Yen Le Espiritu
Biographic Data
| ID | 224974 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yen Le Espiritu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yen |
| FAMILY NAME | Le Espiritu |
| SIGNATURE | LE ESPIRITU Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 366 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Routledge Handbook of the Vietnamese Diaspora , edited by Nathalie Huỳnh Châu Nguyễn
Refugee Students and Parents as Drivers of Change in San Diego Schools
This article presents a case study of the Parent Student Resident Organization (PSRO), a diverse coalition of refugee students and parents in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, and its role in advancing educational equity in San Diego Unified School District. In analyzing how the PSRO's intergenerational, feminist and cultural humility inspired organizing model empowered diverse refugee families to leverage California's Local Control Funding …
Loss and Found
Situated in the field of critical refugee studies, this article conceptualizes refugee loss not as a psychological matter but as a site of social critique that is laden with political potential. Focusing on what is lost, what remains, and what is found as refugees move between past, present, and future, the article pays particular attention to the ways that refugees push against but also at times bridge multiple borders, boundaries, and barriers.…
Livability” and “Ungratefulness”
Critical refugee studies (CRS) conceptualizes refugees’ lived experience as a site of theory‐making and knowledge production with and for refugees. As co‐founders of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), and as scholars with refugee backgrounds, we theorize alongside our refugee partners to offer a refugee critique of refugee law and humanitarianism. Departing from the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of “refugee,” whose restrictive l…
Social and Curricular Inclusion in Refugee Education
Recognizing refugee students, families, and communities as a source of knowledge and social change, this article offers two case studies of innovative, deliberative, and labor‐intensive practices toward meaningful social inclusion of refugee parents and students in education. The first example focuses on the multiyear effort by the Parent‐Student‐Resident Organization (PSRO) in San Diego, California, an education advocacy group organized and led …
Departures
Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples o…
Introduction
J ane H. H ong . Opening the Gates to Asia
For some eighty years, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, US laws barred Asians from legal immigration and naturalization in the United States. In the 1940s, as the era of Asian decolonization proceeded apace and in response to growing international scrutiny of America’s racial policies and practices, US lawmakers began to dismantle race-based immigration policy toward Asians, culminating in the comprehensive reforms of the 1965 Ha…
Emotions, Sex, and Money
Looking Back on the Vietnam War
More than forty years have passed since the official end of the Vietnam War, yet the war’s legacies endure. Its history and iconography still provide fodder for film and fiction, communities of war refugees have spawned a wide Vietnamese diaspora, and the United States military remains embroiled in unwinnable wars with eerie echoes of Vietnam. Looking Back on the Vietnam War brings together scholars from a broad variety of disciplines, who offer …
Allison Varzally. Children of Reunion
Over the past few decades, feminist scholars have shown that war is not exclusively a matter for men, or a masculine domain. Instead, it is a complex process that transforms not only public institutions and national economies but also intimate relationships. Adopting a feminist approach to the study of war and adoptions and migrations from Vietnam, Allison Varzally’s Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations …
Migration and the Search for Home
Feminist Refugee Epistemology
Applying a transnational feminist lens to refugee studies, we introduce the concept of feminist refugee epistemology, which posits that gendered displacement is not only about social disorder and interruption but also about social reproduction and innovation. Fusing the critical with the creative, we conceptualize refugee artwork as a critical practice that allows for new forms of knowledge that would otherwise not be produced or shared. In this …
Transpacific Entanglements
Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies
Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies:A Transpacific Critique Yến Lê Espiritu (bio) When I started my research on the Vietnam War and its refugees, I conceptualized the Vietnam War as a dyadic war between the United States and Vietnam—an asymmetric dyad to be sure, but a nevertheless. What I came to realize was that the war, and the subsequent US-led refugee rescue operation, involved a constellation of US former and current colonia…
Ghosts and Other Unfinished Conversations
Advancing a “critical refugee studies” perspective, the papers in this volume conceptualize “the refugee” not as an object of investigation but as a cultural actor whose alternative memories and epistemologies challenge the established public narratives of the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia. Centering the cultural works of the 1.5 and 2nd generation refugee authors, filmmakers and artists, the essays suggest that the contemporary refugee subject is …
Unsettled
Between 1975 and 1994 approximately 150,000 Cambodian refugees entered the United States as part of the country's largest resettlement program, which granted asylum to nearly 1 million war refugees from Southeast Asia. Many of these refugees were resettled in some of the nation's poorest urban areas. During the 1980s and 1990s as many as ten thousand Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx, a New York City borough beset by “poverty, crime, …
