Solidarity
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Sewing with Intent
chrISSy yee Lau
Five days after police suffocated George Floyd on the streets of Min-neapolis in broad daylight, Auntie Sewing Squad headquarters (hQ) declared that May 30, 2020, was the Auntie Sewing Squad Day of Solidarity with the Black community and the Black Lives Matter move-ment. Although the group was founded by Asian American and Pacific Islander women, it grew to include Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). hQ recognized the urgency for non-Black members to stand in solidarity with the Black community and support the Black Aunties in the Squad. hQ asked non-Black Aunties to “sew with intent” for Black communities affected by state-sponsored violence, or to par-ticipate in antiracist work, and reminded Aunties the communities for whom they were sewing have long been harmed by structural violence and racism. Aunties shared readings, videos, and podcasts about ways to support Black communities. And hQ reminded Aunties that if they decided to participate in protests, they must wear masks.
The Squad’s call for “sewing with intent” was a continuation of the effort to build solidarity between Asian Americans and other BIPOC communities. Since the 1960s, Asian Americans have been mytholo-gized in popular US culture as the “model minority”—law-abiding, self-sufficient, and not Black—in order to erode the civil rights demands of Black activists and absolve the US government from responsibility for addressing institutional racism against African Amer-icans.1 Some Asian American leaders, after years of exclusion laws, segregation, and incarceration, endorsed this portrayal in order to acquire resources long denied them. Still, in 1968, a new generation of Asian American student activists rejected the model-minority stereo-
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type and provided a different model. At San Francisco State University, they stood for six months alongside Black, Latinx, and Indigenous stu-dents as part of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) to demand a redefinition of education. They called on the administration to estab-lish a school of ethnic studies and an admissions process that equitably enrolled more students of color. The Auntie Sewing Squad inherits its understanding of solidarity from the TWLF student strike and is a ben-eficiary of the establishment of ethnic studies.
The Auntie Sewing Squad also draws lessons from women writers of color who offered critiques of the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. To “sew with intent” builds on what the Black writer and feminist bell hooks once called doing “the dirty work” of solidarity: embracing the struggle and confrontation necessary to build political awareness.2 When women of color criticized white feminists for unad-dressed racism, white feminists responded by excusing racist policies or actions because they were well-meaning. For non-Black members of the Auntie Sewing Squad, sewing with intent meant examining their own complicity and their positioning in a racially stratified society that devalued Black lives. By understanding how the disenfranchise-ment of BIPOC communities in the United States led to the dispropor-tionate negative impact of COvID-19 on those communities, Aunties could resituate pandemic mask making—what some other sewing cir-cles considered an act of charity—as an expression of solidarity. By doing the “dirty work” of addressing racism, the Auntie Sewing Squad acknowledges its debt to earlier social movements and writers and cen-ters solidarity as its basis for Asian American feminist mutual aid.
The Squad’s approach to mask making reminds us that solidarity is an ethic passed down from generations of BIPOC critique and orga-nizing. The Super Aunties of the Squad redirected their professional research and outreach skills to establish contacts in vulnerable commu-nities and get masks to the places where they were most needed. Sew-ing and Caring Aunties, like me, joined the Squad and embraced our sewing skills because we had also made a commitment to serve BIPOC
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communities through our own education, or developed a commitment as a result of participation in the Auntie Sewing Squad.
This essay combines oral histories, archival sources, and personal reflection to record the solidarity praxis of the Auntie Sewing Squad. Solidarity is hard work. Solidarity demands that organizers care-fully listen to and coordinate with those most vulnerable. Solidarity leads to intentional collaboration with community-led organizations already doing the work on the ground. Solidarity requires people and institutions to commit to self-education, reflection, and political reckoning. It reframes mutual aid as “solidarity, not charity”: a distri-bution of resources in recognition of systematic injustice. Along the way, the Auntie Sewing Squad did its best to show up for all BIPOC communities.
lisTening To indigenous communiTiesIn mid-April 2020, members of the Auntie Sewing Squad had been sewing masks mostly for healthcare workers in nearby hospitals, friends, and family members, but they shifted focus in order to meet the needs of the BIPOC communities hit hardest by COvID-19. Indig-enous communities were especially badly affected because the fed-eral government withheld congressionally allocated relief for several months. Congress had set aside $8 billion for tribes when it passed the CAReS Act in late March. By late May, Indigenous communities had received only about half this amount. In mid-June, a federal judge had to force the Treasury to disburse the final half of the federal relief to the tribal lands.
