A film by Renee Tajima-Peņa, the Oscar nominated director of Who Killed Vincent Chin (1989). Peņa also wrote and directed the Sundance Film Festival Winner, My America: Honk If You Love Buddha.
The 35-minute documentary is a portrait of three immigrant daughters who are part of a new generation transforming the American labor movement.
Quynh Nguyen is a trilingual organizer who moves easily between Vietnamese, Spanish, and English as she mobilizes meatpackers in their demands for a union contract.
Sri Lankan American Karla Zombro confronts the challenge of being a lead organizer as well as openly gay within the Respect at LAX Living Wage campaign for airport workers fighting for a contract with the Argenbright company.
Jun Chong is a Korean American activist with a labor-community coalition in South Central Los Angeles. She represents the most marginalized of workers - welfare recipients who are being forced into workfare programs.
Nguyen, Zombro, and Chong are nothing like the albeit rare enough images of young Asian American women you would usually see in the media, whether the submissive lotus blossom of the past or the young dot-commer "model minority" of today. They are passionate advocates for social change, and theirs is the story of the American labor movement as it is becoming in the 21st century. |
