How Other Minorities Gained Access: The War on Poverty and Asian American and Latino Community Organizing

• Author: Jae Yeon Kim
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920983456
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(1) 89 –102

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920983456

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920983456

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The power of racial minorities in the United States comes

from the coordination of ethnic groups belonging to the

same racial category. The United States is becoming a

minority–majority nation driven by the population growth

of Latinos1 and Asian Americans. Latinos have now sur-

passed African Americans as the second-largest racial

group, and Asian Americans have become the fastest

growing racial group in the United States. However,

demographics are not destiny. Asian Americans and

Latinos both encompass disparate national origin groups.

If these subgroups do not have a sense of internal unity,

their population increase does not translate into a growth

of their political power.

For this reason, understanding the conditions under

which Asian Americans and Latinos became organized as

coherent groups is important. Until a half-century ago,

the terms “Asian Americans” and “Latinos” themselves

did not exist. In the early twentieth century, Asian

Americans and Latinos organized among their respective

groups of national origin and focused on assimilation into

American society. For instance, the Japanese American

Citizens League (JACL) and the League of United Latin

American Citizens (LULAC)2 were exclusively con-

cerned about their own groups despite the fact that racial

discrimination knows no bounds. Furthermore, the two

organizations seemed to only concentrate on the middle-

class and American citizens among them (it was no coin-

cidence that the term “citizens” was included in the names

of both organizations).

Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did national origin

groups from Asia and Latin America begin to form pan-

ethnic3 organizations that emphasized solidarity. Ethnic

and class dimensions informed this change. These new

organizations strengthened their focus on marginalized

members: the poor, women, elderly, and children.

Figure 1 describes this transition systematically, draw-

ing on my original dataset on 818 Asian American and

Latino advocacy and community service organizations

(CSOs). The data divide panethnic organizations into

three categories: advocacy, community service, and

hybrid organizations. Advocacy organizations are

983456PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920983456Political Research QuarterlyKim

research-article2020

1University of California, Berkeley, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jae Yeon Kim, Department of Political Science, University of

California, Berkeley, 210 Barrows Hall 1950, Berkeley, CA 94720,

USA.

Email: jaeyeonkim@berkeley.edu

How Other Minorities Gained Access:

The War on Poverty and Asian American

and Latino Community Organizing

Jae Yeon Kim1

Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Asian Americans and Latinos organized along national origin lines and focused on

assimilation; By the 1960s and 1970s, community organizers from both groups began to form panethnic community

service organizations (CSOs) that emphasized solidarity. I argue that focusing on the rise of panethnic CSOs reveals

an underappreciated mechanism that has mobilized Asian Americans and Latinos—the welfare state. The War on

Poverty programs incentivized non-black minority community organizers to form panethnic CSOs to gain access

to state resources and serve the economically disadvantaged in their communities. Drawing on extensive archival

research, I identify this mechanism and test it with my original dataset of 818 Asian American and Latino advocacy

organizations and CSOs. Leveraging the Reagan budget cut, I show that dismantling the War on Poverty programs

reduced the founding rate of panethnic CSOs. I further estimated that a 1 percent increase in federal funding was

associated with the increase of the two panethnic CSOs during the War on Poverty. The findings demonstrate how

access to state resources forces activists among non-primary beneficiary groups to build new political identities that

fit the dominant image of the policy beneficiaries.

Keywords

War on Poverty, social policy, community organizing, Asian Americans, Latinos, panethnicity

Article