The delay in pandemic relief was part of a long history of obfusca-tion and incompetence by the Treasury in working with tribes. Both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian health Service were cre-ated as a result of treaties between Indigenous populations and the US government, by which tribes gave up land in exchange for the promise of social services, including housing, education, and healthcare. Indig-enous communities are the only people in the United States with the
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legal right to health services.3 however, such services have been chron-ically underfunded. The most recent delays in providing relief caused irreparable damage. By May, the navajo nation had more confirmed COvID-19 cases per capita than any state, with over three thousand cases and at least one hundred deaths. The spread of COvID-19 partic-ularly affected women, who were the main caregivers for the sick. For instance, valentina Blackhorse, a twenty-eight-year-old mother who dreamed of leading her people as the future president of the navajo nation, died while caring for her boyfriend, who had COvID-19.
Cognizant of this history, the Auntie Sewing Squad worked with Indigenous organizers at the grassroots level. Constance Parng, the Super Auntie in charge of Indigenous mask campaigns, partnered with the Bear Soldier COvID-19 response team, formed by members of a volunteer fire department on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, to provide personal protective equipment (PPe) to Indigenous communities. Although not a mask maker herself, Parng had years of experience working in nonprofit organizations. At a time when PPe was severely limited, she was able to secure donations of hand sanitizer as well as 3D-printed masks. While Parng gathered supplies, the Bear Soldier team made plans to distribute food and masks to Indigenous communities.
Parng’s grassroots approach had begun years earlier, when she par-ticipated in the Teach for America program on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. She saw firsthand how badly reservations were under-resourced. The protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2016 were another turning point for Parng. Activ-ists at the Standing Rock Reservation protested the construction of the oil pipeline that threatened to contaminate their water supply. They also argued that the pipeline, funded by private developers, risked destroying Indigenous cultural landmarks and ignored consultation on its environmental impact. As Parng put it, “It was difficult to witness the blatant disregard for Indigenous rights, treaties, and the environ-ment.”4 Asian American writers and activists called for solidarity with
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the #noDAPL movement through petitions, divesting from private companies that funded the pipeline, and sending much-needed sup-plies to Standing Rock.
Parng’s experience with #noDAPL shaped the Auntie Sewing Squad’s mutual-aid efforts. Because the threat of COvID-19 exacer-bated the serious shortage of medical care and supplies on native lands, Parng led the first coordinated mask drive with the Auntie Sew-ing Squad for Indigenous COvID-19 patients. She identified the gaps between charitable donations and hospital policies. Like many other hospitals, the Gallup Indian Medical Center in new Mexico lacked the capacity to care for the influx of new patients, who instead stayed at nearby motels. Donors and sewing groups sent some PPe directly to the Gallup Indian Medical Center, but the medical center’s policies did not allow the PPe to leave the hospital. The Auntie Sewing Squad was able to send 189 cloth masks with minimal efficiency reporting value (MeRv)-rated filters, as well as five hundred surgical masks, to the patients in motels.
In mid-May, Parng launched a campaign to source and send five thousand masks to a network of Indigenous COvID-19 testing sites. The campaign rallied at least fifty members, including me, to pledge to make masks. Until then, I had hand-sewn masks from fabric scraps for friends and colleagues. I had joined the Auntie Sewing Squad to find camaraderie with a collective of mask makers when the prevailing offi-cial attitude was that wearing a mask was not proved to be effective. I wrestled with the question of purchasing a sewing machine, restrained by my immigrant, working-class frugality and many years of living on a graduate student budget or holding precarious short-term lec-turer positions. My indecision led to missed opportunities, since sew-ing machines were selling out online. But when Parng posted the call for masks for Indigenous communities, and my now-steady income as a tenure-track faculty member signaled my entrance into the middle class, I purchased a sewing machine from a colleague.
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Asian American solidarity with Indigenous organizers can be traced back to the 1960s Indigenous occupation of the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, long used as a prison. A group called Indians of All Tribes organized an eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz, during which they offered to buy the island back for the exact amount that white settlers had paid three hundred years earlier: twenty-four dol-lars, glass beads, and red cloth. Activists set up a school, organized an
Jonathan Edwards (Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo) and Constance Parng coordinating supplies for Standing Rock. Photo by Melinda Creps.
