Laotian Daughters: Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice (Asian American History & Cultu)

Laotian Daughters focuses on second-generation environmental justice activists in Richmond, California. Bindi Shah's path-breaking book charts these young women's efforts to improve the degraded conditions in their community and explores the ways their activism and political practices resist the negative stereotypes of race, class, and gender associated with their ethnic group. Using ethnographic observations, interviews, focus groups, and archival data on their participation in Asian Youth Advocates--a youth leadership development project--Shah analyzes the teenagers' mobilization for social rights, cross-race relations, and negotiations of gender and inter-generational relations. She also addresses issues of ethnic youth, immigration, and citizenship and how these shape national identities. Shah ultimately finds that citizenship as a social practice is not just an adult experience and that ethnicity is an ongoing force in the political and social identities of second-generation Laotians.