This volume presents the personal accounts of African American, Asian American, and Latino faculty who use 'narratives of struggles' to describe the challenges they faced in order to become bona fide members of the U.S. Academy. These narratives show how survival and success require a sophisticated knowledge of the politics of academia, insider knowledge of the requirements of legitimacy in scholarly efforts, and resourceful approach to facing dilemmas between cultural values, traditional racist practices, and academic resilience. The book also explores the empowerment process of these individuals who have created a new self without rejecting their 'enduring' self, the self strongly connected to their ethno/racial cultures and groups. Within the process of self -redefinition, this new faculty confronted racism, sexism, rejection, the clash of cultural values, and structural indifference to cultural diversity. The faculty recounts how they ultimately learned the skillful accommodation to all of these issues. It is through the analysis of survival and self-definition that women and faculty of color will establish a powerful foothold in the new academy of the twenty-first century.

Descriptions of Asian American communities have typically been either historical or literary. Such approaches leave us uniformed about the current conditions within the community and also leave us empty-handed in regard to knowledge by which to solve contemporary problems. Chinese America sets a new standard for ethnic research. By applying social and psychological issues to the historic U.S. community of Chinatown, this volume breaks the boundaries of community studies by addressing multiple controversial issues today. Author Chalsa M. Loo reaches deep into the vital issues that face most ethnic communities in this country. Through survey research, the delineation of major problems highlight needed changes in public policy and ethnic understanding. The core of the book is based on an in-depth study of residents of San FranciscoÆs Chinatown, the oldest Asian American community in the United States. Through surveys and collected interviews with residents, the author examines the social problems that might exist for all the major life domains of an ethnic minority community. Loo sought to test a number of hypotheses about Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, and immigrants, and found that the study dispelled many of the stereotypes and myths about these groups. Each chapter opens with a vignette and a photograph and is infused with quantitative analyses of survey data and census data. It is one of the few systematic studies of an Asian American community with an empirical and psychological approach, and it gives voice to a population that has been relatively invisible and misunderstood. Chinese American offers a comprehensive and richly informative documentation of text, photographs, and dataùa moving portrayal of the most famous Asian American community in the United States.