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election council, and aimed to build a nation. To support the occupa-tion, a delegation of Asian American activists from Los Angeles trav-eled to Alcatraz to deliver food and medical supplies. They drew from Indigenous political ideologies and acknowledged their shared but dis-tinct relations to white supremacy, which shaped their own protests during the Asian American Movement.5
Asian displacement and migration, which resulted from US impe-rialism and military expansion abroad, occurred in conjunction with white settler colonialism and native dispossession. I live and work on land taken from Ohlone tribes that was made into a military base during WWI and is now a state university. What is my responsibility for addressing Indigenous land dispossession and erasure? Some of my colleagues have added a land acknowledgment statement to their syl-labi in order to disrupt Indigenous erasure. Others have criticized this gesture as performative. I see the practice of mutual aid as offering a redistribution of resources that recognizes the interlocking history of Indigenous land dispossession and non-Indigenous land acquisition. To put it into practice, I watched sewing machine tutorial videos and, using fabric donated by a colleague, completed my pledge of sewing twenty-five masks for the campaign for Indigenous communities.
When sewing these masks, Aunties were instructed to avoid fab-ric prints and colors incorporating or evoking cultural appropriation or colonialism, such as tribal headdress prints. These instructions sparked conversations about what was considered cultural appropriation. Unsure of whether to use fabric donated from Disney, Jennifer Lynn Brown, a costume designer, posted a question to the Squad on whether the “Totem” fabric might offend Indigenous recipients. Aunties chimed in with their suggestions: Could she ask Indigenous commu-nities directly? If unsure about the fabric, could she save the fabric for non-Indigenous mask campaigns? Brown mentioned that Disney had used the fabric for African-themed costumes and sets. Was the fabric culturally insensitive to the navajo nation? Was the fabric politically insensitive? There were more questions than answers we could agree
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on. But one thing was clear: considering fabric choices for Indigenous communities was about observing community dignity and respect.
Listening to the instructions from Indigenous organizers, however, was altogether different from heeding special requests that some Aun-ties had begun to receive from families, friends, and strangers. Some friends—and strangers—began to ask for masks in a preferred style, or with some form of tailoring, which took time and effort to sup-ply. Some of these personalized mask requests seemed to treat mem-bers of the Auntie Sewing Squad as if we were personal seamstresses or customer service staff. Once, when a friend jokingly inquired if Wong might tailor a mask to go with a wedding gown, Wong responded, “BITCh I DO nOT DO CUSTOM WORK. I STOP GenOCIDeS.” The Aun-tie Sewing Squad did not set out to be anyone’s personalized etsy shop.
The same consideration of dignity and respect applied to the deliv-ery of supplies by van to the navajo nation. The Auntie Sewing Squad believed in supplying the equipment necessary to enable the navajo nation to make their own masks and safely practice physical distanc-ing. When Wong put out a call for donations, she declared, “We are firm believers in supporting communities by giving them WhAT TheY ASK FOR not what We ThInK they need.” Wong called for cotton fabric, sewing machines, face shields, surgical gowns, hand sanitizer, wet wipes, tampons and pads, detergent, and soap. She emphatically instructed that no unwanted materials be donated. Aunties dropped off supplies to the “Fortress of Gratitude”—the home of Badly Licked Bear, the Auntie who drove the van from the Squad headquarters in Los Angeles, California, to the navajo nation in Arizona and new Mexico. The Squad coordinated four vanloads of supplies during May and June.
In June, the Auntie Sewing Squad received news from Jonathan edwards (Pte Ska Cikala, or Little White Buffalo), an Indigenous orga-nizer of the Bear Soldier COvID-19 response team, that our masks had made a difference. The homemade cloth masks and face shields had changed the conversation and culture around COvID-19 at Standing Rock. Because not everyone on the reservation had a phone, radio, Tv,
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or access to the internet, instructions on preventing the spread of the virus traveled slowly. To encourage everyone to stay at home, the Bear Soldier COvID-19 response team made weekly food deliveries, which included flyers containing the CDC’s prevention guidelines, for the first two months of the pandemic. In the first week of deliveries, many recipients had asked for masks or gloves, which could not be supplied. When the Auntie Sewing Squad’s masks arrived, not only did the masks keep the Bear Soldier team and other community members healthy, but the increase in people wearing masks in public generated conversa-tions about taking more serious precautions. Ultimately, edwards and the Bear Soldier team were able to distribute a much-needed resource because of the solidarity labor of Parng and the Auntie Sewing Squad.
