The morning of July 14, 1944, was intended to be a moment of celebration for the City of Redding, California. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes had been scheduled to arrive in the booming city to dedicate Shasta Dam, a national reclamation project of great pride to local citizens and construction workers. Just days prior, however, the dedication ceremony had been canceled due to the inability of Ickes to leave Washington D.C.. Instead, a small group of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) officials, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) officials, and local city officials quietly gathered within the dam's $19,400,000 power plant. A BOR official flipped a switch to start one of the plant's two massive generators, sending a surge of 120,000 watts of hydroelectricity into California's transmission lines and the Pacific, Gas, and Electric (PG&E) distribution system. This energy would fuel the West's war industries and the federal defense effort in World War II. Though without fanfare, the switching event signaled the official start of commercial production of power from the world's second largest dam and keystone of the Central Valley Project (CVP). From Washington, D.C., the event was heralded by BOR Commissioner Harry W. Bashore as “a milestone in the fulfillment of visions Californians have had for nearly 100 years.” 2

In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word “borderland” to refer to the meeting of two cultures, and she defines the borderland as a “place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (n.p.). While Anzaldua's discussion focuses on the borderland encountered by Mexican Americans, she believes that many share this painful experience:

Higher education has been historically recognized as the very door to opportunity and success for our nation's youths and future leaders. Following the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the cry and pressure for access to America's college campuses have intensified, especially along the lines of racial and gender discrimination. The long record of oppression has translated into an intense debate over the feasibility of affirmative action as a viable policy to rectify the past and the present This article will afford a brief overview of the necessity of affirmative action in college admissions as well as an analysis and assessment of this policy from the perspective of Critical Race Theory.

I like to go out on Friday nights and Saturday nights and join up with my homies and walk around the hot spots and get some food. I like to check out the girls and see if I can get something going with them. But every weekend the cops stop me. What the fuck for? I go to school everyday and get treated like a criminal and then, when I want to step out of my house…I get treated like a criminal again! I have never been arrested for nothing! But I always get stopped for walkin' down the street. For walkin' down the street! Am I in a gang (the police ask)? Who's in a gang? Who's carrying a gun, a disrepectful attitude, and stopping people for nothing? The police gang. You don't see me with a gun or knife or harassing anyone! I'm just tryin' to walk down the fucking street. an anonymous sixteen year-old Chicano (Author, 2004)

The goal of promoting diversity is deep-rooted in the post-civil rights activities of U.S. educational institutions. Universities across the country attempt to foster diversity by seeking a diverse student body, creating initiatives that promote diversity, institutionalizing committees and administrative positions with the sole purpose of overseeing diversity, and implementing curricular strategies to support academic diversity. The pursuit of diversity is so integral to the survival and attractiveness of college campuses that some universities even lie in order to appear diverse to potential students and public supporters. Such was the case of the University of Wisconsin, Madison whose officials digitally inserted the face of a black student into an image of white football fans in order to portray a diverse picture of the university's student body. Etemonstrating that diversity is valued is a staple of any academically competitive US university.

For individuals who are both African American and Deaf finding a place to belong is a process of navigating their many cultural identities. In this paper I explore the following questions: where do individuals who are African American and Deaf find and make community? To which communities do they perceive they belong? Is their primary identity African American, Deaf or something else? Does belonging to one community negate membership in another? Does the presence of African American Deaf individuals have an impact on either community or are they forced to create an entirely new one for themselves?

American scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance has, until recently, been strongly U.S.-centric, but the work of many of the important writers of the New Negro-era has an international dimension, as writers attempted to place the African American struggle for political and civil rights and cultural authority in larger, often global, contexts. Recent scholarship has revealed that the term, “Harlem Renaissance,” used as a rubric to characterize the flowering of black culture-building and political activism in the first years of the 20th century is something of a misnomer.

September 11, 2001 will forever be etched in the memory of Canadians who were deeply affected by the events of that day. This cataclysmic occurrence had a pivotal place not only upon the private troubles of those directly related but also upon the public issues and the consequent public policies of all of us who may not have been as directly touched. Such a life-changing experience will impinge upon the politics of our entire nation. The terrorist act was a political statement at one level which must be addressed politically as well It is noteworthy, given this context of the terrorist attack in the nation to the South, that October 8, 2001 represented the thirtieth anniversary of the political declaration of multiculturalism as a public state policy within Canada What difference does the official policy discourse and ideology of multiculturalism make in the political response to the ethnocultural and racial diversity within and without its national borders?

According to the 2000 census, over 12 million Asian Americans, almost 70 percent of them either immigrants who came to the U.S. after 1970 or their children, comprised an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse population that was more regionally dispersed throughout the U.S. than ever before. (Lai and Arguelles, 2003). Despite these transitions and increasing heterogeneity, discourses about Asian American communities have focused on ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and Little Saigons where coethnic residents, businesses, services, institutions and organizations exist and interact in urban or suburban physical spaces of the bicoastal United States (Fong, 1994; Li, 1999; Zhou and Bankston, 1988). According to Kathleen Wong (Lau), these tangible markers tied to space are often privileged as authentic Asian American communities while those without demographic concentrations and geographically bound enclaves are “less advanced” communities; as a result, “[w]hat is not recognized in the literature is the ‘localness' of this production.’ [1997:83].

This double issue features a range of articles which explore topics, issues and subject matter important to ethnic studies scholars, students, and the general public. In an important interdisciplinary way, these articles are each interdisciplinary explorations into the multi varied ethnic group experience. Some of these pieces provide research focused examinations of the life and living in ethnic communities. Other articles provide literary analyses of the challenges and rewards of life in ethnic communities. Still other articles offer critical perspectives regarding the social justice challenges facing ethnic groups as they attempt to successfully navigate institutional challenges still impeding the quest for social justice.