Chinatown Movements: Past, Present, & Futures

Chinatown Movements: Past, Present, & Futures is an intergenerational series of four public events that highlight historic and contemporary movements focused on labor, housing, and LGBTQ justice in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The series includes panel discussions, film screenings, bilingual walking tours, and a culminating open mic. Chinatown Movements is the first series of its kind in the neighborhood to engage community members in understanding how we can learn and build from Chinatown’s historic social movements to address similar, pressing present-day concerns. It is associated with the oral history project of the larger W.O.W. Project, “a community-based initiative that reinvents, preserves, and encourages Chinatown’s creative culture and history through arts, culture and activism.”

May 24 // 7-9 PM: Garments Workers Organize: Honoring the Legacy of the 1982 Strike in Chinatown Sites of resistance line Chinatown’s streets. On Mott Street in 1982, over 20,000 garment workers once left their jobs and marched on strike to fight for better working conditions. They flooded Columbus Park with fiery multilingual speeches and protested to call for justice. Hear firsthand from core organizers of the 1982 Strike — former garment workers, organizers, and union representatives — as they share memories of the strike and lessons learned from how they mass mobilized the Chinatown community. Hear firsthand from some of our featured speakers and 1982 Strike organizers here.

June 6 // 7-9 PM: Housing Justice in Chinatown As residents of Chinatown continue to face mass displacement from gentrification, it is more critical now than ever to uplift and celebrate the efforts of housing justice organizers, especially women leaders whose efforts often go unrecognized in our histories. This event will highlight the work of three generations of women housing organizers with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and their Chinatown Tenants Union. The panelists will discuss past and contemporary struggles for housing justice and their own lessons learned from organizing in Chinatown. The panel will also prompt attendees to connect the displacement occurring across neighborhoods in New York City from Chinatown to East Harlem, Brooklyn, and The South Bronx in a united fight for affordable housing and a more livable New York.

June 9 // 2-4 PM: Queer Chinatown Tour highlights the hidden histories and contemporary happenings of the LGBTQ community in Chinatown. Inspired by place-keeping and critical mapping methods, the storytelling tour will interactively engage participants with different sites around the neighborhood that hold significance to queer and trans liberation. Based on community-based and archival engagement, the tour will be created and led by queer Chinese American youth from the W.O.W. Project and neighborhood mapping collective, Chinatown Our Narratives Tours. The tour will also be multilingual and include interpretation in Chinese languages.

July 11 // 7-9 PM: Chinatown Movements: Open Mic Night is a night of stories and performances centering movements in our community! We know the personal is political, we know creative projects write our people into history, and we know that the arts are critical, always. We envision a night that embraces and holds all of that.

Diane Wong is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her intellectual interests include American politics, Asian American studies, race and ethnicity, urban governance, comparative immigration, gender and sexuality, community studies, and qualitative research methods. Her current research focuses on intergenerational resistance to gentrification in New York City, San Francisco, and Boston Chinatowns. She draws from a unique combination of methods including ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews with tenants, organizers, restaurant and garment workers, small businesses, public health workers, and elected officials. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Humanities New York, New York Public Library, and has appeared in the Urban Affairs Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Asian American Policy Review, and a variety of edited book volumes, anthologies, podcasts, and museum exhibits.