inTenTional collaBoraTion and asylum seekersAs cases increased among Indigenous populations within the United States, widespread concern also grew over encampments along the US-Mexico border. From January 2019 until the start of the pandemic, more than sixty thousand asylum seekers were deported from the Unit-ed States to Mexico when the Trump administration introduced its Mi-grant Protection Protocols. Those awaiting a decision by US immigration authorities on their status were held in makeshift “processing centers” on both sides of the border. This procedure is part of a longer history of recruitment and arbitrary deportation of Mexican labor by the US government, including the bracero program in the 1940s and 1950s.6 But Trump’s policy was particularly cruel because deportees were held in unhygienic conditions that increased the risk of contracting COvID-19, and because many children were separated from their parents.
By March 2020, two thousand people were living in tents at the bor-der between Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico. Camps were overcrowded and lacked necessities for basic hygiene. Some observers warned of a future mass grave along the border. In an effort to prevent the spread of COvID-19, mutual-aid organizers began placing the tents three feet apart, leaving space for ventilation, and encouraged people
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to sleep head to toe. With COvID-19 cases increasing in both the United States and Mexico, it was very difficult to move medical equipment and supplies across the border.
Jessica Arana spearheaded many mask campaigns for asylum seek-ers. Arana descends from a literary tradition of women of color writ-ers who have embraced a “Borderlands” identity and community since the 1980s, inspired by writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa. This trans-national identity motivates Arana’s service to disenfranchised Latinx communities hard hit by COvID-19. In her first interaction with the Auntie Sewing Squad, she put in a request for masks for local farm workers, who were considered essential workers during the pandemic but were often not provided with PPe by their employers.
Arana became a Super Auntie to help expand the Squad’s reach to farm workers nationwide, as well as asylum-seeking communities and those recently released from US Immigration and Customs enforce-ment (ICe) detention near the border. Finding contacts at the border who worked directly with shelters was tricky, as was complying with export restrictions. Arana had to organize deliveries with seven differ-ent contacts. Shipments of more than ten pieces of PPe from the US into Mexico caused major complications. Arana was mindful to avoid burdening her contacts with requests for too many border crossings. Still, she was determined to get PPe to the border encampments.
An important ethic in women of color feminism is to recognize the work that communities are already doing to address their needs. Rather than imposing ideas or solutions onto a vulnerable commu-nity, which too often creates more problems than it resolves, women of color feminism values the knowledge and the organizing of com-munities experiencing the vulnerabilities and asks how best to sup-port them.7 Arana builds intentional partnerships with community-led organizations that are already working on the ground to assist vulnera-ble communities. The knowledge and experience of these organizations far outweighs our own. In our working group, when Arana introduces campaigns in collaboration with community organizations, she posts
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news articles or videos so that Aunties can learn about these organiza-tions, their work, and where their masks are going.
These intentional collaborations draw in sewing and caring Aun-ties who have histories of working with the same organizations. For instance, when Arana announced a partnership with Border Angels, a community organization that promotes advocacy, education, and direct action for the rights of migrants and refugees, some Aunties vouched for them immediately. In 2015, Dolores Carlos, Lorena Madri-gal, and Kathleen Smith in Los Angeles formed a knitting group called Peaceweavers. Carlos and Madrigal are professors at east Los Ange-les College, and Smith is a retired health professional. Motivated to support unhoused refugees from Syria in their desperate flight from a repressive government and forced resettlement in Turkey, members of Peaceweavers knitted hats and blankets and worked with commu-nity organizations to send them directly to Syrian refugees in Turkey. They, too, had a difficult time moving sewn items across borders, but a partnership with Border Angels was crucial to getting these materials where they were most needed. When the Trump administration failed to provide PPe to residents in the US during COvID-19, the members of Peaceweavers joined the Auntie Sewing Squad, attracted by Wong’s overtly political approach. As Madrigal put it, “When you do not see major leaders take action, you have to do something, especially if you have the capacity to donate your time. It’s the ethical thing to do.”8
When Arana announced a campaign, in collaboration with the South Texas human Rights Center, for six hundred masks to be sent to the asylum-seeker encampment located at the US-Mexico border, I imme-diately made my second pledge. This was a region I once called home and an organization with which I had a history of collaboration. Since 2013, the South Texas human Rights Center has organized to meet the needs of asylum seekers, who flee terrible conditions in their home-lands in search of safety and a better life. They often go thirsty and become sick from traveling in the intense heat of the borderlands. Some resort to calling the police to ask for help but die waiting for
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police to show up. To prevent these deaths, the South Texas human Rights Center maintains water stations along the border. now, however, asylum seekers are also vulnerable to the virus.
