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(powerful music) - Welcome to "Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders: A Philadelphia Story."

I'm your host, Rob Buscher.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a demographic that encompasses over 40 unique countries and cultures of origin, everything east of Istanbul and west of California.

As a mixed-race Japanese American, I grew up learning about the history of my community through the stories of our Elders.

Unfortunately, because this history is missing from most school curriculums, I knew very little about other AAPI communities until I became an ethnic studies scholar.

In this series, we will share the local history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through conversation with some of Philadelphia's most prominent Asian American community members.

Together, we will explore the unique experiences of being AAPI in Philadelphia.

On today's episode, we're discussing AAPI involvement in local politics and civic engagement.

Our conversation will include the historic barriers that Asian Americans have faced in becoming politically active and contemporary challenges the community still experiences.

I'm joined by panelists Philadelphia councilmember at-large Helen Gym, Pennsylvania state senator Nikil Saval, and Dr. Nina Ahmad, former deputy mayor for public engagement in the city of Philadelphia.

Welcome, all of you.

Councilmember Gym, I'd like to start off with a question to you.

Can you talk a little bit about your background as an organizer and how you got into politics?

- Sure, thank you so much, Rob, and it's a pleasure to join everybody today.

I have been, you know, my background is in community organizing.

I spent 20 years as an organizer, particularly in Philadelphia's immigrant Asian American and public education communities.

I started my career fighting mayors and developers that would take Chinatown land for publicly funded boondoggles, like stadiums and casinos.

We fought for strong public schools, affordable housing, for a holistic vision of public safety, and to support small businesses.

We took on the issue of internal supports, you know, what it meant in a world in which so many Asian Americans have to fight for a place called home to establish a vibrant and very affirmative space for Chinatown, for Cambodian communities, whether they be in Olney or South Philadelphia.

And we took on the, you know, took on hate, particularly anti-Asian hatred that exhibited itself through institutions, such as when there was neglect of a murder of a Cambodian man back in 1985 named Heng Lim or whether we were taking on a federal civil rights case against a school district that ignored violence and harassment and hatred against recently immigrated Asian American students.

What I know is is that in all of these spaces, I was led by a vibrant, active, and engaged Asian American community here in Philadelphia.

Many of them were women, women who are active, raising their families, learning how to galvanize both themselves personally and professionally but also collectively across the divisions of race, ethnicity, and especially language that divide so many AAPI communities and formed a really incredible vibrant group.

And it turns out that those issues that we were talking about, strong public schools, the right to walk through these streets without feeling fear, the right to institutions, to our language, to our culture are actually very, very deeply political.

It was largely because of my roots in those communities and the work that we had done that really propelled me into city council largely around a major issue that I'm sure we'll talk about later, which is around the quality of schools here in the city of Philadelphia.

But in 2015, before the progressive, quote, unquote, wave swept through our own city and across the nation, I hope that what people know is that a small, vibrant group of Asian Americans really propelled folks like myself, my colleague, Nina Ahmad, who has been such an incredible leader in visibility in women for, in women in politics and AAPIs in politics and particularly laid the path for which was ultimately a run for the at-large seat in city council, and we've kept going since then.

- Thank you very much, Councilmember.

We'll return to you shortly.

My next question is for Dr. Ahmad.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and career before politics?

And as a first-generation immigrant, what made you decide to get involved in civil service?

- It's been a journey.

As you know, I'm a scientist.

I have a PhD in chemistry and then worked in molecular genetics at Wills Eye Hospital.

And as a scientist, and I'm still a scientist forever, is I'm really interested in mechanisms, or why things are the way they are.

And, you know, I come from a small country called Bangladesh, having lived through its war of independence, and I saw the mechanism that operated of a movement building that allowed that to happen at a great cost.

And when I came here as a scientist, I was working on specific projects, and I was very lucky to be someone who identified the first mutation in a particular disease that impacted a group of people.

And I saw what that information did to galvanize them into action, not just the scientific piece, but what it did to the patients and their families having access to information.

And when I looked around myself and I saw the great disparities in Philadelphia, Bangladesh is very poor, and when I came here as an immigrant, you hear, you know, this is the land of milk and roses, and everything is wonderful, and that was so not the case in many parts of Philadelphia.

And that disparity really drove me to think what it is that is holding people back from living their full lives and what are the things we need to change in our structure to allow that prosperity to happen.

And so that's what moved to public service.

And as a, you know, I come from a family where public service has always been, had a special place.

My mother actually is a social, was a social worker who turned into a teacher, and she was a principal of a small school, and my father was a public servant in government.

And so, but they all had lives outside of their work as well.

So I was imbued by that.

