The last half century witnessed a dramatic change in the geographic, ethnographic, and socioeconomic structure of Asian American communities. While traditional enclaves were strengthened by waves of recent immigrants, native-born Asian Americans also created new urban and suburban areas. Asian America is the first comprehensive look at post-1960s Asian American communities in the United States and Canada. From Chinese Americans in Chicagoland to Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, this multi-disciplinary collection spans a wide comparative and panoramic scope. Contributors from an array of academic fields focus on global views of Asian American communities as well as on territorial and cultural boundaries. Presenting groundbreaking perspectives, Asian America revises worn assumptions and examines current challenges Asian American communities face in the twenty-first century.

Between 2000 and 2015 the Asian American Pacific Islander population grew from nearly 12 million to over 20 million--at 72% percent recording the fastest growth rate of any major ethnic and racial group in the US.This book, the first to focus wholly on Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Institutions (AANAPISIs) and their students, offers a corrective to misconceptions about these populations and documents student services and leadership programs, innovative pedagogies, models of community engagement, and collaborations across academic and student affairs that have transformed student outcomes.The contributors stress the importance of disaggregating this population that is composed of over 40 ethnic groups that vary in immigrant histories, languages, religion, educational attainment levels, and socioeconomic status. This book recognizes there is a large population of underserved Asian American and Pacific Islander college students who, given their educational disparities, are in severe need of attention. The contributors describe effective practices that enable instructors to validate the array of students’ specific backgrounds and circumstances within the contexts of developing such skills as writing, leadership and cross-cultural communication for their class cohorts as a whole. They demonstrate that paying attention to the diversity of student experiences in the teaching environment enriches the learning for all. The timeliness of this volume is important because of the keen interest across the nation for creating equitable environments for our increasingly diverse students.This book serves as an important resource for predominantly white institutions who are admitting greater numbers of API and other underrepresented students. It also offers models for other minority serving institutions who face similar complexities of multiple national or ethnic groups within their populations, provides ideas and inspiration for the AANAPISI community, and guidance for institutions considering applying for AANAPISI status and funding. This book is for higher education administrators, faculty, researchers, student affairs practitioners, who can learn from AANAPISIs how to successfully engage and teach students with widely differing cultural backgrounds and educational circumstances.

Once thought of in terms of geographically bounded spaces, Asian America has undergone profound changes as a result of post-1965 immigration as well as the growth and reshaping of established communities. This collection of original essays demonstrates that conventional notions of community, of ethnic enclaves determined by exclusion and ghettoization, now have limited use in explaining the dynamic processes of contemporary community formation.Writing from a variety of perspectives, these contributors expand the concept of community to include sites not necessarily bounded by space; formations around gender, class, sexuality, and generation reveal new processes as well as the demographic diversity of today's Asian American population. The case studies gathered here speak to the fluidity of these communities and to the need for new analytic approaches to account for the similarities and differences between them. Taken together, these essays forcefully argue that it is time to replace the outworn concept of a monolithic Asian America.