In 2016, I moved to Corpus Christi for my first tenure-track posi-tion. As one of the few Asian Americans in Corpus, I felt isolated by the city’s conservative politics and deregulated infrastructure. After Don-ald Trump won the 2016 election, my colleagues and I organized the Corpus Christi Immigration Coalition, a coalition of professors, teach-ers, students, and community members who stood in solidarity with undocumented immigrants. When the Trump administration promised to deport undocumented immigrants, we were part of a
Peaceweavers’ socially distanced meetup. Photo by Kathleen Smith.
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nationwide movement in which professors and students tried to per-suade university administrators to designate their campuses as sanc-tuaries. Our strategy was to turn to local, educational, and religious entities to appeal for jurisdiction and protection against the federal government’s cruel policies targeting the undocumented. Off campus, we worked closely with the South Texas human Rights Center, which had a longer history of working with migrants in the community. We organized a town hall meeting with the sheriff and asked him to swear on the Bible to not do harm to the Latinx community and to pledge that police would work within their local municipal jurisdiction and not collaborate with the federal agency ICe to enforce immigration policies. (Afterwards, the sheriff backtracked on his pledge and applied for a grant for his department to work with ICe on detaining undocu-mented immigrants.) Despite discouraging outcomes, the South Texas human Rights Center continues its work.
At a different moment in history, my family could have been the ones stuck in an encampment. My grandparents fled the communist regime in China during the 1960s and migrated to the United States under the family reunification clause of the 1965 Immigration Act. Although they were considered legal immigrants, sometime before that, my great-grandfather had migrated as a “paper son.” After the 1882 Chinese exclusion Act prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers, the destruction of public birth documents during the 1906 San Fran-cisco earthquake provided an opportunity: hundreds of Chinese immi-grants could claim US citizenship. Some claimed to have sons born in China, also eligible for US citizenship, who were not in fact biologically related to them. Between 1910 and 1940, suspected paper sons were detained and interrogated at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.9 As a descendant of formerly excluded and detained Chinese immigrants, I stand in solidarity with those who are currently experiencing inhu-mane treatment at the border. For my second pledge, I sewed masks for the South Texas human Rights Center, who delivered the masks to asy-lum seekers at border encampments.
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While Aunties have created intentional collaborations with BIPOC-led community organizations, the Squad has also received requests from community organizations with whom we have no history of col-laboration. For these, Aunties have instituted a vetting process. When community organizations request donations for masks, Aunties exam-ine the organizations’ mission and service. If an organization has a his-tory of racist practices that have gone unaddressed, the Aunties turn down the request.
Ova Saopeng, whose main role in the group was cutting fabric, vet-ted the Lao Family Community Development Center before agree-ing to deliver masks. The main goal of the center, founded by Laotian refugees in 1980, was to help war refugees rebuild their lives. Over the years, it expanded its outreach to support other refugees, immigrant, and low-income communities, including recently arrived refugees from eritrea, ethiopia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran and the former Soviet Union. The center provides refugees with essential needs and helps them find housing. Because of its inclusive approach toward refugee aid and immigrant rights, it passed the Auntie Sewing Squad vetting process.
As a result of this connection, the Auntie Sewing Squad received donations of material from the Laotian Buddhist community. When Saopeng asked a friend about the center’s practices and impact, the friend in turn asked him about the Auntie Sewing Squad. The friend, who was affiliated with the Wat Lao Rattanaram Temple, mentioned that the temple had a surplus of fabric donated by the Laotian commu-nity to the monks for making robes.10 The fabric was offered to Bay Area Aunties, who drooled over its gorgeous saffron color. The “monk fabric” went a long way toward sustaining the solidarity between the Auntie Sewing Squad and several BIPOC communities in need of masks.
