CAAAV – Organizing Asian Communities

Foundation and Evolution of CAAAV

CAAAV was formed in 1986 by Asian-American women who were concerned and wanted to fight back against the rise of anti-Asian hate violence, and that very quickly became both sort of individual hate violence, for instance, Vincent Chin's murder, as well as police violence against Asian-American people and Asian-American youth, and CAAAV has often connected those two individual acts of violence to broader systemic root causes of violence.

CAAAV has had many different iterations and there are many other organizations that have grown out of CAAAV. So, I think one of the ways to understand CAAAV’s trajectory has been really starting off around individual hate violence and realizing that, that you just can't create the kind of structural change you need to stop hate violence if you're only dealing with individual acts. I think that was one shift. CAAAV also used to be more of an activist home, like any Asian-American in New York City or any Asian person in New York City could come through and be part of CAAAV, and it was really a political home, but not necessarily grassroots. I think that's been a shift, that even though it makes the politics more complicated, our commitment now is to really be a mass membership organization, and that's definitely a shift over time. I think the beginning of that shift was with the Lyft driver’s coalition, which is now the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, and that has remained as a thread and have consistently since then but I think especially with the creation of the Chinatown Tenants Union, which turned 15 years old this year.

Grassroots women are who have powered CAAAV always. CAAAV was founded by a group of really fierce Asian women who understood that the political project that was CAAAV and that is CAAAV was needed, and then pretty consistently, many of our member leaders have been grassroots women, many of our staff have been grassroots women. Most of CAAAV’S work has always been powered by both grassroots women and folks who maybe don't come from the grassroots of CAAAV but are committed to the project. The work has changed, as I was explaining before but CAAAV has always being led by women and queer and nonconforming people as far as I know, and again, staff and grassroots members leadership.

CAAAV maintains accountability to its constituency primarily through community meetings. I think as a political organization, organizers will share their political views and their assessment of campaigns or what's needed in the moment, and we make decisions with a number of leaders in particular. Those are folks that meet every week and go through a lot of political development as part of CAAAV and with CAAAV, and it is the highest level of engagement with the organization, and that is often the primary campaign decision making space, even if organizers and staff can strategize behind the scenes as well. But that's probably the primary way. It is very rare, and I don't know when the last time was that we made a big campaign decision without there being a formal decision from our member leadership body. The other way is through general member meetings where both present on the work that we're doing and on decisions that leaders have made and then also put things up for decision making then.

CAAAV’s broad overall mission is to build an Asian immigrant left, and what that looks like right now is that we organized working class Asian immigrants against gentrification and around issues of housing, that is, rent stabilized Chinese immigrants primarily in Chinatown and primarily Chinese, Bangladeshi and Korean tenants in public housing in western Queens.

Core parts of our current strategy is to grow the number of organized working-class Asian immigrant tenants; to interrupt capital, that means to interrupt the sort of project of the real estate industry and developers to gentrify our neighborhoods, to make them places that middle class and wealthy white families and people want to live in instead of the folks who've been there, the working class Asian and other people of color who've been there for a very long time. Another is that we really focus on structural change often, but not always through policy. So, in the last year we've pulled back from doing work that's primarily about language justice as opposed to language justice as it connects to gentrification because we decided that particularly in public housing, some of the root cause issues were really around funding and disinvestment. And that language and access was a symptom of that, but not actually the primary cause.

Achievements and Challenges

Some major breakthroughs in the last year: We were part of the coalition that stopped Amazon from moving their headquarters into Queens. That was a major achievement. We were part of the statewide coalition that won the rent law fight last year. That was also a massive win, a decade in the making. And then along with GOLES and TUFF-LES, we filed a lawsuit that halted the development of two mega towers in the Two Bridges neighborhood. These are accomplishments from just last year, a wild year of victories, it is very rare to have that many big wins all at once.

In the past, some of the major victories have been fighting to keep people in their homes and winning building fights against landlords. We also worked to bring a lot of light to police killings that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. This includes both showing up in solidarity with black communities and black organizers and also doing that with Asian people who've been killed by police. Probably the most well-known case from that is Yong Xin Huang [2], who is a young Asian person who was murdered by police.

