When pioneering Asian American political scientist Don Nakanishi retired from the University of California–Los Angeles as director of its renowned Asian American Studies Center, he chose to forego the golf course and beach as sites for his golden years. Instead, Don chose to focus his energies across town in East Los Angeles and engage again in community activism—in this case, around the long struggle for the area’s incorporation as a city. Don’s journey demonstrates how community-centered engagement has been a catalyst for several political scientists and others to ground their intellectual inquiries centered on Asian American sites in a commitment to political, economic, and social justice.

In his discussion of the “levels of analysis” issue for students of Asian American politics, Nakanishi characterized the choices as encompassing “micro versus macro political approaches” and made a strong case for the need to “undertake more studies utilizing the community as the unit of analysis” (Nakanishi Reference Nakanishi1985, 2–3).

According to activist scholars Liu, Geron, and Lai (Reference Liu, Geron and Lai2008, xiv), the traditional lack of attention to Asian American communities represents what they call “excluded history”: “…excluded from the consideration of social institutions, as Asian American communities have often been. Except in notable antagonistic episodes, public policy and social sciences typically overlooked their interests, voices, and concerns.”

Some voices of relatively newer Asian American communities have been amplified by political scientists and scholars from related disciplines. For example, an incisive examination of Southeast Asian immigrants, largely from Cambodia, to Lowell, Massachusetts, is in essays in a multidisciplinary volume, Southeast Asian Refugees and Immigrants in the Mill City, edited by political scientists Pho, Gerson, and Cowan (Reference Pho, Gerson and Cowan2007). Politics among Hmong Americans is chronicled in Voting Together: Intergenerational Politics and Civic Engagement among Hmong Americans, a masterful piece of scholarship by Wong (Reference Wong2017), another political scientist deeply rooted in the Asian American movement. The political behavior of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi Americans is ably analyzed by Mishra (Reference Mishra2016) in Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans.

In her examination of the Vietnamese American communities in California’s Orange County and Boston’s Fields Corner neighborhoods, Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America, Aguilar-San Juan (Reference Aguilar-San Juan2009) interrogates—despite the book’s title—the notion of community as a geographically bound place. The very contours of the idea and realities of Asian American communities are primed for deep inquiry. This search for capturing the diverse and complicated dimensions of the Asian American community is especially challenging in a contemporary period marked by transnational forces and expanding intersections confronted by nationalistic and disintegrative responses. Võ and Bonus, editors of and contributors to Contemporary Asian American Communities: Intersections and Divergences, explore the very meaning of community as applied to understand the myriad sites of Asian American engagement. As Võ and Bonus (Reference Võ and Bonus2002, 18–19) observed:

The challenge, therefore, for those wanting to commence or return as Nakanishi did to capture the political realities and visions of Asian American communities will find the spaces for exploration to be volatile, non-static, and at times confusing because of the need to juggle sites of inquiry that must encompass broader intersections of characteristics, time, and space. Furthermore, for the political scientist who is Asian American, this search for community likely is undertaken with at least some trepidation. However, for many, the lure is irresistible, and the insights gained about one’s community(ies) are an important part of one’s eternal journey of self-discovery.