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7 Building Community, Crafting Belonging in Multiple Homes APEN is like another family to turn to. It’s like a home where we not [only] talk about our own needs but other community and family needs. We are like a super girl who find crime and find smart ways to make it right. Like a family we also comfort each other because we express our feelings. . . . So APEN is very important to me, like my family is important to me. —Lai, Group 3 (Journal entry, summer 1998) “Home” is “that which we cannot not want. It stands for a safe place, where there is no need to explain oneself to outsiders; it stands for community.” —Dorinne Kondo (1996:97), rephrasing Spivak (1987) We all need to know who our friends and foes are, where are the safe spaces we can rest, and who are the supports we can rely on and whom we should distrust. For those of us on the margins, we need to know where we fit in and where is “home” (Afshar 1994:127). In this chapter I move from discussions of the politics of belonging in previous chapters to address constructions of belonging and community that reflect emotional investments and the desire for attachments. As Yuval-Davis, Anthias, and Kofman (2005:526) argue, how individuals feel about their location in the world is relational and in part shaped by their experiences of exclusion rather than inclusion. The range of spaces, places, and communities in which we feel we do not or cannot belong generates a recurring question: Where do I belong? “Belonging therefore involves an important affective dimension , the emotional attachment to important social bonds and ties” (Yuval Davis et al. 2005:528). As members of an environmental justice organization working with a new immigrant community, the staff at APEN is cognizant that emotional investments and attachments to both place and institutional space will facilitate community engagement with a range of environmental and social justice issues. Not having a sense of belonging acts as a barrier to creating political efficacy and a sense of confidence that one is worthy of participating in the polity and has the right to demand social equality. As APEN staffer Miya Yoshitani observed: This community is like so many other immigrant and refugee communities that really they don’t feel like they have rights. And don’t really feel like they have the right to challenge some of the inequities that their community is Building Community, Crafting Belonging in Multiple Homes 131 living with. You know, there are some other problems, like people are facing great poverty and lack of opportunity. Those are huge barriers to organizing in the community, of course, but there’s some level of just, like, building desire or building, like, the vision. That is building the possibility in people’s minds that you have the right to do this, and you have the right to demand a better life for the community and for your children. (Interview, 22 September 1998) At the time of the study, the Laotian Organizing Project had a three-year presence in the community and many Laotians were supportive of the initiative. Miya recounted the type of comment the APEN staff had heard from several community members: “I really believe in what you are doing. It’s really important and we pray for you. But I have three jobs and I can’t always come on Sundays. . . . I will do, like, whenever you need something, ask me and I’ll probably be able to do that.” However, individuals in the community were unable to become involved in ongoing discussions about LOP’s work. Furthermore, Miya acknowledged that, in 1998, “there’s not a sense of ownership of LOP and the vision and the work.” She attributed the lack of identification with LOP to an “absence of confidence” and recognized that “it’s so hard for someone who has only real fears about what will happen if they do that [engage in community activism]. And this is not natural, to come into this situation and be kind of confident of keeping the leadership.” Miya also noted that this lack of confidence was prevalent among the girls: “They have grown up feeling like they don’t deserve what other people may have” (interview, 22 September 1998). Yet as the first bilingual generation, these young women played an important role in the community as bridge builders and generators of new social capital. If they were...

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