ABSTRACT
Although Asian American youth culture had been flourishing in ethnic enclaves since the 1930s, it began to emerge beyond the enclaves and into the American mainstream during the post-World War II era. Perhaps most intriguing about this emergence is that young Asian American women, in particular, represented the Asian American consumer. Exercising cultural citizenship in an attempt to claim a place in the American nation, Asian American female youth continually fluctuated between public displays of assimilation into white, middle-class America and Asian ethnic pride, and sometimes managed to forge a sense of cultural hybridity. These negotiations were crucial to the formation of an Asian American identity and would later form one of the bases for the Asian American movement (Wei, 1993). As is the case with most grassroots political and social movements, the Asian American movement required its participants to identify as a group with common interests before acting as a politicized entity.
