Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity - Emily Ma
Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity aims to serve API Iowan survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and human trafficking. The organization was founded by community activists Mira Yusef and Shashi Tenneti, who sought to create a grassroots volunteer group that could provide API survivors comprehensive support services. This vision was sparked by Yusef’s frustration with how mainstream Iowan SGBV services weren’t meeting the cultural and linguistic needs of API survivors
The API population in Iowa is relatively low though diverse and fast-growing. During the Vietnam War, Iowa was the first state to receive thousands of resettled refugees, primarily Vietnamese, Tai-dam, Lao, Cambodian, and Hmong communities. The API population in Iowa has continued to grow since then. As of 2018, 87,708 Iowans identified as Asian, and 4,232 identified as native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander; this represents a 134% increase in Asians and 319.4% increase in Pacific Islanders since 2000. The number of Iowans who speak an Asian language is around 31,500, with the most commonly spoken being Mandarin, Vietnamese, Lao, Korean, and Tagalog. Iowa has also continued to receive refugee populations, primarily from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Iraq, Nepal, and Syria. Many mainstream crisis centers and shelters do not have the capacity to provide services or conduct community outreach in such a diverse variety of languages, which can pose a significant access barrier to immigrants who do not speak English as their primary language. Moreover, sexual assault tends to be less discussed in API communities because of its implicit link to sexuality, which is often understood as taboo. The harm API survivors face is additionally not only confined to the individual level but also rooted in larger systems of racial and gender violence. API survivors, therefore, often require culturally specific services that tend to be absent from mainstream providers. Lastly, API in Iowa have lower median household incomes and higher poverty rates than Iowans as a whole, and over 60% of foreign-born API are not citizens, leading many API survivors to have pressing financial and immigration-related concerns as well as a mistrust of state institutions like law enforcement.
Using her years of experience volunteering in social services in San Francisco, Yusef joined with Tenneti in 2003 to begin developing a women’s collective that could better address gender-based violence in API communities. Four years later, Monsoon became a full-fledged nonprofit organization with Yusef serving as the executive director. The organization moved into an office in Des Moines, hired advocate staffers, and enlisted youth interns to help pioneer the organization’s middle and high school violence prevention program. Two years later, after being awarded U.S. Department of Justice grant funding, the organization was able to hire more advocates and open a second location in Iowa City. Monsoon now serves communities in all 99 of Iowa’s counties and has 28 staff members that collectively speak 14 different API languages.
Through its various programs and services, the organization seeks to initiate social change that deconstructs gender-based violence and constructs healthy and safe API communities. Monsoon provides direct services, community outreach and education, violence prevention, and technical assistance. Their variety of free and confidential services (e.g., individual and group counseling, referrals, crisis advocacy, safety planning, immigration assistance, medical care support, etc.) are based on a Multilingual Access Model (MLAM), which trains volunteers and advocates to understand different forms of harm as well as culturally and linguistically sensitive response. Monsoon also actively reaches out to communities with programming that destigmatizes survivors, challenges harmful narratives around sexual violence, provides spaces for community healing, and engages API youth in prevention efforts.
Outside of its regular services, Monsoon has also launched a variety of special projects over the years to pursue its goal of confronting API violence. For example, in 2009, Monsoon created the “Unburdening our Mothers” Oral History project to address the often-unacknowledged intergenerational silence around sexual violence. This project involved statewide interviews and focus group discussions with Asian elders in order to create a safe space for storytelling, testimonials, and other forms of therapeutic unburdening. In 2011, in recognition of the need to strengthen solidarity with other BIPOC groups, Monsoon used its administrative and financial resources to help found “Nisaa: African Women’s Project,” an organization that now combats gender-based violence in African Iowan immigrant communities. Furthermore, realizing that they needed to better reach certain API ethnic groups, Monsoon began working in 2012 to develop a peer-to-peer advocacy project with the Hindu Cultural Center, the National Federation of Filipino American Association - Iowa, and several Iraqi community leaders. To widen their reach further, in 2017 the organization also expanded its operations to establish the National Organization of Asians and Pacific Islanders Ending Sexual Violence, a program through which they provide technical assistance and training to response services nationwide that serve API communities.
