups who have had difficulty making a real difference when the obstacles of traditional associations halting change get in the way. People must surrender their social structure and traditional associations and make way for activist groups in order to secure that their rights are being protected and that their economic interests can also be secured. Something like immigration reform, so that people no longer have to enter the country smuggled in illegally, much to their dismay and to the detriment of the workers who have trouble finding jobs when people willing to work off the books below minimum wage are being chosen before them for work, is not out of the realm of something that community activism could not have a strong influence on. When people mobilize for change, sometimes customs of insular community workings are torn down in the process, but tradition at the expense of economic and social equality seems a small price to pay.

This chapter by Alyshia Gálvez explores one non-profit organization’s experience with a paradox of good intentions. The Asociación Tepeyac de New York is a group comprised of forty parish-based Guadalupan committees designed to serve the Mexican immigrant community of New York. The committees of the association were originally launched with a mission of dedication to “the social welfare and human rights of Mexican immigrants, specifically the undocumented in New York City.” The word Mexican has since been replaced with the word Latino, as the acclaim that the association reached after its successfully efforts to provide compensation to the invisible victims of the attack on the World Trade Center, the survivors and families of those perished in the towers for whom being undocumented workers meant that they left no paper trail behind, has transformed Tepeyac… in a lot of ways for the worse. The tiny organization that began with the founder being seated on five-gallon paint buckets, using crates for desks and armed with only a single phone and the leaders recruited at city playgrounds as instruments for change, demonstrated its ability to successfully use resolviendo. Resolviendo, a Spanish expression similar to the English word adaptability, became an inevitable part of the reputation of the organization after it became the first to develop an innovative system of identifying undocumented victims of the 9/11 attacks by tapping into a secret goldmine of information, coworkers. People who came to Tepeyac provided notarized affadavits that were used collectively as alternate sources of documentation for those lost whose names were not on the payroll. This allowed for speedy and more effective cross-referencing for those claiming a family member who was a victim, creating a form of evidence of their right to being compensated. Tepeyac effectively referred those whose stories checked out to the Red Cross for monetary compensation and acted as an intermediary between the government and those the association was trying to provide aid to via lobbying. Perhaps the most understated victory of this organization was the role it played in attempting to combat growing xenophobia by serving as a collective proxy which enabled undocumented immigrants effected by the disaster who would otherwise be ineligible for participation in things like protests and lobbying to open up spheres for themselves to be involved in civic processes and prepare them for the anticipated goal of being fully enfranchised citizens. Though these efforts yielded undeniably positive results, the costs of the growth of the organization and more esteemed view of it in the media were felt greatly by the very people carrying them out.

A majority of the Tepeyac’s relief for World Trade Center victims came from private organizations such as the American Jewish World Service, AFL-CIO, and the Robin Hood Foundation. Unsurprisingly the diversity of its donors meant that an organization formed to serve a very specific demographic, undocumented Mexican immigrants, has been balked out and presumed exclusionary for the very reason that many of its donors would not be in a particularly good position if they were to seek out the associations help, as many are not exclusively Mexican. Although many non-Mexican survivors did seek out the services of Tepeyac after September 11^th, the nature of the organization that asserted “its collective identity in particularly Mexican idioms,” made the continued communication with the organization for several months necessary to receive the proper paperwork to obtain a death certificate and emergency survivors’ benefits a less likely commitment made by non-Mexicans. Similarly the funding for ongoing services offered by the association was limited, and thus more likely to be allocated for services for the organization’s preexisting (largely Mexican) constituent base. This transformed the original mission to aid Mexican immigrants toward a more inclusive “Latino immigrant” group. The donations inspired due to the Asociación Tepeyac’s role in revealing the invisible victims of 9/11 also had quite a detrimental effect on the association. Contrary to its aim, the donations received made the association ineligible to continue receiving small donations, and the lack of this necessary funding made the sustained overhead of the organization that would be necessary to handle larger government grants impossible. The very people the Tepeyac organization sought to find work became those that the association itself was laying off and taking off of its payroll. Those who helped its founder to create the association lost respect for the direction it had taken and all the quintessential aspects of its origin, even including the connection to the Catholic church that inspired the Guadalupan committees at the heart of its creation, have taken a second seat and become completely out of the picture for this non-profit. This article presented an interesting and somewhat devastating look at a charity group for whom despite the best intentions, the genuine means led to a counterproductive end.

