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5 Transnational Dimensions of Community Empowerment The Victories of Chanrithy Uong and Sam Yoon PETER KIANG AND SHIRLEY TANG When I was with the U.N. in Cambodia, I watched people risk their lives to vote. I believe democracy works best when we give something in return. As City Councilor, my work would be to build a better Lowell for all. —CHANRITHY UONG, LOWELL CITY COUNCIL CAMPAIGN BROCHURE, 1999 What I can already see taking place amongst a lot of pundits . . . is that they are trying to decide how best to pigeonhole Sam. Does he represent an alliance with the old guard? Does he serve as a bridge? Or does he align himself more closely with the progressive segment within the city council? —PAUL WATANABE, FOLLOWING SAM YOON’S ELECTION TO THE BOSTON CITY COUNCIL T his chapter examines the cases and contexts of two history-making electoral victories in metropolitan Boston during the past decade: that of Chanrithy Uong, the first Asian American elected to the Lowell City Council in 1999, and that of Sam Yoon, the first Asian American elected to the Boston City Council in 2005. Both examples are notable, not only because of their individual achievements, but because of their direct relationships to larger contexts of urban inequality, demographic change, and coalition building by Asian Americans with other communities of color and immigrant communities (Bui et al. 2004; Kiang 1994, 1996; Kiang and Tang 2006). In appreciating these cases as groundbreaking victories within conceptual frames of race-based minority representation and placebased local-community empowerment, we propose an additional frame of analysis focusing on transnational political engagements at both the community level and for the two individuals personally to account for what Pei-te Lien (2001a: xiii) describes as “the confluence of a complex dynamic between internal community structure and external legal, social, political, and international context.” We do not view transnational dynamics as the 78 / Transnational Dimensions of Community Empowerment primary theme in either Uong’s or Yoon’s overall electoral story, but they are real, relevant, and under-researched. Using community-based methods of research (Tang 2008) and a conceptual framework that addresses this“confluence”(Lien 2001a) of local and global contexts for both individuals and communities, we suggest that it is not possible to make sense of the victories of Uong and Yoon without recognizing the transnational commitments of the Cambodian community in Lowell and the Vietnamese community in Boston as motivators of political participation. Furthermore, diasporic perspectives based on homeland politics in local Asian refugee and immigrant communities contributed not only to the successful campaigns of Uong andYoon but to aspects of their individual agendas after taking office. This, in turn, contributed to their capacities to win reelection in subsequent years. In Yoon’s case, the Korean diaspora has also emerged as an important influence, even though the population of Korean American constituents within Boston is small. The Case and Context of Chanrithy Uong in Lowell In November 1999, Chanrithy Uong, a bilingual high-school guidance counselor in Lowell, became the first non-white ever elected to the Lowell City Council and the first Cambodian American to gain elective office in any major city in the United States. A decade earlier, a remarkable coalition of Southeast Asian and Latino parents in Lowell had sued the city for denying equal educational opportunities to students needing bilingual services (Kiang 1994, 1996). Renewed legal action in 1998 on behalf of Southeast Asian and Latino students at Lowell High School charged school officials with discriminatory practices that selectively excluded them from receiving college scholarship recommendations and that selectively targeted them for more frequent and severe disciplinary punishment.1 In this setting, Uong’s electoral campaign represented longstanding community claims for voice, space, and rights (Flores and Benmayor 1997) in Lowell by both Southeast Asians and Latinos, particularly in relation to education policy and the schools. This local context is a critical aspect of Uong’s case. Context of Local Community Empowerment Since the late 1980s, Lowell has represented the second-largest concentration of Cambodians in the United States after Long Beach, California. City and community estimates have placed the number of Cambodians in the city at twenty- five thousand for the past two decades—roughly one fourth of the city—together with small populations of Indians, Lao, and Vietnamese.2 The majority of Cambodians in Lowell came as secondary and tertiary migrants because of the availability of jobs and the...

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