ProTesT and The movemenT for Black livesDuring the pandemic, many Black people continued to encounter neighborhood or police violence and failures of the criminal justice
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system. On February 2, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a twenty-five-year-old man jogging around his southern Georgia neighborhood, was chased and gunned down by three white supremacists in militia-style garb. The three men, one a former police officer, were not charged with his murder until May 7. On March 23, Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old medical technician, was shot eight times in her own home by three Metro Police Department officers in Louisville, Kentucky. Police broke into Taylor’s home, and when her partner used a gun in self-defense against the unidentified intruders, Taylor was fatally shot in the cross-fire. By September, only one of three officers had been charged and dismissed from the force. On May 25, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, causing his death by asphyxiation. After the video of Floyd’s death went viral, protesters once again took to the streets and called for the defunding of police.
Monica Bullard, a Sewing Auntie, split her time between protest-ing and sewing. Bullard, a former nurse-midwife and legal clerk, had been sewing masks for hospitals at the start of the pandemic. As a Black Auntie aware of the ways Black communities had been dispropor-tionately negatively affected by the carceral system, she also sewed for organizations serving Black communities. She had sewn two hundred masks for The Place For Grace, an organization that provides services and programs aimed at restoring families and advocating for children affected by incarceration. Bullard turned her home into the materials hub for the Auntie Sewing Squad in the Bay Area. She cut fabric and distributed it to other Aunties. Bullard was the person who picked up the fabric donated by the Wat Lao Rattanaram Temple, and she decided to use it in a drive she spearheaded to supply masks for use in youth-led Black Lives Matter protests. Often, when Bullard brought masks to give away at the protests, the organizers of the protests had already prepared protesters to come masked or had arranged for mask distribu-tion. That summer, Bullard attended between twelve and fifteen pro-tests for the BLM movement around the Bay Area.11
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To support Black Aunties and build solidarity with the BLM move-ment, non-Black Aunties shared antiracist toolkits, films, and podcasts to amplify Black perspectives, histories, and politics and educate each other while continuing to sew. non-Black Aunties took the lead in shar-ing resources to acknowledge that Black scholars and activists have too often borne the burden of antiracist education. Moreover, Aunties shared resources directly from the intellectual work of Black scholars, artists, and activists.
The Day of Solidarity with BLM organizations motivated some non-Black Aunties to attend a BLM protest for the first time. Wei-Ling Chang became politically active when Trump took office, and she attended the Women’s March at his inauguration and the March for Science in April 2017. But she had never attended a BLM march until she joined the Auntie Sewing Squad as a Caring Auntie in May 2020. Moved by the Squad’s sharing of resources and the way Aunties ral-lied to send masks to low-income BIPOC communities, Chang took her daughter to attend a BLM protest in Culver City that included kid-friendly activities. Chang and her daughter began sewing masks for community organizations serving Black communities.12
My own education took years of unlearning anti-Blackness and my investment in the carceral system. As a child, I watched my par-ents struggle to make a living selling alcohol and candy in low-income neighborhoods. My father had immigrated to the US to study chemis-try, but he ended up working as a temporary laborer at Chinese restau-rants in California and Georgia and had long periods of unemployment. When he finally owned his own store, he showed me the red button underneath the cash register that would alert the police if we needed help. My father had to press that button a few times. every day after school, I joined my dad at his store and passed the time watching Tv. When I watched the sitcom Family Matters, which centered on a Black family, my dad asked disapprovingly, “You like that show?” In contrast, when I watched Full House, featuring a white family, he reinforced
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the lesson of the episode with “Do you hear that?” I was taught from a young age to devalue Black representation and to trust the police.
Only later, after listening to the experiences of Black friends and taking Asian American studies courses, did I confront my own invest-ment in the prison-industrial complex. In college, I learned about police harassment of Black students from the song leader of my former church. he was one of a small number of Black students at the Univer-sity of California, Santa Barbara, and was frequently stopped by police. Years later, in a graduate course, my professor asked the class, “What
Monica Bullard passing out masks at a Black Lives Matter Protest in Oakland. Photo by Stephanie Pepitone.