Susan Slyomovic’s article “New York City’s Muslim World Day Parade”, explores the power of a parade in defining a cultural group’s identity, solidarity and power. The display of the parade held in it a great deal of meaning, which each aspect of this procession veiling a hidden significance. The very constituency of organizers and participants, which unites different Muslim groups in the public eye and in support of the religion, superseding the schisms within different Islamic sects, is a quintessential part of the shaping the parade. People who disagree come together in order to demonstrate the thriving of the Muslim people as an ethnic community of New York. Even the mere location of the march is representative of the power of a group and how long its roots have been sowed in the history of modern-day New York City. This perception from the view of the organizers of how each little piece that comprises the parade has a unique importance is enlightening. The aims of this demonstration of unity and pride magnified successfully shows what a passerby on September 22^nd may not see when the parade passes by. Even the method of marching is extremely telling of the culture represented in this parade. The very way in which partakers chose to march, “sideways, backwards or in circles [as opposed to in]… solemn military formation”, examines the reorientation of the start of the parade, form which Muslims involved turn themselves toward Mecca to start with prayer, before turning back toward the direction of the Lexington Avenue path that the parade follows.

Unlike other ethnic groups who choose this mode of unification to demonstrate their presence and pride to the rest of New York City, costumes and decorations are replaced instead with Islamic ethnic dress and messages broadcast on signs in the form of Koranic passages as well as the Kaaba of Mecca as a float. An aspect of this ceremony (of sorts) that links it to other parades is that it embraces the subtype of being not only Muslim, but also American, with those involved embracing their Muslim identity in dress, food and prayer, but using the parade as an exchange and gathering of the American people who associate with their Muslim identity. The parade through New York City is, in itself, a uniquely American show of the strength of a community that plays a role in the cities vast ethnic foreground, yet the use of prayer and common chants in praise of Allah, religious garb and music that reflects the values of the Quran of the Islamic religion allow for another hyphenated group, Muslim-Americans, to join together and show the city their unity and their slice of New York. The question that Slymovic’s argument presents is as to why this parade is the only one in recognition of a specific religion. It seems that for every other religious group there is either a national pride (i.e. Israel) or other unifying parade by which groups find a way to represent them. Is the Muslim population, whose numbers are undoubtedly misrepresented in things like the NYC census, incapable of uniting on any front other than religion? Is the city bridging gaps that cannot otherwise be created by utilizing the need for a united perception in the public eye and using religion as the building blocks?

In this chapter Foner explores the way in which race has consistently remained a tool for social stratification based on perceived visual distinctions between different groups and the ways in which prejudices against certain groups have evolved. To demonstrate her assertion that discriminations have evolved, she first explores the historically targeted groups of Jews and Italians. Though the dichotomy between these two groups and the larger “White” racial identity no longer appears to exist in our modern society, Foner looks at the “people of inferior breeding (144)”, once feared as the “inferior Europeans”, that would “mongrelize (144)” the “genetically pure and biologically superior… American stock (144)”, thereby “diminishing the quality of American blood (144)”. In order to create a perception of Jewish people and Italian people previously that assigned to them a lesser position on the social ladder, these people were referred to as swarthy and non-white. These very characteristics create the spectrum by which Foner describes how modern-day prejudice works. At the lowest end of the spectrum, those who are the most discriminated against and viewed as the most inferior, is a classification of people as Black while at the other end of the spectrum, those greeted with the least prejudicial sentiment and viewed as the most superior, is the classification of people as White. Ironically, this spectrum seems to exist for immigrants from all over the world, in which people who are not African American consistently try to escape being identified as such and distinguish themselves. This is true for African immigrants, West Indian immigrants, “Hispanic” immigrants and Asian immigrants across the board, who try to put themselves closer to the white end of the spectrum and distance themselves from the black end in order to escape the intolerances that accompany their distinctions.

This reading revealed the ways in which discrimination against darker skin appear to be a universal form of bigotry, not something exclusive and authentic to the United States and New York City. It baffles me that so many current minority groups and groups that were once targets of hatred who have since escaped the legislative de jure discrimination and societal de facto discrimination can so easily turn a blind eye to the way in which other groups of people are similarly being persecuted. People would rather snuff their noses at anyone they can claim to be superior to and distinguish themselves from the “have nots” than acknowledge the universal problem of using race, a societal construct to define the content of a person’s character and their place in society. The vicious cycle of people being limited and stuck in the same monetary circumstances because of the narrow-mindedness that comes with racially identifying people is being perpetuated by minority groups themselves, who will do anything to be seen as just one step away from black, and one step closer to white.