“Asian Americans in the Cipher” aims to challenge prevailing notions of Asian American rappers by presenting a polycultural portrait of their lives and cultural practices. Among cultural critics and race scholars, Asian American participation in Hip Hop has increasingly become a popular subject of socio-political inquiry. On one hand, critical Asian and African American voices have asserted the need to boldly confront instances when Asian American youth appropriate Black cultural styles for their subversiveness and profitability. Concurrently, a number of Asian American Studies scholars have exhumed case studies of Asian American rappers who engage Hip Hop expression to articulate racial identities that reject assimilation into whiteness. These accounts thus importantly distinguish forms of cultural interface that challenge relations of power from those that reinforce them. To varying ends, however, they also narrowly determine Asian Americans in Hip Hop as a particular racialized group that draws on the culture of others for “their own” agendas. More broadly speaking, they treat cultures as fixed and discrete, rather than as living entities that coincide and assume lives of their own. A fundamental reason for these limited perspectives, I argue, is that they have yet to adequately consider Asian Americans who are in community with Black and other Hip Hop heads of color.

In this dissertation, I provide an alternative window onto Asian American rappers by emphasizing those whose cultural practices are informed by and produce further opportunities for interracial collaborations. Specifically, I center young men who grew up in majority non-white neighborhoods or otherwise locales that allow for routine Afro Asian encounters, in order to explore how their everyday racialized landscapes shape and are shaped by their relationships to Hip Hop, African Americans, and other people of color. Thus, utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology that incorporates in-depth interviews, multi-sited ethnography, and music/performance analysis, I elaborate upon the polycultural relations indexed in their life histories, music-making practices, and scenes of performance. First, I trace how their identification with Hip Hop reflects the deeply-entrenched interraciality of their daily paths and the mundane cultural exchanges and social intimacies that constitute them. In turn, they understand Hip Hop as both a Black popular form and a vernacular culture. Furthermore, I analyze how their significations of race and Hip Hop cultural identity cohere in their musical compositions. While drawing attention to the ways the rappers critically mediate ideas of Asian Americanness, I also underscore how they invoke a distinct, Hip Hop lexicon of aesthetics and epistemic positions that conjoin them to other people of color as fellow Hip Hop heads. Based on my examination of these processes and ethnographic research, I further exhibit how they forge artistic networks and scenes of performance that more fully realize the Afro Asian notions of community they signify.

By triangulating race, place, and Hip Hop in my study of Asian American rappers, my dissertation questions the racial scripts often used to interpret cultural exchanges between young people of color, and in particular, those that hinge on assumptions of Asian-Black distance. The Asian Americans rappers featured here do not necessarily move outside of themselves and their situated experiences, but rather, build upon their deep-seated polycultural lives. By the same token, they do not simply coincide with African Americans as racialized peoples, but also as a people based on resonant life histories, community ties, common Hip Hop subjectivity, and shared cultural politics. In their worlds, Asians, Blacks, and other people of color more than coexist. They also build, party, and even come to recognize each other as a group. My research thus presents emergent, yet definitely formed, polycultural solidarities that challenge the conflation of race, culture, and peoplehood

This report documents the findings of the Institute for the Study of Social Change’s evaluation of the quality, role, and effectiveness of the Business Economics Technology Achievement (BETA) Program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. BETA’s curriculum is designed to build business skills and to assist middle school and high school students in becoming eligible and competitive for college. The program reaches out to educationally disadvantaged youth and schools in Berkeley, Oakland, West Contra Costa county and San Francisco. The program is also distinguished by its use of undergraduate and graduate MBA business students from the Haas School of Business as mentors in delivering its program services.

In the early twentieth century, Chinese men and white women often worked in close proximity to each other in various intimate settings in the North American West— from the kitchens of upper class homes to the noisy cafés of the city. However, little has been said in the scholarship on the social and political significance of these encounters. Instead, this study centers on the different and connected ways in which intimacy shaped the North American West in the early twentieth century. As such, this work makes central and transparent the connections between the expansion of white women’s political and economic rights and efforts to exclude the Chinese in British Columbia and California. Thus, this study asks: How were changes in the status of white women and shifting notions of domesticity related to debates about Chinese labor and migration? Conversely, to what extent was the anti-Oriental movement and its calls for exclusionary measures informed and shaped by debates about gender roles? Last, how might a transnational analysis of these intersecting debates deepen our understanding of how such controversies shaped Vancouver and San Francisco as frontiers and gateways for Chinese labor migration and white settlement? If both Western Canada and the United States were primary sites for Asian labor migration and white settlement, did intimacy and affective labor play out differently in these two contexts?

By using primary source documents to analyze two murder cases involving Chinese servants and two legislative efforts regarding affective labor in the distinct but connected contexts of Western Canada and the United States, this study shows how white women and Chinese men working together in intimate settings became increasingly scrutinized and subject to rampant social commentary and governmental intervention as racial, sexual, and class tensions flared.

