Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage
2024 Theme - Advancing Leaders Through Innovation
Special Thanks to Jessica Ramos and Rhonda Vargas for serving as consultants.
Ajay Bhatt: is an Indian-born American who led the team at Intel that invented the Universal Serial Bus, or as most of us know it, the USB drive, in 1996. His belief in making the technology available to everyone made this storage device easily accessible to anyone who needed to it.
Allan Pineda Lindo: professional name Apl.de.ap was born in the Philippines. He drove for hours in a jeep each day to go to school and farmed to help support his family. He moved to the United States at the age of 14 and founded the Black Eyed Peas with his middle school friend, will.i.am.
Amy Tan - Critically Acclaimed author. Her most notable book is the Joy Luck Club, which was turned into a movie in 1993.
Anna May Wong - First Asian American Hollywood Star and Film Producer.
Anne Chow - First Asian woman and woman of color to be named CEO of AT&T Business.
Brendon Urie - Native Hawaiian singer, songwriter, and musician, best known as the lead vocalist for Panic! at the Disco.
Chien-Shiung Wu: A pioneer in particle and experimental physics, she was the only Chinese woman to work on the Manhattan Project. Her work helped the project succeed.
Dalip Singh Saund: The first Indian-American, Sikh, and Asian-American to serve in the US Congress. The former judge was a fierce advocate for the farmers in his southern California district and championed efforts to open citizenship to people of Indian descent who were living in the states in the 1940s.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - Samoan American actor, producer, former football player, and retired professional wrestler.
Ellison Onizuka - First Asian American and first person of Japanese descent to fly into space. He was aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on its tragic flight on January 28, 1986.
Huma Abedin - Indian and Pakistani American who was the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice-Chair of Clinton's 2016 campaign for President of the United States.
I.M. Pei: Chinese American architect, born in Guangzhou, China. He is internationally renowned and designed famous structures across the globe. These include the Louvre Pyramid, the John F. Kennedy Library, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and even the Pei Student Center at New College of Florida. Pei's death, at 102, was mourned worldwide.
Janet Mock - Transgender rights activist, writer, and television producer. Her father is African American and her mother is Asian, Brazilian, and Native Hawaiian.
Julia Cho - Korean-American playwright and television writer. She is the writer of the animated film Turning Red.
Kamala Harris - 49th Vice President of the United States and first woman to hold that office. Her father was Jamaican and her mother was Indian.
Kealia Ohai - Native Hawaiian soccer player in the National Women's Soccer League.
The Kim Sisters: a Korean born American singing trio (Mia Vig, Sook-ja Kim, Ai-ja Kim) that performed for over two decades (1952-1975) and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 22 times. They paved the way for the explosively popular K-Pop movement in the US.
Manny Pacquiao: a former professional boxer who holds six Guinness Book of World Records. He served as a senator of the Philippines from 2016-2022.
Ocean Vuong - Award winning and critically acclaimed Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. His novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, spent 6 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Dr. Roseli Ocampo-Friedmann: was a Filipino-American microbiologist and botanist who spent her career studying extremophiles (organisms able to live in extreme environments). This work can help lead to the understanding of life on other planets.
Steve Chen: is a Taiwanese immigrant who, along with his friend Chad Hurley co-founded YouTube. They were at a party together and became frustrated when they couldn't share videos easily with the party goers. They looked to digital photo sites like Flikr and thought, "we need something like this for videos."
Tammy Duckworth - First Thai American and first Female Veteran elected to the United States House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Duckworth lost both of her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
The Model Minority: perpetuates a narrative that all ANHPI people excel in math, are non-confrontational, and are successful. This stereotype has contributed to divisions among other marginalized groups and may be a factor for AANHPI people who experience discrimination not speaking out. In a study of AANHPI high school students, 99.4% of respondents stated they had experienced this particular stereotype at least once. It also does not take into account that the wealth disparity between the richest AANHPI members and the poorest is the larger than any other racial group.
From Forbes: “The myth that all Asian Americans are somehow wealthy, smart and good at math or science is so harmful to our communities, because then the people that don't fit that myth are ignored and neglected and made invisible,” says Cindy Trinh, a Vietnamese-American photojournalist and creator of Activist NYC.
The Bamboo Ceiling: refers to the discrimination AANHPI people experience in their careers while trying to advance. Though AANHPI make up 13% of the workplace, they are only 6% of executive leadership. The stereotype assumes that AANHPI people are great at executing but not see as leadership material in a cultural model that still places white males on the top rung of the ladder. According to Jean Lee, president and CEO of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, "It’s perpetuated, because we are taught to be much more humble, to be quiet, and to build group consensus. It's very hard to translate that when the American standard of leadership, and especially the white male standard, is about speaking up and being assertive.” As a culture, organizations need to expand their ideas of what makes a great leader and what a great leader looks like.
