Event

Rethinking Asian American Assimilation

How can we understand the assimilation of Asian Americans, a group viewed at various times as model minorities, honorary whites and the perpetual foreigner? Vivian Louie draws from her research with working- and middle-class Chinese immigrant families, comparing their experiences to their Latino and Russian counterparts, to look at this question. Louie argues that the similarities and differences in how assimilation works for different immigrant groups tell us a complex story about inclusion and exclusion in the United States. While immigrants, even those who are linguistically, residentially, and economically assimilated, believe themselves to be marginalized as foreigners, the group's racialization in the United States and the immigrants’ prior home country experiences with marginalization give rise to different experiences. In contrast to the absence of race in prevalent understandings of Asian American assimilation, Louie's research with Chinese Americans shows how race continues to matter.

Vivian Louie is CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor. She studies immigration, education, and identities with a focus on the contrast between lived experience in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Vivian Louie’s two books, Compelled to Excel: Immigration, Education, and Opportunity Among Chinese Americans (Stanford University Press, 2004) and Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012), reveal how academic success is achieved in similar ways among working class Chinese, Dominicans and Colombians, even though they belong to groups typically framed at opposite ends of academic success (the Asian American high achiever and the Latino American low achiever). She finds shared family and institutional mechanisms in the respondents’ success, especially how access to different kinds of institutions, especially good public schools and afterschool/enrichment programs, made these journeys to success easier or harder. She is an editor of and contributor to Writing Immigration: Scholars and Journalists in Dialogue (University of California Press, 2011). Along with Evangeline Harris Stefanakis, Louie is co-writing a new book, Achieving the Dream: Educators, Immigrants and the Paths to College (Harvard Educational Press, forthcoming).

Dr. Louie received her Ph.D and M.A. from the Yale University Department of Sociology, M.A. from the Stanford University Department of Communication, and A.B. from Harvard University. Louie has previously worked as a newspaper journalist, journalism teacher and youth magazine editor, and an associate professor in education and lecturer in sociology at Harvard.