Building Power from Historic Ground: Lessons from Our LA Retreat

 

We gathered in Los Angeles for our first in-person team retreat under the leadership of AAPIP’s new President & CEO, Connie Chung Joe. We held part of our workplan sessions at the Japanese American National Museum, in the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. The building we met in served as an assembly point in 1942, where Japanese American families were ordered to report before being sent to concentration camps. We also met in the Pico House and learned about the Chinese American Museum, housed in the historic Garnier Building, the lone survivor of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown. As we mapped our priorities over the next year across these spaces, their histories shaped our conversations about what it means to build lasting institutions for AANHPI communities.

Our staff retreat took us through spaces that embody this tension. At the Chinese American Museum, we learned how this lone survivor of Los Angeles’s original Chinatown stands as testament to what communities can preserve when they refuse to disappear. The building escaped demolition in the 1930s when the rest of Chinatown was razed to make way for Union Station, an act of municipal violence that displaced an entire community. Executive Director Michael Truong reminded us of an even earlier erasure: the 1871 massacre in Chinatown, when a white mob killed 19 Chinese residents in what remains one of the largest lynchings in American history and an early example of anti-Asian hate.

The thread connects across time: massacre, forced displacement, and today’s invisible deportations of AANHPI community members who attend immigration hearings and simply never return home. Each generation faces its own version of the same question: How do we build institutions strong enough to survive the storms?

The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) offers one answer. James E. Herr, director of the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy (Democracy Center), shared the story of the founding of the museum and sees it as a testament to the importance of communities building political and social influence. The Democracy Center is named for the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye and the Democracy Plaza at the center of the JANM campus is named for the late Secretary Norman Y. Mineta. These two leaders were instrumental in the fight for reparations that came decades after WWII, helping to galvanize community organizing and strategic coalition-building.

But even institutions built to preserve memory remain vulnerable. Just a month before our retreat, this vulnerability played out in stark terms at JANM itself. During Governor Gavin Newsom’s press conference, 75 armed federal agents from ICE and CBP swarmed the plaza outside the Democracy Forum and detained an immigrant truck driver who happened to be delivering strawberries to a nearby restaurant. The museum’s leadership called it “a deliberate act of provocation and intimidation” on the very ground where Japanese Americans had been forced to board buses to concentration camps. The historical echoes were unmistakable, armed agents of the state, operating in the name of law and order, targeting communities of color.

The intimidation extends beyond symbolic gestures. JANM recently lost $1.7 million in federal funding, with another $5 million in jeopardy, after the Trump administration deemed their educational programs misaligned with current policy goals. The museum refused to scrub its content or soften its mission, a stance made possible by the diverse funding base their community had built over decades.

This is the lesson both museums teach: institutional memory requires institutional resources. The Chinese American Museum exists because the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California spent two decades building coalitions with city officials, state agencies, and community members. JANM opened because Japanese American veterans and business leaders joined forces in 1982, leveraging everything from state senate appropriations to individual family donations. Neither museum emerged from good intentions alone, they required sustained investment in AANHPI communities.

As we developed our team agreements and mapped our priorities during the retreat, the parallels became clear. AAPIP’s work of moving resources to AANHPI communities and inspiring action exists in this same tradition of community-driven institution building. We are part of a continuum that includes the families who donated artifacts to fill museum cases, the legislators who secured appropriations despite political risk, and the community members who organized portable exhibits in libraries and malls before permanent spaces existed.

The retreat itself embodied this tradition of strategic institution-building. Staff presented individual work plans, and we mapped both our organizational priorities for the year and our long-term vision. Through these sessions, we expressed a renewed commitment to our mission and the work ahead, advocating for more philanthropic resources and support for AANHPI communities.

The current moment demands this historical perspective. While attention focuses on high-profile targeted raids in the name of immigration enforcement, the majority of AANHPI deportations continue in the shadows. The pattern of invisibility that allowed the 1871 massacre to be forgotten, that made possible the wholesale displacement of Chinatown, that permitted the detention of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, persists in our failure to track and respond to current removals of AANHPI community members.

Funding AANHPI organizations means funding the infrastructure of resistance to this erasure. When institutions like JANM lose federal support for refusing to abandon their missions, community-based funders become the backbone that allows them to maintain integrity. When AAPIP works to move resources to grassroots organizations, we strengthen the ecosystem that can respond to crises and preserve memory across generations.

The museums we visited exist because communities understood that survival requires strategy, that preservation demands resources, and that resistance needs institutions. As we implement the priorities we set during our retreat, surrounded by the ghosts of assembly points and the echoes of forced displacement, we carry forward this understanding. The work of building power for AANHPI communities has always happened in the space between memory and possibility, funded by those who understand that investing in our institutions means investing in our capacity to resist erasure and build power.