May 2024: Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage
May is national Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! In October 1992, when Congress permanently designated May as a celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage they noted the significance of May as both the month when Japanese immigrants first arrived in the United States and as the month when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. To learn more about how the Central Pacific Railroad relied on Chinese workers to complete the Transcontinental railroad, visit this digital exhibit from the California Railroad Museum.
Today, California is home to over 6 million people of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage and has many unique connections to the national history of Asian Americans. California may even be home to the oldest continually operated Chinese Restaurant in the United States! UC Davis Law Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin led an archival research team, including History PhD Student Hao Zou, have investigated the history of Woodland's Chicago Cafe which was founded as early as 1903. Check out the video about the restaurant below:
In the 1960s, the academic discipline of Asian American Studies emerged as a result of student activism on California college campuses. By 1970, scholars “fully established” Asian American Studies at UC Davis “as an academic program on campus with faculty, offices, and staff in place and courses in the university catalog.” The program has only grown since, was once the site of the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies and now fosters exciting research through such projects as the New Vietnam Initiative, the Asian American Seed Steward Program, Anti-Asian Violence: Origins and Trajectories Research Initiative, and the George Kagiwada Library and Digital Media Lab. CHSSP Assistant Director Tuyen Tran has highlighted some of these resources and more in her 2021 blog on Teaching Asian American and Pacific Islander History.
Teaching Resources:
In this inquiry set, first grade students will learn and discuss the multiple cultures and peoples that historically have contributed to the creation and growth of the United States. Students will compare and contrast their conception of the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States at present and its past communities.
California’s Diverse Population
This inquiry set for fourth-grade students explores how Asian immigrants to the United States and Asian Americans formed community and resisted racism and xenophobia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The set’s investigative question —What was life like for California’s increasingly diverse population at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century?— can be used to guide students through the photographs to understand the racial and cultural diversity of California historically, as well as the proposed laws that white conservatives used to stall integration.
Reflections on Vietnamese American Identity
This source set for tenth and eleventh grade students was designed by 2023 CA-R & CHSSP Educator Fellow Virginia Nguyen. It is composed of primary and secondary sources, including oral histories, photographs, and moving images. These sources provide a more comprehensive understanding of Vietnamese American identity and experience, through which students will gain a nuanced understanding of human conflict and struggle.
Vietnam and Movements for Equality
This inquiry set for eleventh-grade students includes images, letters, and interviews that highlight the effects of the Vietnam War. The documents encourage students to explore the impact of the war on diverse groups of people, including Asian Americans and Vietnamese refugees. Students will also examine how growing opposition to the war ignited discussions about racism and oppression of people of color and fueled movements for equality at home.
Current Context: Anti-Asian Racism in United States History
Incidents of hate crimes, attacks, and harassment directed at Asian Americans skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To scholars and students of Asian American history, these patterns are neither new nor surprising. Yet most Americans remain unaware that Asian Americans have long been at the heart of our country’s most racist laws and incidents. This May 2021 issue of Current Context explores this history with a special essay by UC Davis Professor Cecilia Tsu, an annotated timeline, and primary source activity.
AAPI Changemakers: People Who Made a Difference
This collection of AAPI biographies was compiled by CHSSP Assistant Director Tuyen Tran in 2022. The biographies were gathered from all across the web in an effort to spotlight the diversity of authors, agencies, organizations and changemakers. Given the variety of authors, intended audiences, and purpose of creation, teachers may closely examine with students the range of text types and biographies to determine the how and why we honor specific people within and among us. In doing so, students are prepared and trained in taking on creative biography projects and exemplary subjects of their own choosing.
Other Online Resources:
The UC Davis Archives and Special Collections compiled a wonderful feature of AAPI resources for 2023’s AAPI Heritage Month. Primary sources include books, pamphlets, and papers from their manuscript collections. These include the first English language Chinese cookbook published in the United States and other items of cultural significance on topics including art and politics. These resources can help contribute to a great AAPI history lesson!
This place listing (and accompanying Theme Study) from the National Parks Service offers a listing of California sites and others where visitors can learn more about and celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage.
