| The central question of this dissertation is: How do the strategies of organizing campaigns led by community-based organizations affect the construction of group and place identities and how do these constructed political identities, in turn, affect the outcome of community organizing? Community-based organizations play a crucial role in providing a political voice for those excluded from formal political participation, especially in immigrant, low-income, urban communities. This study examines the ways that organizing in New York City's Chinatowns that targets small bosses, corporations, and the state constructs identities for community members and for Chinatown itself and explores the reciprocal role of identity formation in shaping political strategy. Led by Chinese immigrant workers, the four organizing campaigns studied began as localized fights against exploitative working conditions in the garment, restaurant, home healthcare, and construction industries in Chinatown, but expanded to include a larger set of worker issues and a wider geographical scale and scope. The campaigns primarily organize around labor identities, but simultaneously address gender, race, ethnicity, class, and immigrant identities, among others. The dissertation also demonstrates that the production and deployment of place identities and the production and manipulation of scale are effective organizing strategies for locally based groups.;The grassroots community-based organizations and workers' centers leading these campaigns are the Association of Chinese Workers (ACW) and the National Organization to End Sweatshops (HOED) (both are organizational pseudonyms). Although both ACW and NOED lead and organize these campaigns, the dissertation focuses more on ACW as the organization working in New York City's Chinatowns. The bulk of the dissertation research is based on ethnography, primarily participant observation. Throughout, my role as researcher is one of political investment.;By organizing Chinatown multi-dimensionally and with the notion that issues faced by working people in Chinatown are not limited to Chinatown, political organizing disputes the popular idea that Chinatown is insular, disorganized, or politically passive. By mobilizing beyond Chinatown at various scales, political organizing challenges the idea that new immigrants are to blame for exploitative labor conditions for all working people and instead envisions a new labor movement based on identification and recognition between workers. |