The youth program is now Mekong, another organization, but I think that project had some really big wins, including producing a film about the experiences of Southeast Asian refugees and food insecurity. There were also some big wins from what was then the Lyft Service Coalition, now the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, concerning rights for primarily South Asian taxi workers. Similarly, there was a domestic workers project called Domestic Workers United that became different organizations, but I think the legacy has led to the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

The bigger challenge is trying to balance both CAAAV’s legacy as a political organization that has a left organization legacy instead of current commitment and being a grassroots membership organization. It's a constant work in progress and one that's really generative.

Relatedly, I think funding and sustainability is a constant challenge, both because of the political work that we do and because we have a commitment to making decisions with membership, which means that I actually can't tell you as an individual what our work will be twelve months from now, even for the sake of a grant, because things change when there's an actual weekly monthly decision making process.

Organizer and member burnout is always a challenge. The work is hard. The work is long. That work is exhausting. There are folks who have been at CAAAV for over 15 years and that's a really long time to sustain this kind of work.

Then in general, language access and language justice are always a struggle. Members speak primarily three different languages, Mandarin, Korean and Bangla, but we also have members who speak Cantonese, Fujianese, Taishanese, and so, it's possible to have a meeting happening with five to ten languages flying around the room all at once, and it's really hard to get things done fast when you translate all of that. It creates real roadblocks in having members be part of a coalition and bigger decision-making bodies. I think we often get stuck there, where our main coalition reps are often staff, even though we'd prefer for them to be members, but it is a hard situation to have. It's hard to commit to a weekly coalition call in which there's constant translation struggles, and we do it, we were actually much better at it before this moment (COVID), as it's much easier to do in person than to do over Zoom. This current version created a roadblock that we have not been able to troubleshoot yet. Zoom is hard anyway. Zoom in five languages is a nightmare. I think those are some of the biggest challenges.

Citywide Planning and Climate Change Activities 

I think the most recent fights have been in a long-term fight to rezone the Two Bridges neighborhood, and a very long-term project of the Chinatown Working Group to actually rezone the entire neighborhood. We focused on the Two Bridges piece first because the most imminent threats were those two luxury towers that are no longer being developed, and we hope that remains true. But that's probably the primary way that we've engaged in city planning: trying to create a community plan and then actually get it passed through all of the incredibly tedious and cumbersome mechanisms that exist for city planning and through the city itself. I think also the fight around Amazon in some ways was about city planning, though less directly.

Part of what we were saying in that fight was that communities should get to decide who moves in and out of their neighborhoods and there shouldn't be a massive development dropped into the middle of our existing community without not just community say, but without real decision making from community members.

In the past, I think we've been part of different fights around park space, around waterfront space, and not exactly city planning, but we did a lot of emergency response after Hurricane Sandy, and I think it was very clear that the reason that disaster was so bad was because of the failure of city planning, specifically when it comes to working class neighborhoods of color.

I wasn't around when Sandy happened, but my understanding is that Sandy highlighted the inability of city planning and the city government to actually keep our communities safe. I think we doubled down our commitment to real city-led and city-decided community planning, knowing that if we don't decide, we get left vulnerable to gentrification to natural disasters, to everything else, and there's a limit to how much you can advocate to get considered. You actually have to be able to make decisions.

Visions for the future

We had really clear plans and visions for the future four months ago, and I think we're just not sure what the impact of this pandemic will be, especially in Chinatown. We anticipate that for folks that are in public housing, the fights remain similar.

One vision is fully funded public housing across the entire state. That's a big commitment and fight that we've been in for many years, and that is even more important now in the context of this pandemic because NYCHA isn't being sanitized and that's incredibly dangerous. Tenants have stories of water pouring through their roof every time it rains in the place they're supposed to be safely sheltering in place. You can't really shelter in place in a flooded apartment. So, the things that we always knew we needed and have been saying we needed, it's very clear that the lack of full funding is why NYCHA has become such a death trap in this pandemic, and the vision for a fully funded public housing remains the same.

