About a week before he died, in March, at the age of seventy-five, Peter Kwong sat with his old friend Wing Lam in the offices of the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association, in New York's Chinatown. The two men had known each other for nearly half a century. Kwong, who in his productive and varied life was an activist, journalist, filmmaker, and professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was helping Lam, the executive director of the C.S.W.A., plan a new education center for immigrant workers.

Kwong was a regular presence at the C.S.W.A. since its founding, in 1979, when a group of Chinese restaurant workers decided that they needed an organization to represent them in ways that traditional labor unions hadn’t. They wanted a smaller, consensus-based operation; they wanted to talk about concerns beyond the union contract; and they wanted to engage in militant protests. In the decades that followed, C.S.W.A. clashed often, and sometimes violently, with those older unions, and with restaurant and garment-factory bosses. In the nineteen-nineties, the association’s office, on Catherine Street, was firebombed.

At C.S.W.A. events, Kwong’s foppish hair and professorial clothes made him stick out from the working-class crowd. Kwong was an academic, but an unorthodox one—his research crossed disciplines and international borders. A first-generation Chinese immigrant, he’d defected from a short-lived engineering career to sink roots in Chinatown and run class interference. He helped establish the field of Asian-American studies, and co-created Hunter's program in 1993. He wrote articles with his wife, Dusanka Miscevic, about the Chinese-American heroin trade for the Village Voice. He co-produced an Oscar-nominated documentary about the parents of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. And he took part in many campaigns launched by C.S.W.A. and its sister entity, the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS). He had a reputation for being salty and blunt, yet tender with those he cared about.

Kwong was fluently bilingual and bicultural, and deeply attached to Chinese America. His interest in identity politics, however, was eclipsed by a commitment to old-school class struggle. In the second of his five books, “The New Chinatown,” published in 1987, he offered a typology of immigrant workers intended to upend the Asian-American “model minority” stereotype. On one end of the spectrum, Kwong identified the Western-educated, socially mobile, code-switching “uptown Chinese”; on the other end were the non-English-speaking, blue-collar “downtown Chinese.” These two groups were foreign to one another. As Kwong told the Times, when the book was first published, “For most Chinese, Chinatown is a ghetto. The living conditions are crowded, and rent is out of line with income. The labor conditions are totally outside of American standards: ten-hour workdays in both the garment and restaurant industries, with no overtime pay and no job security.” Despite these limitations, Kwong believed deeply in the collective potential of the downtown Chinese.

More recently, Kwong argued that rising rents, long days, unpaid overtime, and lack of security—the kinds of issues he’d seen in New York’s Chinatown—had become endemic to the entire American economy. Over the years, C.S.W.A. and NMASS have organized not only restaurant and garment workers but also child- and elder-care providers, post-9/11 cleanup workers, limousine drivers, clerical staff, nail-salon workers, public-housing residents, and the unemployed. They’ve helped employees recover millions of dollars in unpaid wages and led hundreds of protests across the tristate area. They’ve inspired activists in other cities to establish immigrant-worker centers as a grassroots alternative to large, bureaucratic labor unions.

In the epilogue to a 2001 reissue of his first book, “Chinatown, New York,” Kwong wrote that “what is going on in Chinatown is not at all marginal to the American labor movement. Fuzhounese immigrant workers are not that different from the rest of America's working people—they just happen to be on the edge of our crumbling working-class structure. To be sure, Fuzhounese undocumented immigrants normally work seventy-hour weeks, but their deprivation is comparable to that of all other working people.” Having studied the links between migrant labor and capitalism for decades, Kwong saw Chinatown’s workers as merely a representative sample. They were caught in a system that was flush with a constant supply of new people, enabling bad employers to steal wages from their employees and landlords to gouge tenants. Kwong’s solution was simple: organize everyone.

A few weeks ago, at a memorial service held in the Downtown Community Television Center—another nonprofit Kwong helped to found—Wah Lee, a restaurant employee turned C.S.W.A. organizer, said, “He was very different from other academics. He could talk to workers.” It was standing-room only, and Lam was co-m.c. He still spoke of his old friend in the present tense. “He’s more than an advocate—advocates usually just have big mouths,” he said. This week, C.S.W.A. announced that the center Kwong and Lam were discussing back in March will be named the Peter Kwong Immigrant Workers Learning Center. It’s slated to open this fall.