All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism and the Third World Liberation Front Strike: An Intergenerational Activist Dialogue

All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism and the Third World Liberation Front Strike: An Intergenerational Activist Dialogue

On the fifth-year anniversary of the emergence of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) as a degree-granting program at UC Santa Cruz, CRES—in conjunction with campus student activists and organizers from Pilipinx Historical Dialogue, AAPIRC, Anakbayan, and the CRES undergrad collective—commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) Strike at SF State and UC Berkeley that inaugurated ethnic studies on the national stage. As a democratizing strike against the Cold War corporate university, the Third World Liberation movement imagined education in transfigurative ways that both shaped the project of ethnic studies but also exceeded the latter’s institutional realization.

Our two-part event, “All Power to the People! Asian American Radicalism and the Third World Liberation Front Strike: An Intergenerational Activist Dialogue,” features three Asian American activists who were vital to the TWLF struggle, Vicci Wong, Bruce Occena, and Emil de Guzman. Both events are open to the public.

The first event, scheduled for Thursday evening, 2/21, will take the form of an intergenerational dialog between TWLF veterans and campus- and community-based youth organizers and activists today. The conversation will touch on the anti-imperialist vision of ethnic studies during a time of U.S. war in Viet Nam, the manifold legacies of the TWLF struggle, the activist biographies of the invited veterans, the policing of radical social movements, and the possibilities for solidarity then and now.
The second even, scheduled for Friday morning, 2/22, will be smaller in scale and will center on discussion of a set of shared and precirculated materials (films, video clips, historical documents, essays, interviews, articles) suggested by the speakers.