Similarly, I think in Chinatown, we are still sort of doing an assessment of the neighborhood. I think it will become clearer as things start opening up to see who is able to open up and who is not and how that will impact the neighborhood. We are anticipating and trying to prepare to fight massive land grabs There's a lot of fear that small landlords and small businesses will go under and will get bought out by massive mega developers and corporations, and I think we're still trying to build our forces to be able to fight that with all the challenges of remote organizing.

Our broader vision for the neighborhood is still the Chinatown Working Group plan - that neighborhoods should get to decide their own future and get to do their own planning.

Broadly, our vision is that gentrification stops in New York City and that there is such a powerful, organized, large mass group of both working class Asian immigrants through our base and through other people of color and other communities in the city, that we're actually strong enough to keep our neighborhoods and stop real estate from pushing us out.

Regarding key factors for long term sustainability, one is funding perpetual struggle. Another is the continued political development of our members, which is often really hard to make time for in the midst of so many big fights; that we’re constantly developing ourselves as an organization at all levels to be politically sharp and strategic in order to make sure that we're always fighting the right fights or that if we're not, that we're able to assess that and pivot.

I think another is that at least CAAAV within the neighborhoods we're in we are actually in some ways fighting against gentrification; it is the fight to actually keep our base, that as folks get pushed out it becomes harder to have a mass membership organization in neighborhoods that are being gentrified when that base is getting pushed to all kinds of places and corners of the city or even the state. That's another real challenge, it is gentrification.

We just went through a strategy development process, which was our strategic plan, and the board gave input based on their vantage point and also their connection to other movements. Most of our board, almost all of our board is actually folks who've been involved in other grassroots or other political organizations in the city, either have been or currently are. So, we lean on the board for knowledge and input a lot, but the board is clear that they don't make day to day programming. Decisions of their primary purpose is to actually fundraise and sustain the organization, and because of that, the board is primarily professional, although with maybe one exception, our folks are all Currently or have been connected to grassroots organizing in the city.

Lessons from CAAAV

I think one is the importance of organizing in and with working class communities. That is the kind of baseline for so many of the fights for justice that we're in.  It's really hard to win victories at scale without an organized working-class base.

Another is the struggle of being a clear politically left organization and being committed to that grassroots working class base is worth it, and it is needed and similarly, you won't win at scale without the combination of those things.

I think that our movements are going to need to be multilingual. That feels like a clear lesson, even if it's really hard. And as much as it is a struggle and as much as we do it imperfectly, that it's actually really important to have a commitment to member decision making while holding back their political line, the interplay between those two is really important.

Last lesson, which I think has been true for CAAAV for a long time and became particularly poignant last year, is actually fighting for what we want, not fighting for the compromise. We think we have a grounded assessment of what is possible to win and fight for it. I think especially in the Amazon fight, we got that that happened three weeks after I started, and I had folks tell me, “You just started, are you really trying to lose this hard this early?” Because our demand was that Amazon wouldn't come. Not like getting a good community benefits agreement, not building one building of affordable housing. It was like staying out. One lesson from that fight is that our assessment was that our forces were strong enough to actually win the thing we actually wanted, and that I think if we had asked for less, we would have gotten less and Amazon would be here and we'd have a really pretty community benefits agreement that we've seen a thousand times does not actually help and still causes gentrification and we would be losing ground. So that's another key lesson: have a ground assessment, but actually fight for the biggest win you can possibly have.

Maybe just one last piece that may be less public since we developed a strategy and then the entire world changed. But I think another key lesson has been that it's actually really important to have a strategy to know what you're trying to win, to know what your path is to get there, even if it's just a guess. It doesn't have to be sure but to be very clear about what you're trying to win, to have your best guess as to how you got there and to be willing to reevaluate that all of the time, every three months, six months, to be able to actually to be constantly reassessing that strategy and to not get stuck in campaigns that actually aren't the best bet, to not get stuck in a theory of change that no longer works but to be constantly developing and redeveloping and reassessing strategy.