Editor's Preface

About a year and a half ago, Robyn Rodriguez, professor and chair of Asian American studies at UC Davis, and one of our preeminent scholars of international labor migration and activism studies, broached to me the possibility of a JAAS special issue on labor. As someone who has followed her work on labor and race over the years (we were in graduate school at the same time, she at UC Berkeley and I at UC San Diego), and as a scholar myself whose academic involvement in Asian American studies has been defined and circumscribed through the historical and ongoing intersections of labor, ethnicity, education, and power, I had no second thoughts. In 2015, Robyn had just concluded a symposium on "The Changing Dynamics of Asian Migration in the 21st Century," and the idea of having her bring together its participants into a narration and depictions of their conversations about new and ongoing issues in transnational labor into JAAS was excitedly brought up. It was going to be a provocative mix of scholars and activists, as well as artists, from here and elsewhere, from multiple vantage points, and with diverse views articulated in conventional and alternative ways. The focus was to bring to our attention new insights on global work from the perspectives of those who study it, those who are in it, and those who have a stake in it, or are organized through it. Now, about three years later, we bring you this special issue!

Asian American studies, as an interdiscipline, has long been understood as an activist and scholarly site of interventions in the study of labor—migrant labor, extracted labor, racialized and gendered labor, labor as and with resistance—so much so that it is most probably impossible to deal with any aspect of it without, at the very least, a consideration of labor's historical powerful manifestation in the lives of Asian Americans. From coolie and railroad labor, to contracted farmworker and military labor, all the way to service and professional labor in all of its historical periods, Asian presences in the United States have more or less been singularly connected and determined within and through a history of racialized and gendered labor. In "Guests and Strangers: Asian Workers in Transnational Perspectives," however, we are making it apparent that the workings of labor cannot be sufficiently accounted for if it is seen only from the purviews of Asian American lives. For, on the other side of the ocean, where the sourcing of global labor extraction in a major sense takes place, labor is partially understood differently. It is about brain and skill drain, it is about overseas work, disrupted lives, illegal trafficking, recruiter exploitation, and ongoing poverty and human rights violations. To be sure, these conditions may be said to also manifest themselves in many parts of the world, including the United States and other dominant economies. But, as you will read in the "conversations" here, including through some creative work done by amazing artists, there is much to be learned from both ends and in between the spectrums of the current global labor trade. Thank you, Robyn, for bringing us together. Your commitment to keeping us all engaged in critical and life-affecting work in transnational studies of labor is one that is as commendable as it is invaluable, necessary, and pertinent for our times.

I hope you are provoked, as I was, by this special issue. One important set of items that stood out to me was the breadth and depth of the work done in the name of resistance and impassioned organizing among aggrieved workers across many borders. As much as "migration regimes" benefit from labor exploitation, through the complex streams and schemes of recruitment agencies and transnational arrangements, serial working-class migrants selflessly look for ways to mitigate social exclusions, financial precarities, and vulnerabilities in order to belong, collaborate, and fight to regain their humanity and dignity. I am touched by the energy and the agency of their labor; they stand as a most valuable source of inspiration for our work in Asian American studies.