Puro Arte
Islanders in the Empire
Journal Article Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i Get access Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i . Asian American Experience Series. By Poblete JoAnna . ( Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 2014 . xi + 237 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 .) Yen Lê Espiritu Yen Lê Espiritu University of California , San Diego Search for other works by this auth…
Race and U.S. Panethnic Formation
Panethnicity refers to the development of bridging organizations and the generalization of solidarity among subgroups that are racialized to be homogeneous by outsiders. This chapter argues that while the formation of a consolidated white identity in the United States is self-motivated and linked to white privilege, panethnicity for people of color is a product of racial categorization and bound up with power relations. As the influx of new immig…
Transpacific Studies
Body Counts
This book examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of …
Body Counts
Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and…
The appropriation of American war memories
This article delineates and critically juxtaposes the differential public commemorations of the Vietnam War and the Holocaust in the US. We elucidate how the tragedies of the Holocaust have been integrated into US public memory as a central part of the American story, solidifying the image of the United States as a powerful and moral nation that rescues desperate people from tyranny. In contrast, public commemorations of the highly divisive Vietn…
The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora
The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People." Asian Studies Review, 36(4), pp. 580–581
Panethnicity in the United States
Panethnicity - the development of bridging organizations and the generalization of solidarity among ethnic subgroups - is important theoretically because it focuses attention on ethnic change, and allows one to assess the relative importance of structural and cultural factors. In this article we present a framework for the study of panethnicity, generate research questions from this framework, and then test these questions by examining panethnici…
Gender and Labor in Asian Immigrant Families
This article explores the effects of employment patterns on gender relations among contemporary Asian immigrants. The existing data on Asian immigrant salaried professionals, self-employed entrepreneurs, and wage laborers suggest that economic constraints and opportunities have reconfigured gender relations within contemporary Asian America society. The patriarchal authority of Asian immigrant men, particularly those of the working class, has bee…
The "We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose" Syndrome
Through analyses of U.S. press coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this article examines how U.S. popular culture has dealt with the "difficult memory" of the Vietnam War, a war that left the United States as neither victor nor liberator. As a morally controversial and unsuccessful war, the Vietnam War appears to offer an antidote to the prominent "rescue and liberation" narratives of World War II. However, instead of …
Feminist Refugee Epistemology
Applying a transnational feminist lens to refugee studies, we introduce the concept of feminist refugee epistemology, which posits that gendered displacement is not only about social disorder and interruption but also about social reproduction and innovation. Fusing the critical with the creative, we conceptualize refugee artwork as a critical practice that allows for new forms of knowledge that would otherwise not be produced or shared. In this …
The intersection of race, ethnicity, and class
Through the prism of life stories, this paper examines the construction of identities among the children of professional immigrants from the Philippines. It pays particular attention to the strategies that these Filipino Americans use to construct multiple and overlapping identities and to rework dominant ideologies about their place in contemporary U.S. society. Stressing flux rather than continuity, and multilinearity rather than unilinearity, …
Korean Businesses in Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods
This article explores why Korean merchants in Los Angeles County have not encountered the same hostility from Hispanic communities as they have from black neighborhoods. We reviewed the racial, social-psychological, and materialist explanations for intergroup antagonism. While these theories do help to predict Korean-black tension, they do not explain why such hostility has not occurred in similarly deprived but Hispanic-dominated communities. To…
Colonial oppression, labour importation, and group formation
This article approaches the study of ethnic organization and reorganization from an international and historical perspective. Focusing on Filipinos in the United States, it argues that the identities of immigrants (particularly of immigrants of colour) have been shaped not only by the social location of their group within the host society but also by the position of their country within the global racial order. Couching the study of Filipino Amer…
Beyond the “Boat People”
Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies
Critical Refugee Studies and Native Pacific Studies:A Transpacific Critique Yến Lê Espiritu (bio) When I started my research on the Vietnam War and its refugees, I conceptualized the Vietnam War as a dyadic war between the United States and Vietnam—an asymmetric dyad to be sure, but a nevertheless. What I came to realize was that the war, and the subsequent US-led refugee rescue operation, involved a constellation of US former and current colonia…
