Flyer for Eating Welfare: Asians and Welfare in New York City
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In 2000, CAAAV’s Youth Leadership Project (YLP) produced a short documentary entitled Eating Welfare: Asians and Welfare in New York City. Created in the wake of the aggressive welfare reform of the 1990s, the film explores the lives of Southeast Asian residents of the Bronx, New York, and the efforts of the community’s youth to document state-enacted abuse and seek justice for their elders.
The titular phrase “eating welfare”—referring to receiving government benefits—is derived from the Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian) language spoken by many of the borough’s residents.[1] Since the 1980’s, refugees of war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia had been living in a secluded immigrant community in the Bronx, surviving largely on public assistance. According to Eric Tang, scholar-activist and previous director of YLP, approximately two-thirds of the residents were receiving a monthly welfare check during the mid-90s.[2]
When Rudolph Giuliani took office as Mayor of New York City in 1994, welfare reform became a major policy priority. The crux of this reform was a strong emphasis on work requirements, namely mandatory workfare jobs via Giuliani’s Work Experience Program (WEP).[3] In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in an effort to drastically reduce Americans’ reliance on welfare. The act essentially served to disparage and deny Americans who had, until now, relied on public assistance.
As documented in Eating Welfare, the enforcement of the work requirement as a condition for receiving cash benefits pushed huge numbers of the Bronx’s Southeast Asian residents into undesirable and low-paying jobs, such as trash pick-up and hard labor. While the immigrant community suffered—with many unable to speak up against workplace abuses due to limited English—the rest of NYC claimed that “the city [was] getting cleaner, the mayor more popular, and the typical resident more satisfied with city services.”[4]
Witnessing demoralizing working conditions and worsening poverty in their community, young Vietnamese- and Cambodian-Americans organized to document and fight unjust welfare policies in action. Members of YLP, depicted on this postcard advertising the documentary project, developed a “Fair Work” campaign to abolish workfare and expose WEP cases as civil rights violations. One tactic of resistance involved YLP organizers attending their parents’ WEP work assignments and filming the working conditions.[5] This footage, which is included in Eating Welfare, serves to contextualize YLP’s resistance efforts and put faces and names on disenfranchised welfare recipients.
Eating Welfare reflects CAAAV’s commitment to helping Asian youth challenge harmful actions enacted by the state against the most vulnerable members of their community. Tang, who became director of YLP in 1996, saw tremendous benefit in organizing and training teenagers to become community organizers—with their “bilingual and bicultural” skills, these politically-engaged youths could “turn their individualized efforts into collective action.”[6] CAAAV’s current Asian Youth in Action initiative continues their efforts to develop the leadership and organizing skills of young people with a vision for social justice.[7]
[1]. Michael Truong, “Welfare reform and liberal governance: disciplining Cambodian-American bodies,” International Journal of Social Welfare 16, no. 3 (July 2007): 262. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2397.2006.00479.x.
[2]. Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 7.
[3]. Demetra Smith Nightingale et al., “Work and Welfare Reform in New York City During the Giuliani Administration: A Study of Program Implementation,” The Urban Institute Labor and Social Policy Center, accessed March 16, 2021, http://webarchive.urban.org/publications/410542.html.
[4]. Judith Havemann, “New York's Workfare Picks Up City and Lifts Mayor's Image,” Washington Post, August 13, 1997, A01, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/welfare/stories/wf081397.htm.
[5]. “Southeast Asian Women and Welfare Rights,” The Voice 10, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 10, https://caaav.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Voice_Fall_2000.pdf.
[6]. Tang, Unsettled, 6.
[7]. “Asian Youth in Action,” CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities, accessed March 16, 2021, https://caaav.org/our-work/programs/aya2017.
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This post was completed as coursework for HIST-GA 3901 Community Archives, taught by Maggie Schreiner, in the Archives and Public History MA program at New York University.
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