Monsoon’s survivor- and community-centered approach builds knowledge about the multidimensional forms of violence and the various spaces in which it exists. Its programming aims to dismantle the shame and stigma that often silences API survivors while offering alternative, non-state solutions to preventing gender-based violence – and thus pathways towards recognizing and refusing the state’s own forms of oppression. The organization’s work pushes back against dominant representations of API women in particular as unassuming, quiet, and passive by carving out safe forums for survivors and community members to actively speak up about their experiences. For instance, one of their community events this year was “A Letter to My Body: A Virtual Open Mic,” which invited API Iowans to share letters or stories, both traumatic and celebratory, about their bodies. Monsoon also solicits the voices of community members to shape the organization instead of treating them merely as victims to be helped. They hold community listening sessions with various different API groups to gauge attitudes about and experiences with sexual violence. The compilation of this information into a publicly available report that informs the organization’s practices and the community as a whole functions as a form of knowledge production, which centers on the lived experiences of API survivors as legitimate sources of expertise. The creation of a report such as this also works to highlight the diversity of opinions within the incredibly heterogeneous Iowan API population, who are often treated as a monolith in popular political and social discourse.
Furthermore, not only does the organization address violence that has occurred by giving API survivors a platform to voice and process their experiences, it also engages in violence prevention and education. Monsoon’s community outreach and programming seeks to raise awareness about underlying structures and histories of oppression and how they are tied not only to overt sexual harms but also to less obvious forms of racialized and gendered discrimination. For example, Monsoon has a regular community newsletter and podcast that has focused on topics like comfort women, yellow peril, and the model minority myth. This is in addition to events and guest lectures that delve into subjects such as media representations of Asian women, API mental health, and histories of state violence. This work explores and deconstructs narratives that commonly otherize and exoticize API. Asian women especially are often fetishized as simultaneously hypersexual and docile. Monsoon provides resources that unpack how this fetishization is not random but rather inherently tied to violent imperial and colonial systems that commodify and dehumanize API as disposable bodies for Western consumption. This focus is especially important given how API women are often gaslit into thinking of fetishization as a form of flattery rather than subjugation. In the process, Monsoon shows how addressing sexual violence is not just about holding individual perpetrators accountable but also about dismantling the white, patriarchal structures and institutions of harm that promote only certain forms of desirability and worth.
The organization’s extensive work with API youth also furthers this goal of unraveling characterizations of API as politically and sexually submissive. The youth violence prevention team works in middle and high schools to initiate peer-to-peer programming about topics like racial histories, healthy relationship building, online dating, stalking, and consent. Monsoon also hosts a “Summer School of Youth Activism,” for youth to learn about API community organizing, thereby helping the next generation develop the tools to actively recognize and address systems of oppression. This encouragement of personal bodily autonomy and ownership over personal relationships and activist spaces opposes narratives that stereotype API as non-threatening, non-resistant objects of fantasy.
Furthermore, the organization’s practices also facilitate revolutionary care and more personal/interpersonal forms of resistance. The experience of being a person of color and an immigrant in predominantly white spaces can often be one of isolation, alienation, and constant performance. Monsoon works towards community building, bringing together API individuals of many different ethnicities, sexual identities, and ages. While these connections are useful for organizing and advocacy purposes, they also facilitate genuine relationships that have inherent, as opposed to just instrumental, worth. For instance, Monsoon hosts casual chats for high school and college-aged API to discuss their experiences and form friendships with one another. For Asian American Heritage Month this year, the organization compiled an online community recipe book, open to contributions from various ethnic groups. The organization has also invested in creating physical spaces for gathering with the purchase of the “Banh Hao” (translated as “our house” in Thai and Lao), a community healing place. These digital and physical places help establish a sense of belonging and ownership over space, which challenges how API have typically been pushed to take up less space, be unassuming, and minimize themselves and their experiences.
References
“About.” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/about-us/
“Asian/Pacific Americans in Iowa: 2020.” State Data Center of Iowa & the Office of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs. May 2020. https://www.iowadatacenter.org/Publications/api2020.pdf
“Asians in Iowa.” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/asians-in-iowa/
“Events.” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/events/
“Media.” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/category/news-updates/
“Our Mission.” Monsoon Violence Prevention Program. n.d. https://monsoonvpp.weebly.com/our-mission.html
“Our Story.” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/our-story/
“Our Story.” National Organization of Asians and Pacific Islanders Ending Sexual Violence (NAPIESV). n.d. https://napiesv.org/our-story/
“Programs & Services” Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsooniowa.org/programs-services/
Soweid, Loulwa. “Community Listening Sessions on Sexual Violence in Asian and Pacific Islander Communities in Iowa, March 2021.” April 1, 2021. https://monsooniowa.org/resource/community-listening-on-sexual-violence-in-api-communities-in-iowa-report-march-2021/
Stories of Monsoon. Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. n.d. https://monsoonvpp.weebly.com/stories-of-monsoon.html