Naomi Hirahara - We Are Here: 30 Inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Have Shaped the United States

W e are here because you were there. That sentence has become shorthand for a number of experiencessojourns, migrations, and movements. It can certainly be used to trace that long arc of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) stories that this book suggests through individual portraits. Who is the you in that sentence? Take a look at Loni Dings fantastic three-part documentary called Ancestors in the Americas . The first episode is titled Coolies, Settlers, and Sailors: Voyage to the New World. It helped to rearrange my thinking about my familys personal journey from the Philippines to the United States. But it did much more. It demonstrated the need for all of us to think more critically about where and when we entered this evolving American story. Ding stepped back centuries and widened the frame, making global connections to AAPI routes and roots. These journeys were not just to the United States, but to the Americas as a hemisphere. One of the historians Ding interviewed for the program reminded viewers that Europe had had Asia on its mind for centuries. So much so, an Italian sailor was financed by Spanish funds in the search for an elusive passage to the Orient. He landed in whats now called the Bahamas and thought he was in the Indies. And consider how the United States third president, Thomas Jefferson, commissioned Lewis and Clarks expedition to find an overland path to the Pacific Coast and commerce.

Our stories have been woven into the hemisphere for centuries. With the formal end of the global trade of enslaved Africans in the early 1800s, Indians and Chinese were sent to the Americas as replacement labor. From 1565 to 1815, a grand galleon trade route linked Nagasaki, Macau, Malacca, and Goa to Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, Havana, Panama, Rio, and Limawith everything anchored between Manila and Acapulco. Weve been here.

The year 2022 marks the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Centers twenty-fifth year of researching, documenting, and sharing AAPI stories. We Are Here is the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the diversity and pace of our communities growth. Beyond the global cities weve called homeHonolulu, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York Cityyoure just as likely to find our families and networks in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Little Rock, Houston, and Madison. Numbering more than twenty-four million persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest-growing racial group in the country. Of the ten most commonly spoken languages in US homes other than English and Spanish, four hail from Asia. Were everywhere.

When the Asian American movement was in full swing, poet-activists like Janice Mirikitania Stockton, Californiaborn daughter of farmersgave us a powerful vision of how to think about the expanse and beauty of our communities. In a poem called Firepot, she wrote about our routes and roots: we have been fractured / made to look at each other / as though we are / divided / but if we see with clear eyes, we know we are bound by common shackles:

Manila to Vietnam

Korea to Laos China to the Islands

Hiroshima to Cambodia Post St. to Hunters Pt.

Kearney St. to Richmond Mission to the Valley

Bound by our Survival

Bound by our Strengths