The Asian American and Pacific Islander press brings the world home
The first Indian American journalist to land a job in the U.S. was hired by the Black press during a period of intense racial terror across the country. In 1922, after being roundly rejected by several White-led newsrooms, H.G. Mudgal applied to be a reporter at Marcus Garvey’s Daily Negro Times, which later became Negro World. By 1930, Mudgal had risen through the ranks to become the paper’s managing editor.
Just as White-led newspapers were directly inciting violence against Black communities, they also gave local politicians and anti-Asian labor organizers space to stoke resentment and coordinate lynchings and pogroms in Chinese American, and later Indian American and Filipino American communities. Throughout the period before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and until the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which banned all immigration from Asia, the Black press routinely made common cause with Chinese and other Asian immigrants during the mid-19th century.
One of the most vocal critics of Chinese exclusion was the great Frederick Douglass, who published the abolitionist newspaper The North Star. And while White-led press attacked them and Black press stood up for them, their own community journalism was emerging to narrate their lives — and organize their communities.
Today, fewer than a quarter of all Asian Americans say they are familiar with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history. Much of the lost and erased history of Asian and Pacific Islander America can be found inside its community journalism. Asian Americans built over 700 miles of transcontinental railroad and comprised 75% of California’s agricultural workforce by the late 19th century. They delivered the economic miracle that made California the world’s fifth-largest economy today. They also used their community newspapers to innovate contributions to the U.S. economy and global letters — and to organize their communities. Arab American New Yorkers modified the linotype machine to produce Arabic letters, unleashing a global Arabic literary renaissance. Japanese American labor leaders created in-language newspapers to organize sugarcane workers. Native Hawaiian activists launched newspapers to advocate for self-rule. Filipino American student activists created pamphlets to push back against racist mob violence.
Today’s in-language and community-based news media ecosystem dramatically eclipses its early forebears in both size and scale — there are more than 690 AAPI news media outlets, serving their audiences in 56 languages across the U.S.
“Many of us building community-based cultural movements are creating the infrastructure our people need to survive today’s backlash,” said Jonah Batambuze, founder and executive director of The Blindian Project, a narrative community dedicated to connecting and organizing the historically erased global Black-South Asian diaspora.
These are not just the type of ethnic newspapers your mother might have grabbed by the checkout aisle at the Asian grocery store. Today’s community AAPI media includes hard-hitting investigative and human rights documenting projects launched by exiled activists and refugee journalists, glossy industry and fashion magazines, literary magazines preserving endangered languages, in-language how-to guides and fact-checking sites, podcasts, and newsletters on diasporic culture and politics.
While it’s tempting to romanticize an ecosystem this large and vibrant, today’s AAPI media faces existential and structural threats unimaginable even during these earlier periods of vicious anti-democratic and racist hate. Those news outlets must navigate the same pressures as better-resourced mainstream newsrooms to build new revenue models and compete in a complex digital landscape — only with less staff, fewer resources, and far less investment overall.
They must navigate an ongoing and wide-ranging effort to co-opt, undermine, and influence their audiences from powerful governments and organizations abroad, as well as in their communities locally.
Contesting and claiming community narratives
The AAPI communities that reconstituted in the back half of the 20th century have not only been cut off from their earlier history, they have often functioned as a “red line” against Black and other immigrant communities — AAPI community media can become a site for opposing voices in divided communities to contest and claim community narratives around policing, immigration, and education.
AAPI community media publishers tell me they struggle to serve their increasingly polarized communities as a whole and fight disinformation. One city desk editor at a Chinese-language newspaper in New York City noted that, while many of the community organizers and elected officials from her community may have progressive or liberal politics, her readers have been exposed to social media campaigns denouncing them as “woke,” a term unlikely to have much cultural resonance for global AAPI diasporas, but which has appeared in Filipino American and Indian American news, as well as in Asian news outlets as far-flung as Hong Kong and Taiwan. Other publishers describe the challenge of serving as a “town square” for their communities as a whole.
Powerful local leaders and organizations attempt to influence or interfere with their editorial independence using the power of the purse — or worse. One Indian American publisher in Georgia told me he was called before 30 prominent Hindu leaders, who interrogated him for three hours and threatened to withdraw their advertising because he published an op-ed critical of current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A Vietnamese-language newspaper in California faced six months of boycott and protest outside its office over contested language that earlier immigrants fleeing communist rule found offensive, but which newer arrivals raised under Chinese influence and second-generation Vietnamese Americans lacking fluency would not.
AAPI media must also reach in many directions — connecting diverse communities from across Asia-Pacific with deep internal hierarchies and conflicts. A look below the surface of the AAPI Media Map reveals that the ecosystem reproduces many of the persistent gaps and disparities that plague Asian-Pacific America, leaving those communities with the lowest income levels and worst health outcomes, and who are living in heartland states with Sharia bans and property bans that AAPI activists are describing as new alien land laws, without independent, in-language, or culturally relevant local news.
Pressure from within and beyond the ‘rim’
As violence and natural disasters drive more migration in and from Asia-Pacific, our communities also grow more multiracial and global.
I spoke with a number of publishers as part of an effort to document threats to press freedoms and safety inside AAPI media throughout the 2024 election. The identities of these publishers, who face ongoing harassment and surveillance, have been anonymized. During the course of this work, I learned about the stark conditions they face.
Chinese American communities — and their community media — navigate surveillance and digital influence efforts from both within the U.S. and transnationally. The U.S. government alleges that some Chinese-language community broadcasters were launched explicitly to counter narratives critical of the Chinese government after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Leaders of formerly independent Hong Kong community media outlets based in the U.S. tell me that they have been coerced into signing cooperative agreements with state media agencies, including the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) and its China News Service (CNS), following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule. One Chinese-language publisher in New Jersey told me that a representative from Chinese state media would write down the names and quantity of newspapers local publishers were picking up from the printer each week. The Indian government has pioneered the use of so-called “cyber troops,” who have targeted journalists across South Asia and the U.S. South Asian American newsrooms relying on back-office support from Asia as they attempt to manage costs are routinely impacted by internet shutdowns commonly deployed across India and the region as a whole.
AAPI news organizations operate as vital components of communities within diaspora networks. The solution to the steady erosion of community rights and shared narratives is to build and fortify collaborative networks and communities of practice across Asian America and into the diaspora. If divisive forces can see the value in undermining and dismantling these narrative networks, then those that advocate for Asian American civil rights can invest in them.
“Community media feels more important than ever these days,” said Annie Guo VanDan, president of Asian Avenue Magazine, a monthly glossy for the pan-Asian American community in Denver — where an anti-Chinese riot in 1880 led to lynchings, pogroms, and the destruction of the city’s original Chinatown. “Our work shines a light on our communities’ stories that are often untold, and at the forefront of this work lies solidarity and community building. Our collective power grows when we speak up and show up for each other.”
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