Being the Joke Punchline: The top 10 grossing films from 2010-2019 were analyzed and even though less than 1/4 of the AANHPI characters were comedic in nature, audiences were asked to laugh at almost all of them. This came from filming and editing. "Long Duk Dong, an Asian foreign exchange student in the 1984 movie 'Sixteen Candles,' is a character that experts say was an early watershed example of APIs being mocked on screen" (NBC News). “Anything he said was something that you laughed at, not with,” sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen told NBC Asian America. “He kind of defined Asian characters for decades.”
AANHPI Heritage Month - The name and acronym have changed several times since President Jimmy Carter signed this heritage month into law in 1978. Most recently, President Joe Biden expanded it to Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Heritage Month. There are so many rich and diverse cultures wrapped into these six letters. This includes the 40 countries on the continent of Asia and 25,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. How can we honor all of these vibrant cultures?
1500 year ago: Polynesians arrive in Hawai'i after navigating the ocean with only the stars as their guides.
1765: The first Filipino Americans settle in Louisiana. These Filipinos were sailors known as "Manilamen" who were indentured servants on Spanish Galleons. They jumped ship in the Gulf of Mexico and established the first Filipino American Communities.
1778: Captain James Cook lands in Hawai'i and names it the Sandwich Islands in honor of the Earl of Sandwich. He was the first European to make contact with the Hawaiian Islands.
1795: King Kamehameha unites the Hawaiian Islands and his dynasty rules over Hawai'i until 1874.
1820: First missionaries arrive in Hawai'i to convert the natives to Christianity, many forcibly.
1835: The first sugar plantation opens on Kaua'i. The Hawaiian islands earn recognition for its prime agricultural land, making agriculture a primary economic force on the islands. This begins the forced removal of Hawaiian independence and the march toward a forced takeover from the US.
1854: People v. Hall determines that Chinese people cannot testify against white defendants. George Hall was convicted of murder based on the testimony of three Chinese witnesses. On appeal, that California Supreme Court disqualified the testimony, stating that like "Negroes, blacks, Indians, and mullatoes," the Chinese could not testify against white defendants.
1893: The overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai'i begins. Queen Lili'uokalani is placed under house arrest at 'Iolani Palace in Honolulu.
March 28, 1898: The US Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark. Wong was a Chinese American born in San Francisco in 1873. After returning from a visit to family in China in 1895, immigration authorities denied him re-entry, citing the Chinese exclusion laws that barred Asians from both immigration and US Citizenship. The court ruled that since Wong acquired citizenship at birth, due to the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act did not apply to him.
1898 and 1901: In 1898 Hawai'i is annexed by the United States through the Newlands Resolution. In 1900, the Organic Act established the Territory of Hawai'i.
September 4, 1907: The Bellingham Riots. Due to the inflammatory rhetoric of the nativist hate group, the Asiatic Exclusion League, hundreds of white workers pushed through Bellingham, Washington, at night, looking for Indian immigrants. These immigrants were mostly Sikh men from Punjab, India, working in Bellingham's lumber mills. They were taken from their bunks, beaten severely, and the bunks were set on fire. The entirety of the Indian workers fled into Canada, on foot.
1913: California passes the Alien Land Act prohibiting "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from owning agricultural land. Though this included all immigrants from Asia, it was specifically intended to target the Japanese.
1943: The first War Relocation Authority field office is opened in Chicago. This was the start of moving Japanese Americans to internment camps, an action eerily similar to the German Concentration Camps.
1959: After a popular vote, Hawai'i becomes the 50th State of the United States of America.
1965-1970: Filipino Farmworkers lead the Delano Grape Strike after decades of mistreatment and lack of availability of jobs other than farm labors. Filipino immigrants were barred from citizenship, owning land, living in white neighborhoods, and marrying white women. This, even though the Philippines was a US territory.
1980: Hawai'i becomes the home of the NFL Pro Bowl when the AFC-NFC all star games lands in O'ahu's Aloha Stadium. The Pro Bowl would be hosted in Hawai'i for 26 years, until 2017 when it moved to Orlando, FL.
June 19, 1982: The murder of Vincent Chin. In the late 70s and early 80s a global oil crisis that drove the US economy into a recession that led to the collapse of the auto industry. Many workers in the American auto industry blames Japan. Asian hate and violence historically tend to follow crisis in America. Eerily, we are seeing it today. Chin was killed because he "looked Japanese." The judge in the case who set the white killers free said, "These are not the kind of men you sent to jail." The backlash from the Asian American community led to the passing of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
1990: Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanos, located on the island of Hawai'i, erupted sending lava through the town of Kalapana. The town was completely destroyed, but the eruption did create a new coastline that extended nearly 1,000ft farther into the Pacific Ocean.
Bravespace (Presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific Heritage Center) Spotify Playlist
My Man by Japanese-born American Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi
From the Porch lithograph by Miyoko Ito, Japanese American Artist
AAPI Artists to Watch by Rolling Stone Spotify Playlist
