Taking it to the streets: Representations of ethnicity and gender in San Francisco's Chinese New Year festivals, 1953--2001 (California)

The major objectives of this dissertation are to demonstrate how Chinese Americans created and contested Chinese Americans' identity through San Francisco's Chinese New Year Festivals and to understand the complex entanglement of ethnicity, class, gender, and national and transnational politics and economics as they shaped identity formation. Whereas much contemporary Chinese American history focuses on either the pre-1943 or the post-1965 periods and is concerned with the important work of recovering Chinese Americans' social history, this project attempts to build upon as well as reshape the debate over identity formation within the Chinese American community by studying Chinese American cultural history from the early Cold War period to the present. This study argues that ethnic cultural celebrations and beauty pageants are an important avenue for understanding Chinese American experiences. This dissertation examines festival publications, brochures, pamphlets, newspapers, oral histories, autobiographies, and government records to analyze the process of Chinese American identify formation and identity politics. The central analysis focuses on how some Chinese American leaders, student activists, gang members, feminists, and new and old immigrants actively constructed their ethnicities through selecting certain cultural attributes, experiences, and memories to represent themselves and the Chinese American community. It emphasizes the tensions and conflicts that resulted from the very process of ethnic identification and exclusion---a process in which diverse constituencies of the Chinese American community expressed different visions of themselves. By examining the changing power relations in the festivals, this study demonstrates the complex class and gender structures in the San Francisco's Chinese American community and the impact of national and transnational political, economic, and social forces on that community. It also shows how a Chinese diaspora asserted its own power culturally, politically, and economically as an ethnic constituency in a major U.S. urban city.