Increased federal investments in social programs increases Asian mobilizing and solidarity with other groups which allows for movement building and increased autonomy. This assumes their critique of capitalism

In the early twentieth century, Asian Americans and Latinos organized along national origin lines and focused on assimilation; By the 1960s and 1970s, community organizers from both groups began to form panethnic community service organizations (CSOs) that emphasized solidarity. I argue that focusing on the rise of panethnic CSOs reveals an underappreciated mechanism that has mobilized Asian Americans and Latinos—the welfare state. The War on Poverty programs incentivized non-black minority community organizers to form panethnic CSOs to gain access to state resources and serve the economically disadvantaged in their communities. Drawing on extensive archival research, I identify this mechanism and test it with my original dataset of 818 Asian American and Latino advocacy organizations and CSOs. Leveraging the Reagan budget cut, I show that dismantling the War on Poverty programs reduced the founding rate of panethnic CSOs. I further estimated that a 1 percent increase in federal funding was associated with the increase of the two panethnic CSOs during the War on Poverty. The findings demonstrate how access to state resources forces activists among non-primary beneficiary groups to build new political identities that fit the dominant image of the policy beneficiaries. The power of racial minorities in the United States comes from the coordination of ethnic groups belonging to the same racial category. The United States is becoming a minority–majority nation driven by the population growth of Latinos1 and Asian Americans. Latinos have now surpassed African Americans as the second-largest racial group, and Asian Americans have become the fastest growing racial group in the United States. However, demographics are not destiny. Asian Americans and Latinos both encompass disparate national origin groups. If these subgroups do not have a sense of internal unity, their population increase does not translate into a growth of their political power. For this reason, understanding the conditions under which Asian Americans and Latinos became organized as coherent groups is important. Until a half-century ago, the terms “Asian Americans” and “Latinos” themselves did not exist. In the early twentieth century, Asian Americans and Latinos organized among their respective groups of national origin and focused on assimilation into American society. For instance, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)2 were exclusively concerned about their own groups despite the fact that racial discrimination knows no bounds. Furthermore, the two organizations seemed to only concentrate on the middle-class and American citizens among them (it was no coincidence that the term “citizens” was included in the names of both organizations). Only in the late 1960s and 1970s did national origin groups from Asia and Latin America begin to form panethnic3 organizations that emphasized solidarity. Ethnic and class dimensions informed this change. These new organizations strengthened their focus on marginalized members: the poor, women, elderly, and children. Figure 1 describes this transition systematically, drawing on my original dataset on 818 Asian American and Latino advocacy and community service organizations (CSOs). The data divide panethnic organizations into three categories: advocacy, community service, and hybrid organizations. Advocacy organizations are involved in public and electoral campaigns, litigation, and lobbying. CSOs provide social services to community members. Hybrid organizations are active in both advocacy and service.4 In the figure, the y-axis represents organizational population density,5 which measures the number of organizations founded in each decade per population of one million, and the x-axis indicates the decades.6 The figure presents three patterns: (1) Asian American and Latino organizations began to emerge in the 1960s; (2) among different types of organizations, panethnic CSOs were the clear majority; and (3) were the most densely populated in the 1970s. What explains the emergence and popularity of Asian American and Latino CSOs in the 1960s and 1970s? Figure 1. The founding trends of Asian American and Latino advocacy, community service, and hybrid organizations, 1960–2017. Source. The author. CSO = community service organization. Previous studies do not explain these patterns. Recent studies on panethnicity show how networked relationships shaped the formation and expansion of Asian American and Latino panethnic organizations (Mora 2014; Okamoto 2014). However, these studies share one common limitation: their exclusive focus on national panethnic organizations. CSOs, the majority of Asian American and Latino panethnic organizations, are mostly local organizations. Only 2 percent of Asian American and 4 percent of Latino CSOs are based in Washington, DC, or have “National” in their organization names (see Figure B.1 in Online Appendix B). Although most of these CSOs did not make headlines, they matter because they served marginalized members in the Asian American and Latino communities and trained new political activists and leaders by providing them with political knowledge, experience, and networks (D. Chin 2001; G. Chin 2015; Duarte 2016; Ishizuka 2016; Muñoz 1989). I argue that the key to explaining the origin of these panethnic CSOs lies in the expansion of the American welfare state. After World War II, the American public became aware of the millions of Americans living in poverty amid the nation’s postwar material prosperity (Harrington 1962). In response, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the