Gender, Migration, and Work
Since the 1960s, the Philippines has sent the largest number of professional immigrants to the United States, the majority of whom are Filipino health care practitioners. Linking U.S. imperialism and migration to the United States, this article argues that the overrepresentation of nurses among contemporary Filipino immigrants is the result of intertwined influences of U.S. (neo)colonialism in the Philippines, the establishment of Americanized pr…
Made in America
Book Review| October 01 2000 Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools, Laurie Olsen. Yen Le Espiritu Yen Le Espiritu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2000) 20 (1): 91. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502650 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Yen Le Espirit…
Introduction
Filipino Navy Stewards and Filipina Health Care Professionals
Drawing from in-depth interviews of more than 100 Filipino Americans in San Diego, California, this article analyzes the migrations and changing family relations of Filipino Navy stewards and Filipina health care professionals. The first section details the racialized and gendered experiences of Filipino Navy stewards, paying particular attention to the men's efforts to reclaim their masculinity in both the private and public spheres. Focusing on…
Migration and the Search for Home
The appropriation of American war memories
This article delineates and critically juxtaposes the differential public commemorations of the Vietnam War and the Holocaust in the US. We elucidate how the tragedies of the Holocaust have been integrated into US public memory as a central part of the American story, solidifying the image of the United States as a powerful and moral nation that rescues desperate people from tyranny. In contrast, public commemorations of the highly divisive Vietn…
Thirty Years AfterWARd
This special volume originates from our concern that thirty years after the Fall of Saigon, a determined incomprehension remains the dominant U.S. public stance on the history of the Vietnam War. To be sure, the Vietnam War has not been forgotten. Partly due to the lack of a national resolution, the Vietnam War is the most chronicled, documented, reported, filmed, taped, and - all likelihood - narrated war in [U.S.] history... But as Ralph Elliso…
Disciplines Unbound
The new social movements of the 1960s and the post-1965 increases in racialized immigrant populations transformed the academy, ushering in new subjects of social knowledge as well as new critical social knowledges (Seidman 1994). These new subjects posed new questions, challenged the dominant paradigms of academic disciplines, and contested the separation of knowledge and politics. The new critical knowledge seeped into the traditional discipline…
The Role of Race and its Articulations for Asian Pacific Americans
Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 3, Number 2, June 2000
Social and Curricular Inclusion in Refugee Education
Recognizing refugee students, families, and communities as a source of knowledge and social change, this article offers two case studies of innovative, deliberative, and labor‐intensive practices toward meaningful social inclusion of refugee parents and students in education. The first example focuses on the multiyear effort by the Parent‐Student‐Resident Organization (PSRO) in San Diego, California, an education advocacy group organized and led …
The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora
The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People." Asian Studies Review, 36(4), pp. 580–581
Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies
It is now some thirty-five years since the establishment of the first Asian American Studies program. The field of Asian American Studies has grown tremendously, particularly over the last fifteen years. It has produced new scholarship; books on the subject published during the 1960s doubled the output of Asian American books published since the mid-nineteenth century, but the 1970s doubled that number, and the 1980s and 1990s doubled that in tur…
Asian American Panethnicity
Journal Article Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. By Yen Le Espiritu. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xvi, 222 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-87722-955-4.) Get access H. Brett Melendy H. Brett Melendy San Jose State University, San Jose, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 4, March 1994, Pages 1543–1544, https://doi.org…
Beyond the “Boat People”
Korean Businesses in Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods
This article explores why Korean merchants in Los Angeles County have not encountered the same hostility from Hispanic communities as they have from black neighborhoods. We reviewed the racial, social-psychological, and materialist explanations for intergroup antagonism. While these theories do help to predict Korean-black tension, they do not explain why such hostility has not occurred in similarly deprived but Hispanic-dominated communities. To…
Panethnicity in the United States
Panethnicity - the development of bridging organizations and the generalization of solidarity among ethnic subgroups - is important theoretically because it focuses attention on ethnic change, and allows one to assess the relative importance of structural and cultural factors. In this article we present a framework for the study of panethnicity, generate research questions from this framework, and then test these questions by examining panethnici…
Ethnic Minorities and Employment Practice
