Transnational dimensions of community empowerment: The victories of Chanrithy Uong and Sam Yoon

This chapter examines the cases and contexts of two history-making electoral victories in metropolitan Boston during the past decade: that of Chanrithy Uong, the first Asian American elected to the Lowll City Council in 1999, and that of Sam Yoon, the first Asian American lected to the Boston City Council in 2005. Both examples are notable, not nly because of their individual achievements, but because of their direct elationships to larger contexts of urban inequality, demographic change, nd coalition building by Asian Americans with other communities of olor and immigrant communities (Bui et al. 2004; Kiang 1994, 1996; Kiang nd Tang 2006). In appreciating these cases as groundbreaking victories within conceptual frames of race-based minority representation and placeased local-community empowerment, we propose an additional frame f analysis focusing on transnational political engagements at both the ommunity level and for the two individuals personally to account for what ei-te Lien (2001a: xiii) describes as "the confluence of a complex dynamic etween internal community structure and external legal, social, political, nd international context." We do not view transnational dynamics as the primary theme in either Uong's or Yoon's overall electoral story, but they are real, relevant, and under-researched.