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C H A P T E R T H R E E “Peace with a Lease” Renovation and Revolution, 1969–74 Claiming a Space The signing of the three-year lease in 1969 ushered in a new period of renewal that the tenants and their supporters called “Peace with a Lease.” The tenants and students felt proud to have defended their community. The Asian American students believed that they had combined militancy and service in ways similar to the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs for children and other activities to aid the African American community. At that moment, an assertion of community consciousness could be rooted in an actual place. During this period, intra-ethnic ties within the Asian American movement strengthened, and cross-generational bonds within the Filipino community matured. However, the various ethnic groups within the Asian American movement began to be pulled in apparently contradictory directions. At the same time that the pan–Asian American movement consolidated, developing class-based analyses of oppression that linked all Asians as a single racial or national minority , individual ethnic groups increasingly focused on organizing their own communities . The more radical elements joined the “multinational” and “multiracial ” New Left parties that had begun to emerge after the demise of Students for a Democratic Society in 1969. These parties often promoted a strong Third World nationalist consciousness, reflected in ongoing debates on whether to characterize ethnic groups as “racial” or “national” minorities.1 Despite jubilation at the signing of the lease, the number of tenants at the I-Hotel did not return to the level it had reached before the first eviction notice was served. The reduced number of tenants, coupled with the visibility of Asian youth in the renovation, persuaded some of the public and politicians that the struggle had been overrun by radicals, displacing the elderly from its center. At least fifty of the original tenants remained—they had nowhere else to go; resistance was their last stand. But as new elderly tenants arrived after being evicted from nearby hotels, the base of the struggle among the elderly eventually expanded. The uncertainty and stress of the conflict weakened the hotel’s economic base. The fire partially ruined a floor, preventing those rooms from being rented. Only 65 of the hotel’s 184 rooms were occupied, and the ground-floor, commercial storefronts had long been vacant. The I-Hotel’s manager, Joe Diones, decided to look for commercial renters, hoping to net thirty thousand dollars a year in rent for the next three years. He sought businesses whose political character would lend support to the tenants. Diones was politically and economically pragmatic: He rented spaces not only to small, Asian-owned businesses , such as a key shop and a sundry shop, but also to new Asian American organizations that wanted to open offices and community centers. Diones also recruited Charles Smith, a tenant, to help him manage and coordinate support for the I-Hotel. Among the groups that moved in was Leways (Legitimate Ways), a self-help group of street kids founded to combat juvenile delinquency. Inspired by the Black Panthers, they named themselves the “Red Guards” and opposed the traditional Chinatown leadership. Other Asian American groups established community centers, an art center, a bookstore, and headquarters for Asian American revolutionary organizations. The Asian Community Center (ACC), the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), Everybody’s Bookstore, the Kearny Street Workshop, and the newspaper Kalayaan were among the community groups that set up storefronts during this period. For the youth-oriented Asian American organizations, the space became available at the right time. When they moved into the storefronts on Kearny Street, the core of support for the I-Hotel expanded. Because they were commercial tenants of the I-Hotel, the public and politicians would perceive their involvement in the fight against eviction as legitimate. All of the groups gathered on Kearny Street created a concentrated space that provided easy access and exchange between Asian American students and the community. “Kearny Street” now came to mean not only the social scene of the manongs but also the site of Asian American mobilization. The Kearny Street block may have been the only place that these “upstarts” could have rented space. Traditional Chinese organizations were wary of the new youth groups because they openly questioned the status quo in Chinatown. Traditional Chinese leaders believed that youth activism upset the image they had carefully cultivated during the postwar years as an obedient, law-abiding citizenry whose...

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