I still have family in Bangladesh who are very involved in grassroots organizing.

So I came with that kind of a lens, matched it to my scientific inquiry and desire-to-know mechanism, and that's what led me to public service.

- Thank you, Dr. Ahmad.

That's a very fascinating entry point into politics, and I'm sure we'll be talking more about that afterwards, but I'd like to bring Senator Saval into the conversation now.

Senator, can you talk a little bit about your background in grassroots organizing and how that ultimately led you to become a ward leader before you held your current office?

- Sure, thank you so much.

And likewise, it's a pleasure to be here and to listen to stories of colleagues and friends who have really blazed a path for so many of us.

So for me, you know, a lot of my work in organizing started in the labor movement.

My day job has been for many years as a journalist and magazine editor, but I sort of have always kept two sets of books.

One is that job, and the second is just doing local organizing, community and labor organizing.

In particular, I was a volunteer, a very much full-time volunteer with UNITE HERE, which is hospitality workers union.

They represent workers in hotels, in stadiums, airports, and here in Philadelphia, they also represent cafeteria workers and student climate staff in the school district.

And both in San Francisco when I was in graduate school and here in Philadelphia starting about 10 years ago, I did work with the union, and I think the union in particular, you know, I wanted to learn to organize.

Fundamentally, I just, I had wanted to organize a union at a workplace I was in several years ago, had no idea how to do it, reached out to the union to become a volunteer, and learned the craft, as it were, of organizing.

And that made it possible to confront established powers, wealthy developers, just people that I would have otherwise been afraid of, I think, frankly, prior to that point.

But also it brought me into contact with a broad diverse movement in what is fundamentally the new working-class or new labor movement in this country of service sector workers, Black, immigrant, Asian, Latinx.

I mean, it just was this extraordinary, extraordinarily diverse movement that also, I had never seen people that looked like me or had backgrounds like mine that had power in a city, and UNITE HERE brought me into contact with that.

So that's where I started.

I think that, you know, that experience led me to demand more from elected officials, from people I knew.

I remember actually when Councilmember Gym ran in 2015.

I had known about her work from the work that I was doing through UNITE HERE in the school district.

She was the only person I voted for on that ballot in 2015 because I knew, I was like, "Oh, this is a candidate who comes from social movements.

This is something I understand."

And it was the first time I think that I realized that someone could come from social movements and to make change within the Democratic Party or within established structures.

So, you know, the Democratic Party in Philadelphia is constituted by these local, you know, two or three blocks called divisions.

Those divisions are represented by committee people.

I thought that I had a, was connected with a group of activists who were already doing the work of getting out the vote and connecting people to broader political movements.

We should institutionalize ourselves and transform the party that way.

So I organized a group of people to run for committee person, about 40 people.

We transformed our local Democratic Party organization, the Second Ward, where I live here in Philadelphia, and immediately boosted turnout.

We were nowhere on the map before, and we became the fifth-highest-turnout ward in the city.

We supported the most progressive slate of candidates for elected office for city council in 2019, including Councilmember Gym for her reelection.

And, you know, I think that we've been able to demand more from our elected officials.

And so like that's, that was a transformative experience, and I think we've made some waves within the Democratic Party.

- Thank you, Senator, and it's really exciting to see how people power plays a role in so many of these conversations around what is happening politically for the Asian American community.

This next question is for all panelists, and I'd like to think a little bit about over the past few election cycles in Pennsylvania, it seems like this is the first moment when the Asian American communities have really been perceived as a force to be reckoned with.

And I'm wondering if you could comment why that is, and perhaps what some of the historical barriers to participation in the political system has been for our communities.

Why don't we start with you Councilmember Gym?

- So I do think that visibility has had a huge issue to play with this.

I think you're seeing additionally the maturing of generations of individuals who have benefited, not just purely from like, you know, the traditional trappings of what might be establishment politics, which might be wealth or education, income or money, but actually some maturation of the diversity of the Asian American experience.

Senator Saval talked about labor movements.

I come out of social movements and grassroots community organizing that protected places like Philadelphia Chinatown or did public educational organizing.

I think those movements are also more vibrant than we've ever seen, and at a time when the nation feels fraught politically, one of the things that I hope that our AAPI communities feel and find some comfort and strengthen in is that the temperature and the appetite from younger AAPIs, from our youth, from our own children has shown that there's unlimited potential around the efforts of Asian Americans to play a visible and powerful role in the shaping of this nation, whether it's through politics, whether it's through social movements, whether it's through, you know, science, experiments, you know, discoveries, but there's no question that visibility has mattered.

And most importantly, I think the vibrancy of collective social movements, organizations, and institutions that support and engage and diversify within the AAPI communities is having a large-scale impact.

