In the Driver’s Seat:
The Collective Activist Authorship of Immigrant Working Women at AIWA - Kim Salac

This experimental film seeks to illustrate the constant negotiations of spaces, of these multiple, entangled selves, that Asian immigrant women workers face on a daily basis. As layer upon layer of selves clash, merge, fuse in the spaces they inhabit, the figures portrayed are inspired by the intersectional optics inherently surrounding immigrant working women. Inspired by the efforts of AIWA in particular, this film seeks to explore gendered narratives, and imagery of work, responsibility, and expectation, while also acknowledging community spaces, represented by a circle of chairs, as fundamental sites of meeting, and reaffirmations of selfhood.

As a community centered organization, Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, or AIWA has since placed migrant women’s narratives at the forefront of their mission. Tracing this to the very foundations of the organization, AIWA first found its voice by approaching and listening to the needs of immigrant garment workers. Polling immigrant women who worked in the largely overworked and exploitative garment industry, its founding members realized an underlying well of experience and knowledge beneath their answers and demands. Laying the foundation for its origins, one of the sought after types of programming amongst these women was a desire for educational resources and opportunities; Young Shin, an AIWA founder, cites the specific desire for English speaking classes, as a catalyst, not to enable assimilationist narratives, but rather, as an entry point into a collective sharing of experiences, and action. Beyond a single definition, this demand revealed a myriad of layered motivations, from wanting to learn the language for job prospects and mobility to proficiency as a symbolic marker of belonging (Chun 926). By helping to unravel, bridge, and provide a space for immigrant women to negotiate their selfhood, the needs of their communities, as well as playing an active process within this negotiation, AIWA forefronts these immigrant women, particularly through their inherent intersectional lives, as significant political resources to seeking productive, collective action and change.

Staying rooted in this historical origin, AIWA’s mission has continued to prioritize leadership and personal growth of the immigrant women that seek out its spaces, seeing all identities and women entering their spaces as capable and knowledgeable of leadership roles. Centered around a collective practice, their primary goal is to empower working class immigrant women to mobilize, providing tools, resources, and spaces to continuously evolve and realize this shared well of knowledge that already lay within their own communities (“Asian Immigrant Women Advocates”). Under a sense of community and collective action, the organization seeks to redefine leadership away from a singular, individual, and hierarchical entity. Former staff member, Stacy Komo, describes AIWA’s move towards a more grounded, community-based definition, seeking to deconstruct “this notion of leaders as someone everybody else follows,” towards “leadership development [as] about us being able to lead our lives powerfully” (“Becoming Ourselves”, 00:02:25 - 00:02:35). Even their three areas of  programming (education, leadership development and collective action) illustrate the shifting arenas and spaces in which leadership can be found. From negotiating time for themselves within the household to demanding better working conditions and pay in their workspaces, leadership is multiple and multitudinous within AIWA’s models. An example of this very notion is their community transformation organizing strategy (CTOS) model. Rooted in the lived experiences of these immigrant women, the CTOS model embodies intersectionality as praxis; it encourages and aids in their member’s transformation by inherently building their evolution on their own knowledge base, consisting of their everyday struggles from work to household (Chun 924). These theoretical frameworks of activism, intersectionality, and community transformation are always rooted in tangible skills and experiences; a citizenship class, for example, acts as a multiple site of convergence, for both learning practical skills of passing a citizenship test, while also learning about the workings of power structures that define citizenship literacy in the first place. As such, AIWA moves beyond mere spotlighting of issues to placing these women as the agents of their own livelihoods, and the change that they seek to enact in their communities.

Seamlessly embedded into their leadership models, and programming practices, AIWA marks a significant shift in social change and organizing work through their reshaping of activism and initiatives away from a single spearhead at the helm to a community-led, horizontal representation. By being so ingrained in the communities they serve, AIWA’s relationship with its members becomes a constant, mutual exchange of knowledge; the lived experiences of the women that enter their spaces reveal the intricacies of power structures at play within their struggles, allowing AIWA to model its programming and organizing efforts after these specific needs. Inversely, immigrant women who attend the organization’s programming formulate and negotiate their own leadership growth, even joining the ranks as an organizing member as part of that development. It is precisely this intertwined relationship that allows AIWA to continue its revolutionary efforts. With these women’s inherent intersectional livelihoods acting as the drivers of social and political strategy, their model of mobilization and leadership has significantly contributed to a reimagining of organizing towards a more collective future.

This restructuring, and the significance of intersectionality within that formulation towards collective action is further embodied in AIWA’s engagement of youth in their organizing campaigns and practices. The involvement of youth, many of them children of the migrant workers involved with AIWA, illustrate the organization's specific attention and recognition of the gendered navigation of women workers, as they must continuously negotiate spaces of employment, motherhood, and marriage (Chun 928). Not only does AIWA embody an opportunity to build relationships amongst themselves beyond this constant negotiation, it provides the ability to engage their families in their processes of organizing and mobilization; instead of AIWA primarily becoming a place of separation for these women (though many of them have described its spaces as a welcomed break), the organization seeks to work within the entanglement of their responsibilities to reflect the ways that these women’s lives are inherently intersectional. In the wake of their Garment Justice Workers’ campaign, AIWA folded more opportunities for youth outreach and resources into their programming as a result of an increased engagement of young people after its success. Paralleling the ways that many of these immigrant women workers initially sought English language classes, several of the youth members have also become involved in campaigns through similar struggles of overcoming language barriers. Former youth leader, Mandy Tsang, has even expressed how youth engagement in programming through AIWA (particularly spoken in their first languages) had inspired a movement to increase Cantonese speaking faculty at her local high school, creating this sense of collective and shared struggle within their communities (“Becoming Ourselves”, 00:01:37 - 00:02:24). With opportunities for more direct involvement in the initiatives of their mothers, and vice versa, layers of support, empowerment, and consciousness-raising are built generationally, folding in an intersectional lens to mobilizing strategies. By spearheading a move towards a more holistic, grassroots approach to organizing, that actively takes into account the multiple negotiations of spaces in the face of multiple oppressions that immigrant women workers must face daily, AIWA’s strategies and programming reflects the unique positioning of these workers as key political resources in striving for collective action.

Works Cited

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“Becoming Ourselves: How Immigrant Women Transformed Their World Trailer.” Youtube,

Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, 29 June 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYWz18-BY9Y&t=146s.

Chun, Jennifer Jihye, et al. “Intersectionality as a Social Movement Strategy: Asian Immigrant

Women Advocates.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 4, 2013, pp. 917–940., doi:10.1086/669575.

Delgado, Gary, director. Becoming Ourselves. Kanopy Streaming, Asian Immigrant Women

Advocates, 2013, www.kanopy.com/product/becoming-ourselves.

“History.” AIWA, Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, www.aiwa.org/history/.