Recent Scholarship:
Asian American History, Huping Ling (August 2023)
From Rutgers University Press:
"A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization, and new challenges and opportunities. It is an up-to-date and easily accessible resource for high school and college students, as well as anyone who is interested in Asian American history."
The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, Laureen D. Hom (June 2024)
From the University of California Press:
"Urban Chinatowns are dynamic, contested spaces that have persevered amid changes in the American cityscape. These neighborhoods are significant for many, from the residents and workers who rely on them for their livelihoods to the broader Chinese American community and political leaders who recognize their cultural heritage and economic value. In The Power of Chinatown, Laureen D. Hom provides a critical examination of the politics shaping the trajectory of development in Los Angeles Chinatown, one of the oldest urban Chinatowns in the United States."
The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, Diego Javier Luis (January 2024)
From Harvard University Press:
"Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements of Asian peoples to the Americas. Hailing from Gujarat, Nagasaki, and many places in between, both free and enslaved Asians boarded the galleons and made the treacherous transpacific journey each year. Once in Mexico, they became “chinos” within the New Spanish caste system."
Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain: Networks, Power, and Everyday Life, Saara Kekki (April 2023)
From the University of Oklahoma Press:
"On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as “domestic enemy aliens” during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political alliances—in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki’s Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain."
The Unknown Great: Japanese Americans at the Margins of History, Greg Robinson with Jonathan Van Harmelen (January 2024)
From Washington University Press:
"Through stories of remarkable people in Japanese American history, The Unknown Great illuminates the diversity of the Nikkei experience from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Acclaimed historian and journalist Greg Robinson delves into a range of themes from race and interracial relationships to sexuality, faith, and national identity. In accessible short essays drawn primarily from his newspaper columns, Robinson examines the longstanding interactions between African Americans and Japanese Americans, the history of LGBTQ+ Japanese Americans, religion in Japanese American life, mixed-race performers and political figures, and more. This collection is sure to entertain and inform readers, bringing fresh perspectives and unfamiliar stories from Japanese American history and centering the lives of unheralded figures who left their mark on American life."
Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism, Wendy Cheng (November 2023)
From the University of Washington Press:
"Under the distorting shadows of Cold War geopolitics, the Kuomintang regime and collaborators across US campuses attempted to control Taiwanese in the diaspora through extralegal surveillance and violence, including harassment, blacklisting, imprisonment, and even murder. Drawing on interviews with student activists and extensive archival research, Wendy Cheng documents how Taiwanese Americans developed tight-knit social networks as infrastructures for identity formation, consciousness development, and anticolonial activism. They fought for Taiwanese independence, opposed state persecution and oppression, and participated in global political movements. Raising questions about historical memory and Cold War circuits of power, Island X is a testament to the lives and advocacy of a generation of Taiwanese American activists."
Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, November 2023, Adrian De Leon (November 2023)
From the University of North Carolina Press:
"From the late eighteenth century, the hinterlands of Northern Luzon and its Indigenous people were in the crosshairs of imperial and capitalist extraction. Combining the breadth of global history with the intimacy of biography, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States's Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon's eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association’s documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces "the Filipino" as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people."
Picture Books (#KatesBookClub)
Hot Pot Night by Vincent Chen.
What's for dinner? A Taiwanese American child brings his diverse neighbors together to make a tasty communal meal. Together, they cook up a steaming family dinner that celebrates community, cooperation, and culture. Includes a family recipe for hot pot. Students could be encouraged to share foods that are special to their family or culture.
My Grandfather’s Song by Phung Nguyen Quang and Huy’nh Kim Lien.
Simply beautiful picture book about a family’s connection to their land, their home, and each other. Lovely multi-generational story about the bond between a grandparent and child.
The Truth About Dragons by Julie Leung and Hanna Cha.
Wonderful book that celebrates mixed cultural identity as a young boy learns about dragons from his two grandmothers. Caldecott Honor Winner and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Winner in 2024.
Two New Years by Richard Ho and Lynn Scurfield.
For one multicultural family, both Lunar New Year and Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) are times to celebrate with family and to enjoy traditional foods and activities. The two holidays may follow different calendars and have different cultural roots, but at their hearts lie similar sentiments. Shares the joys of a child in a Chinese American and white Jewish family.