Asian American panethnicity
Books
Shammit Saggar, Race and Politics in Britain, Hemel Hempstead: Prentice‐Hall, 1992, 236 pp., £9.95 p.b. Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992, 270 pp., n.p., cloth Caroline Knowles, Race, Discourse and Labourism, London: Routledge, 1992, 206 pp., £40.00 h.b. Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939, Buckingham: Open University Pres…
Asian American Panethnicity
Asian American Panethnicity
Journal Article Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. By Yen Le Espiritu. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. xvi, 222 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-87722-955-4.) Get access H. Brett Melendy H. Brett Melendy San Jose State University, San Jose, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 80, Issue 4, March 1994, Pages 1543–1544, https://doi.org…
The intersection of race, ethnicity, and class
Through the prism of life stories, this paper examines the construction of identities among the children of professional immigrants from the Philippines. It pays particular attention to the strategies that these Filipino Americans use to construct multiple and overlapping identities and to rework dominant ideologies about their place in contemporary U.S. society. Stressing flux rather than continuity, and multilinearity rather than unilinearity, …
Racial Killing or Barroom Brawl? Multiple Explanations of the Killing of Vincent Chin
In the late 1970s, Asian American leaders began to call attention to what they termed “rising anti-Asian activities.” At a congressional hearing on the impact of the new Asian immigration, an Asian American attorney contended that “today we are witnessing a resurgence of anti-Asian sentiment manifest by growing problems of vandalism, physical attack, and on occasion murder.”1 In a statement submitted to the US Commission on Civil Rights, US Repre…
Asian Americans
Filipino American Lives
Breaking the Silence
Colonial oppression, labour importation, and group formation
This article approaches the study of ethnic organization and reorganization from an international and historical perspective. Focusing on Filipinos in the United States, it argues that the identities of immigrants (particularly of immigrants of colour) have been shaped not only by the social location of their group within the host society but also by the position of their country within the global racial order. Couching the study of Filipino Amer…
The Gender Lens Series
Disciplines Unbound
The new social movements of the 1960s and the post-1965 increases in racialized immigrant populations transformed the academy, ushering in new subjects of social knowledge as well as new critical social knowledges (Seidman 1994). These new subjects posed new questions, challenged the dominant paradigms of academic disciplines, and contested the separation of knowledge and politics. The new critical knowledge seeped into the traditional discipline…
Gender and Labor in Asian Immigrant Families
This article explores the effects of employment patterns on gender relations among contemporary Asian immigrants. The existing data on Asian immigrant salaried professionals, self-employed entrepreneurs, and wage laborers suggest that economic constraints and opportunities have reconfigured gender relations within contemporary Asian America society. The patriarchal authority of Asian immigrant men, particularly those of the working class, has bee…
On My Own
Asian American women and men
The Role of Race and its Articulations for Asian Pacific Americans
Journal of Asian American Studies - Volume 3, Number 2, June 2000
Made in America
Book Review| October 01 2000 Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools, Laurie Olsen. Yen Le Espiritu Yen Le Espiritu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2000) 20 (1): 91. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502650 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Yen Le Espirit…
"We Don't Sleep around like White Girls Do"
Filipino Navy Stewards and Filipina Health Care Professionals
Drawing from in-depth interviews of more than 100 Filipino Americans in San Diego, California, this article analyzes the migrations and changing family relations of Filipino Navy stewards and Filipina health care professionals. The first section details the racialized and gendered experiences of Filipino Navy stewards, paying particular attention to the men's efforts to reclaim their masculinity in both the private and public spheres. Focusing on…
Home Bound
Filipino Americans, who experience life in the United States as immigrants, colonized nationals, and racial minorities, have been little studied, though they are one of our largest immigrant groups. Based on her in-depth interviews with more than one hundred Filipinos in San Diego, California, Yen Le Espiritu investigates how Filipino women and men are transformed through the experience of migration, and how they in turn remake the social world a…
Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies
It is now some thirty-five years since the establishment of the first Asian American Studies program. The field of Asian American Studies has grown tremendously, particularly over the last fifteen years. It has produced new scholarship; books on the subject published during the 1960s doubled the output of Asian American books published since the mid-nineteenth century, but the 1970s doubled that number, and the 1980s and 1990s doubled that in tur…
Sociology (36 works) · Political science (35 works) · History (26 works) · Gender Studies (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (20 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (16 works) · History (14 works) · Ethnic group (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works)