Assimilation and Asian American Refusal

Abstract This article examines precedents of Asian American sociopolitical marginalization in the United States and considers how appropriations of mobility and community building practices have resisted and relocated the assignations of those margins. Considering precedents of immigration exclusion, wartime incarceration, and refugee resettlement, the article excavates underlying continuities between these cases. It then turns to a specific examination of Vietnamese American resettlement and secondary migration processes following dispersion policies imposed by policy agendas to culturally assimilate Southeast Asian refugees in 1975 following the Vietnam War. Assimilation agenda trajectories were appropriated through secondary migration and affordances of automobility. Such histories of Asian American refusals offer their own precedents for reconstituting community, rebuilding solidarity, and asserting recognition.