- Thank you, Councilmember.

Dr. Ahmad, would you like to add to that response?

- Yes, so, you know, Helen, Councilmember Gym and Nikil Saval, our state senator, are perfect examples of how the AAPI community has arrived, to some extent.

We have a long ways to still go, but part of it is the population explosion of the AAPI across the nation.

So that's fueling, we are getting new voters who are, you know, are going to hold people accountable.

So when you have a voting bloc that identifies as AAPI, you start paying attention to it.

And so that's happening across the nation.

Philadelphia itself, our population growth is due to our Asian immigrants and our Latinx immigrants, right?

So we, that's data, we know that to be a fact.

So politicians start paying attention when they see who their, what their voters look like and where they're coming from.

As you might know that I ran for statewide office as opposed to, you know, more localized offices that Helen and Nikil have ran for.

And that showed me while I didn't win in the general, I won in the primary, which was against a very established candidate who had support in the traditional politicians in Philadelphia, my hometown, where I've lived over 35 years.

And I won, and I won because of relationship-building that happened, trust-building that happened over those 35-some years that I've been here as opposed to party leaders saying, "We're gonna go with this one," right?

So in the general, I was outspent 2.5 times.

That's a lot of money.

We have to do better.

We have to reach people.

We have to get people mobilized.

And it doesn't happen just by putting an ad or, you know, you have to do what these two have done, knocking doors, talking to people, building wards.

We can do it.

We have arrived, I think, and we're gonna go places, and just as you saw with Michelle Wu and all these other elections in New York.

So we have come quite a ways, and we still have to keep building.

- Thank you, Dr. Ahmad.

Senator Saval, would you like to briefly add anything to that answer?

- I mean, I think Dr. Ahmad is completely on point.

In terms of the obstacles that Dr. Ahmad was talking about, quite rightly, I think that, you know, that we do, we do fundamentally have a turnout problem, which is actually not just a problem in terms of people being unwilling to vote or it's a problem of, you know, of exclusion fundamentally, that a lot of people are excluded from the political process, in part, for example, due to language access.

That's one part of it.

One thing that we're pursuing, we have legislation that we're working on in our office to expand language access for voting materials.

I mean, there's a federal threshold under which you are supposed to provide voting materials or election materials into minority communities in their own languages.

We wanna lower that threshold, make it more accessible, you know, whether it's 7,500 people or 3%, whichever is lower, so that more and more people are actually brought into the political process, at least formally, you know.

In addition, of course, I completely agree with what Dr. Ahmad and Councilmember Gym have said about the sheer organizing that needs to happen, but those two things are complementary.

I mean that we organize, we win elected office, then we have people who understand what it means to have English as a second language or not have access to those materials, to be divided by language.

You know, those are things that I think all of us to some degree have understood and experienced in our own communities.

And so, you know, there's much more to be done to limit that level of exclusion, quite intense, and people, frankly, just don't see themselves for any number of reasons, but a lot of them resolvable frankly, or like attackable due to the way the political process is structured against them.

- Thank you, Senator, and that actually segues nicely into my next question for Dr. Ahmad.

As the former deputy mayor of public engagement, one of your roles was overseeing advisory boards and commissions, among them the mayor's advisory board on Asian American affairs.

Can you talk a little bit about the role of commissions and how they can effectively advocate for our communities?

- Absolutely, you know, I just want to step back and say the office of public engagement didn't exist before Mayor Kenney.

We actually, he appointed me to start that office, and under that office, we brought in how we connect with community, and the goal of that office was to have our communities be at the table when policies were made about them.

So Nothing About Us Without Us was the operating principle in that office.

You know, I don't know that we, they have been able to stay as loyal to that original thought of creating the office, but nonetheless, it's there, and the use of these commissions was to reach community.

I actually used to chair the mayor's Commission on Asian American Affairs before I became deputy mayor, and I also served on President Obama's Commission for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

So I brought, I saw what the power of those places could be and how we could harness that in order to really end these disparities that different communities felt because of their ethnicity or for whatever reason, how we could break those barriers, using them to come to government through that conduit.

So that's really the frame of what this was.

And, you know, using the mayor's commission, one of the things that I remember very clearly once I was deputy mayor was the sanctuary city movement that Philadelphia was involved in and being involved in the top-line messaging around that and how we got our communities to come in and really understand what that meant, you know, what was ending some agreements with the federal government meant, what was legal, what was not, and the Cambodian community particularly was very disproportionately impacted by some of the laws that exist even today in the United States.

And so I had been working with them and bringing all that.

And while in the White House, you know, serving on the White House commission, we had brought that up as well with the administration at the sort of the tail end of things.