War on Poverty and Congress enacted the Economic Opportunity Act to support his agenda. Between 1961 and 1972, federal aid programs to cities increased more than sixfold—from US$3.9 billion to over US$26 billion. These federal grants outweighed local social expenditure. In 1968, the total non-defense federal spending in Oakland, California, was US$95.5 million, twice the city’s budget (Pressman 1975, 1–18). The War on Poverty programs sparked an expansion of panethnic CSOs by disrupting the political hierarchies within the national origin groups from Asia and Latin America. In the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a major division emerged within these groups between, on one hand, a relatively affluent old guard focused on pursuing assimilation and, on the other, a rapidly expanding and more economically disadvantaged base focused on gaining access to resources. The War on Poverty programs, which included community action agencies and the Model Cities Program, effectively tipped the scales toward the latter faction comprising Asian American and Latino activists by giving Asian American and Latino activists an opportunity to build their own organizations and transform the agenda of their communities (Orleck and Hazirjian 2011). Although founding these organizations required substantial and long-term investment, these organizers took on this challenge to increase their groups’ access to state resources. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was the agency responsible for the War on Poverty programs. The OEO allocated federal funds across states using a poverty index (see Online Appendix A). The spending within each state was strongly associated with both the poverty rate and the share of non-white people in each county (Bailey and Duquette 2014). However, Asian Americans and Latinos were non-primary beneficiary groups. According to the U.S. Census, more than 99 percent of the U.S. population was either black or white in 1960. Consequently, the federal government paid little attention to non-black minority groups. To gain federal support, the younger generation activists needed to document their conditions and increase the number of poor members in their grant proposals (Kuramoto 1976; Orozco, Schwartz, and Austin 2011). For them, Asian American and Latino CSOs were a strategic instrument that could be leveraged to take advantage of the federal funding and serve the economically disadvantaged in their communities. In the rest of the article, I first develop a theory that explains the formation of panethnic CSOs as a strategic response to two organizational environmental changes: the availability of external financial resources (i.e., federal funding) and the extent of population growth. The underutilized archival materials at the Asian American7 and Chicano Studies Collections8 at the Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley provide rare insights into how Asian American and Latino community organizers strategically responded to the War on Poverty funding and policy implementation. Next, I test the theory with my original dataset of 818 Asian American and Latino advocacy organizations and CSOs. Using interrupted time-series design and regression analysis, I establish the effect of federal grants on the founding rate of panethnic CSOs. Leveraging the Reagan budget cut, I show that dismantling the War on Poverty programs reduced the founding rate of panethnic CSOs. I further estimated that a 1 percent increase in federal funding was associated with the increase of the two panethnic CSOs during the War on Poverty. Past studies mentioned the impact of the War on Poverty on Asian American and Latino community organizing using interviews and case studies (Espiritu 1992; Herrera 2013; Padilla 1985, Võ 2004; Wei 1993). However, these examples are limited to demonstrating how generalizable the connection was. Based on the large-scale original data collection, my findings provide the first systematic evidence of how the expansion of the welfare state transformed Asian American and Latino politics by activating the politics of recognition. It has long been argued in policy feedback literature that new policies, through vested interests, create a new politics (Campbell 2011; Pierson 1994; Schattschneider 1935). The case of Asian Americans and Latinos shows that for these historically disadvantaged groups, gaining access to—not protecting vested interests—motivated them to become politically active. Asian American and Latino activists organized the poor in their communities and began to form panethnic CSOs in the 1960s and 1970s to fit the dominant image of policy beneficiaries. This conclusion that access to state resources forces activists among non-primary beneficiary groups to take new political identities has broad implications for scholars of racial ethnic politics, intersectionality, policy feedback, and inequality, as well as activists and organizers. Theory Although interrelated, advocacy organizations and CSOs are two different species. Commitment to social justice played an important role in the founding of both types of organizations in Asian American and Latino communities (Muñoz 1989; Wei 1993). It is, however, crucial to note that founding a CSO is more capital-intensive than founding an advocacy organization. Building affordable houses, providing accessible healthcare, and expanding educational and employment opportunities all require substantial and long-term investments. Conversely, the variation in political advocacy activities is more strongly influenced by structural changes in political opportunity vis-à vis repression and openness of the government rather than funding availability (Eisinger 1973; McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978; Zepeda-Millán 2017).