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would it take for you to not call the police?” I did not understand the question. In fact, I had just called the police a few nights earlier when someone had thrown a potted plant through my window late at night. Years later, I came to realize that my reliance on the police complied with and enabled police harassment of and violence against Black and Brown communities.
For my third mask-making pledge, I sewed with intent for Black communities. I contributed to a campaign in partnership with Alma Backyard Farms, a community-based, Black-led urban farming orga-nization that grows food for donation to food-insecure individuals and communities. Thanks to Arana’s leadership, I learned that Alma Backyard Farms aims to help the formerly incarcerated individuals to transition back into the community by offering hands-on technical education in urban food production, such as repurposing urban land into farm plots. Alma Backyard Farms arranged for the masks made by the Auntie Sewing Squad to be included in the grocery kits they were giving away for Father’s Day.
By July, the Squad had pivoted toward sending masks to the incar-cerated, which include disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown people due to racist policing and prosecution. Coronavirus cases had increased exponentially in prisons, where physical distancing was dif-ficult. At San Quentin State Prison in the Bay Area, more than two thousand prisoners had tested positive. Organizers demanded pris-oner releases. Aunties rallied to deliver masks to prisoners. Grace Yoo, an Auntie in the Bay Area, led the official appeal to the warden at San Quentin. After making a number of calls and submitting the proper paperwork, Yoo came into contact with a recently retired San Quentin employee who was working to gather donations for inmates and staff with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a prison guards’ union, and received permission from the warden. Aunties sewed 1,200 masks for San Quentin prison inmates.
Meanwhile, Monica Bullard checked in with her group, the Trans-formative In-Prison Workgroup, to see how to get masks to recently
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released detainees. Because of public advocacy, the California Depart-ment of Corrections and Rehabilitation had just announced that they planned to release up to eight thousand incarcerated persons to max-imize available space for physical distancing. One of Bullard’s contacts worked for an organization, Choices for Freedom, that assists individ-uals recently released from incarceration, picking them up and driv-ing them where they need to go. As part of their mission, they supply individuals with backpacks that contain basic toiletries and Target gift cards with which to buy essentials. Bullard spearheaded a campaign in the Auntie Sewing Squad to include cloth masks in the backpacks. Between July and August, the Squad sewed 1,300 masks for women recently released from the California Women’s Prison.
crossing BordersThe Auntie Sewing Squad has crossed both figurative, racial borders and physical, national borders in building connections with BIPOC communities. The Squad makes masks as an expression of solidarity and of the shared understanding that BIPOC communities have suf-fered from historical patterns of government failures and racial in-justice, including the failure to provide adequate resources to protect these communities from COvID-19. In the spirit of “solidarity, not char-ity,” the Auntie Sewing Squad listens to people from disenfranchised communities to recognize their assessment of their own needs rather than imposing our perception. The Squad also identifies and collabo-rates with community-based organizations. The Squad supports all of its members, especially when its efforts require personal reflection and education of other members. This is the hard work of solidarity when putting the health of the most vulnerable first.
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nOTeS
1. ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, nJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
2. bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women,” Feminist Review 23 (1986): 125–38.
3. American Medical Association, “AMA Covid-19 Update, April 30, 2020,” video, www.ama -assn.org /delivering-care/population-care/ama-covid-19-daily-video-update-pandemic-s-impact -native-american.
4. Constance Parng, interview with author, October 30, 2020.5. Catherine Fung, “‘This Isn’t Your Battle or Your Land’: The native American Occupation of
Alcatraz in the Asian American Political Imagination,” College Literature 41, no. 1 (2014): 149–73, www.jstor.org/stable/24544625. See also Quynh nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Americas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).
6. Laura Gutierrez, “A Constant Threat: Deportation and Return Migration from the U.S. to northern Mexico, 1918–1965” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2016).
7. Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cam-bridge, MA: South end Press, 2000).
8. Lorena Madrigal, interview with author, August 13, 2020; Kathleen Smith, interview with author, August 10, 2020; Dolores Carlos, interview with author, August 11, 2020.
9. See erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
10. Ova Saopeng, interview with author, September 16, 2020.11. Monica Bullard, interview with author, February 28, 2021.12. Wei-Ling Chang, interview with author, August 11, 2020.