Asian Americans' peculiar combination of high levels of socioeconomic attainment, high rates of citizenship acquisition, and low rates of voting defies conventional sociological theories of assimilation, which tend to view political integration as occurring in step with socioeconomic integration; and traditional political science theories of political engagement, which emphasize socioeconomic determinants of participation. It also complicates the position advanced by some social scientists that Asian Americans are "becoming white." Beyond the theoretical puzzle, low rates of electoral participation from one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population have sobering implications for the practice of democratic self-governance and the representativeness of public policies.

In this dissertation, I approach the puzzle of Asian American under-participation in electoral politics from a contextual perspective by investigating how different political contexts change the extent to which Asian Americans under-participate in the electoral process. I employ a multi-method research design, beginning with statistical analyses that identify the correlates of under-registration and under-voting among Asian American citizens. I find that it is at the registration stage where Asian American "exceptionalism" in the sense of an unusually large and unexplained degree of under-participation in electoral participation occurs. I then perform an in-depth comparison of two California counties that differ substantially in their magnitude of Asian American under-registration relative to whites, and in their values of the correlates.

I find that the incentives for electoral candidates and political parties to target Asian Americans for registration differ substantially between the two counties, and that the mobilization strategies that follow from those uneven incentives are what accounts for the difference between the counties in the degree of Asian American under-registration. I conclude that, when political agents are incentivized to target Asian Americans for mobilization, the gap in voter registration between socioeconomically comparable Asian and white American citizens is significantly reduced. The missing piece in the puzzle of Asian American under-participation in electoral politics is political mobilization.

The Fremont California-based NUMMI plant was long considered a model of high-skill, high-productivity manufacturing, as the facility produced some of the highest quality vehicles in the world for almost three decades until its closure in 2010. I argue that NUMMI's success was due to its collective bargaining agreement because it leveraged workers' fullest effort and skill because it ensured them job security, a living wage, and protected them from capricious management. The presence of a union and a collective bargaining agreement mandated that workers avoid disputes with management and collaborate with managers on streamlining production in exchange for compensation and related guarantees and ensured smooth, consistent and high quality work.

Some interpreted NUMMI's closure in 2010 as a referendum on union-supported wages, health care benefits and pensions at General Motors. My research shows that General Motors' failure was due primarily to financial problems, poor managerial decisions, rises in health care costs, undesirable product lineups and overinvestment in trucks and SUV's. General Motors also played a conspicuous role in the financial meltdown through its subsidiaries. General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) financed hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-based assets of suspect credit quality that helped create this multi-trillion dollar mortgage-backed asset market that collapsed in the global meltdown of the financial sector in 2008.

I argue that NUMMI and case studies from other automotive plants show that, despite a recession and global competition, lowering the wages of American workers and slashing their benefits undermines key sources of American competitive strength and represents the incorrect policy posture for the American economy.

The dissertation develops our theorizing about the dynamics of racialization, and the role of race and ethnicity, in the United States, particularly in order to account for the dynamics and processes unique to Latinos. It does so by examining white attitudes towards Latinos in Orange County, California through public discourse analysis of the "Ask a Mexican" column, a survey instrument and a series of in-depth interviews to triangulate whites' use and logic of racial stereotypes and policy preferences. Orange County is a good testing ground for contemporary Latino racialization because it is a majority minority area, which has a long history of migration from Mexico, with deep racial segregation that reflects racial inequalities between whites and Latinos. While Latinos in the United States as a whole are a heterogeneous group my data demonstrates how the current racialization of Latinos in the United States has a homogenizing effect.

Empirically my data maps racial stereotypes whites have had and continue to reference as the Latino population has increased. These include: Latinos are inherently criminal; do not value education; abuse public assistance; and do not assimilate. They further diametrically oppose what it is to be an American and from being Mexican. Whites use the illegality frame, but frequently assign characteristics to all Latinos regardless of their status and generation. The findings demonstrate how the perceptions of whites towards Latinos are used when whites make daily decisions and also form their larger policy preferences. While some supported a pathway to citizenship most of the respondents overwhelmingly held negative and frequently racist views of Latinos.

Theoretically, my work interrogates how Latinos/Mexicans have their own complex, multifaceted dynamics, including the implications of proximity to Mexico, the torrid race relations between whites and Latinos that included labor exploitation, segregation and lynching as well as the ongoing dominant discourse centered around Latinos being "illegal," a threat, and undeserving of citizenship. My research reveals that whites often use "ethnic" terms to really mean biological, racially fixed terms. Thus, the extent to which Latinos are imagined to be a race or ethnicity among populations outside the academy have major implications. Importantly, whites consistently express the belief that Latinos are not assimilating and consistently assert that an alleged "backward" culture is passed down from generation to generation, leading whites to believe Mexicans are an inferior group. Furthermore, my data account for context of reception, measured by white attitudes towards Latinos, that the literature does not take into account. My data also supports Ngai's and other scholarship about Latinos treated as perpetual foreigners, but also adds how other parts of the Latino community are labeled and treated as racial minorities. Thus, my data challenges past literature that examines the Latino experience solely through an immigrant paradigm. Lastly, my findings challenge Black exceptionalism and a black/non-black color line, because it proves in fact that whites have racist sentiments towards Latinos and do not see them similar to themselves.