And we continued with that, and I was very proud to be part of that conversation of creating top-line messaging for this issue of sanctuary city policy.

And again, using the Asian American community, a lot of people didn't see the role of Asian Americans in that space.

They thought it was just, you know, like next community that was involved in that.

And I think we helped change that perspective and said that there was a lot of Asian American Pacific Islanders who were impacted by that policy as well.

- Thank you very much, Dr. Ahmad.

I'd like to turn to Councilmember Gym.

As the first Asian American woman elected to the city council, can you talk a little bit about how you've been able to advocate for the Asian American community and what that means in terms of being an at-large council member?

- Sure, you know, first of all, I just wanna say again how much it means to have the three of us on here with you, Rob, as well.

But I wouldn't be here if it weren't for trailblazers like Nina Ahmad, you know, going out there, ascending to different commissions and then pulling other especially women along with her and paying close attention to that.

And I think Nikil, Senator Saval's, I mean, we're all on a first-name basis in part because we're very close and have deep admiration and support for one another, but also Nikil's work continuing on, deepening it, and evolving it.

You know, I think what you're seeing on this panel is an evolution of an Asian American political sensibility and different ways in which people have found their place in the times that they've had been able to do it and hopefully in doing so, we bring each other all in.

So I just wanna start by saying that.

You know, a lot of my work comes out of, you know, there is a world in which people can kind of sit on places and just be a different face in the same kind of environment that executes on situations that can cause harm, perpetuate the status quo, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, I've always felt very strongly that our presence in these spaces should fundamentally transform them, rooted in experiences that we've had as Asian Americans, understanding how harmful it is to exclude individuals, what happens when we aren't language accessible, when we're not cognizant of the diversity of the AAPI experience and recognizing that there are hundreds of different dialects, dozens of different ethnicities which may occur even within one nation and that class, immigration status, language status, and education as well as our experiences within the system deeply impact our experience with this nation and that all of those things can live together and reflect an Asian American experience, just not the same monolithic one.

So for me, one of the things that's been incredibly important is to ensure that there is a critical Asian American voice that is present at all of the work that we do.

You know, I've been proud to have Asian American representation on my staff, you know, certainly with our partners, with political elected officials who try to really think through and ensure that we're creating a space and voice for Asian American leadership for visioning, for policy-making, as well as just for being present at the table.

- Thank you, Councilmember.

And our final question goes to Senator Saval.

Similarly to Councilmember Gym, you are a pioneer within the state assembly, and as the only currently elected South Asian American state senator, can you maybe comment on the role and the position that you have in advocating for Asian American communities?

- You know, I do wanna acknowledge, first of all, that, just as an Asian American, there are people who have done incredible work before me, including my current colleague, Representative Patty Kim, the Senator John Pippy, who I think was the first Asian American in the Pennsylvania Senate.

Obviously I think there should be more.

We should have more elected representatives, but I wanna acknowledge that their work in enlarging a space for all of us.

You know, the first, the thing I've started to realize about our work is that we won in the First Senate District.

We represent just one of the most diverse districts in the entire state.

In particular, in South Philadelphia, Chinatown, we have a renowned ESL program in some of our high schools like South Philadelphia High.

You know, just there is an existing network and just fierce culture of organizing out of which, you know, which Dr. Ahmad and Councilmember Gym are a deep part of.

And so that's one thing that buoys my role in the Senate.

It makes it, it means that we have movements that we're connected to that give us license to do the kinds of things that we can do in Harrisburg.

So for example, there was the coup in Burma or in Myanmar, and we have a very large proportion of refugees and immigrants from various language communities in Southeast Asia from Burma.

And so I attended rallies, you know, protesting the coup but also just wanted to stay and just bring that grief again into the assembly.

People should recognize that your neighbors, people you know are also dealing with family members and the inability to communicate with those family members in some instances because of what's happening abroad.

And that's, you know, I think essentially that as Asian Americans, we're Americans, of course, but we are also in many instances connected to a global community.

We are, we have an understanding of what it, what our country does abroad, what our country, you know, what is happening in, and how our neighbors are affected by incidents and, you know, violence abroad.

So that's also been something that we've been trying to bring into the assembly so that people don't just, people recognize that our state has a diverse origin, you know, and it has, and it is connected to so many different things happening around the world.

- Absolutely, well, thank you, Senator, and thank you to all of our panelists.

That's all the time that we have for today's program, but we look forward to continuing the conversation online with viewers at home.

Thanks again for joining us.

I hope this discussion has been engaging and informative.

You can join the conversation, too.

Just email us at TalkBack@WHYY.org.

For WHYY, I'm Rob Buscher, thank you.

(powerful music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by.