Generational Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American Organizational Politics

It may be argued that one compelling issue to arise out of scholarly research on contemporary Asian and Latino immigration concerns the fate of those immigrants and their children who are no longer spatially isolated in traditional urban enclaves. In respect to today’s immigrant communities, there has been an abundance of literature written on adaptation processes within the past couple of decades but a relative scarcity of material that has looked at the political transitions that these communities have been experiencing as new generations of leadership emerge and people begin to rapidly mobilize out of their respective enclaves into suburban communities. The same applies to research on Koreans in America, which has been dominated by studies on immigrant entrepreneurship and to some extent, immigration adaptation processes with little attention to the political and organizational development of Koreatown. Although several works have touched on the structure of business-related associations (Min 1996; Park 1997), contemporary works on the impact of inter-generational relations on community-based organizations and Korean American political structures is still relatively sparse. However, earlier works by Ilsoo Kim (Kim 1981) and Bong Youn Choy (Choy 1979) and more recent studies by 1.5 generation scholars like Edward T. Chang (Chang 1988; Chang 1999) and Edward J.W. Park (Park 1998; Park 1999a) have contributed to our current understandings o