National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science Directorate

A Brief Glimpse

ASIAN AMERICAN

PACIFIC ISLANDER

NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS THEME STUDY

A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 3

The National Park Service is pleased to issue the introductory essay of 

Finding a Path Forward: Asian American/Pacific Islander National Historic 

Landmarks Theme Study, which will be published in its entirety later in 

2016. In this essay, Franklin Odo, editor of the theme study, introduces the content 

and scope of the upcoming work. The theme study will include contributions from 

sixteen other scholars of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history and 

culture. It is our hope that Dr. Odo’s essay—and those that follow—will familiarize 

the American public with AAPI contributions to our nation’s history and lead to 

the recognition of associated properties. The theme study is intended to help in the 

identification of buildings, structures, sites, objects, and districts associated with 

AAPI history, and facilitate their designation as National Historic Landmarks and 

their listing in the National Register of Historic Places. With this recognition, an 

important step toward the preservation of these historic properties will be taken. 

Although we intend to publicize widely the release of the full publication, please 

look for it later in the summer on the Asian American Pacific Islander webpage at 

www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/index.htm.

A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 5

Introduction

ASIAN AMERICAN/PACIFIC ISLANDER

NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARKS

THEME STUDY

Franklin Odo

There are two major lists of officially designated historic 

properties in the United States. Both are maintained by the National 

Park Service (NPS) which celebrates its centennial in 2016. Known more 

widely for its stewardship of the national parks—“America’s best idea”—the 

NPS also maintains the National Register of Historic Places and the National 

Historic Landmarks Program.1

 The National Register lists properties that are 

important to cities, states, and the nation, while the National Historic 

Landmarks (NHL) Program only designates those of outstanding national 

U.S Immigration Station

Angel Island, California

Photo from the collections of the 

National Register of Historic Places.
6 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

significance that retain a high degree of integrity. Fewer than 3,000 NHLs 

have been designated, with properties ranging from Mt. Vernon to the Angel 

Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay, through which many 

immigrants came into the U.S., but where many Asians were detained and 

barred from entrance because of their race and nationality. These places are 

critical as effective lessons through which visitors absorb American history 

and learn about the people who belong in that narrative and in this nation.

When peoples of color, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islander 

Americans, are not reasonably represented, the historical narrative of the 

nation itself becomes skewed and biased. Because it was manifestly evident 

that the histories and heritages of AAPIs are dramatically underrepresented 

on both lists of significant historic properties, in 2013 then-Secretary of the 

Interior Ken Salazar asked the NPS to undertake this AAPI theme study. Secretary Sally Jewel carried the project forward. NPS Director Jonathan Jarvis 

has taken a personal interest in the project and Stephanie Toothman, Associate Director for Cultural Resources, has been a champion for its completion.2

This volume seeks to inspire Americans to discover the story of America’s Asian and Pacific Island heritage. Further, it is intended to inspire and 

From Asia to America: 

Asian Americans and Pacific 

Islanders emigrated from a huge 

geographic area to settle in the 

United States.
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 7

help those seeking National Historic Landmarks or 

National Register of Historic Places designation for 

historic places linked to stories about Asian American 

and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and their experiences in 

the United States over time. Designed to be inviting 

and inspirational, these essays are not intended to be 

encyclopedic or comprehensive.3 Instead, we hope 

to reach local historians, planners, elected officials, 

the AAPI community, and all Americans interested in 

linking the power of place to the ideas, people, and 

movements that have been meaningful to American 

communities. When and how did Pacific Islanders 

become part of the American empire/fabric? When 

and where did the earliest people from Asia appear 

in the United States—or earlier, in the American 

colonies—or even earlier, in North America? How 

did ethnic communities like Chinatowns develop? 

What are the legacies of these vast movements of 

people, capital, resources, and labor—where do they 

begin and end? Do they end? The NPS hopes to help answer these and other 

questions by identifying and designating historic places that can provide 

stories explaining the long and fascinating histories of AAPIs.

Who are Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders?

What do we mean by the term “Asian American and Pacific Islander 

Americans”? As the accompanying map shows, some of these Americans 

travelled farther to get to North America than most European settlers and 

some Africans. Asia generically refers to the Eastern hemisphere of the globe. 

The Asian region of interest in this theme study is generally defined by China 

to the north and Indonesia to the south, and spanning from Afghanistan and 

Pakistan to the South Pacific Islands and Hawai‘i. The South China Sea, the 

Philippine Sea, and the Indian and Pacific oceans are major bodies of water in 

this region. 

The Pacific Islands are highly fragmented geographically, but some of 

the major island groups are Hawai‘i, Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Virgin 

Islands, the Solomon Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Samoa, and Fiji. 
8 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

People who came to the U.S. from the Pacific Islands and Asia represent a 

staggering number of cultures, languages, and religions, some resulting from 

an ancient mingling of cultures and others representing more recent merging.

In this theme study we refer to the people from these diverse and geographically far flung cultures as “Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders”—AAPI 

for short. Because they share a sense of community in the United States, they 

often unite for political or cultural reasons under various names, but often as 

“Asian Pacific Americans” (APA), “Asian American and Pacific Americans” 

(AAPA), or simply “Asian Pacific Islanders” (API). There is no common agreement that one designation is more accurate than others; we selected AAPI as a 

convenient acronym, but we do not consider it superior to others.

Why This Theme Study is Needed

The year 2016 marks the centennial of the establishment of the NPS by 

an act signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The NPS includes 411 units, 

including units in every state, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the 

Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia. Some of these units already 

commemorate the extraordinary presence of AAPIs, but people of AAPI 

heritage are still underrepresented in terms of designated places that tell their 

stories. AAPI communities and the general public need to be awakened to 

the sites that provide insights to AAPI groups, from indigenous peoples in 

Hawai‘i, Guam, and Samoa to more recent refugees from Southeast Asia.4 And 

there will be exposure to large audiences; in 2015, some 307,247,252 visitors 

enjoyed the natural wonders and historic buildings, museums, memorials, 

and parks that NPS protects and interprets and that help explain America’s 

rich and diverse history.

 The explosive growth of Asian American and Pacific Islander American 

communities has fueled political, scholarly, economic, cultural, and transnational interest in many circles. The AAPI share of the American population in 

1970 was less than one percent (just over one million people) but, largely as 

an unintended consequence of the 1965 immigration reforms and the influx 

of refugees after the disastrous American interventions in Southeast Asia, by 

2015 there were close to 20 million AAPIs in the U.S.5 AAPIs have experienced 

the fastest growth rate among all “races” in the United States since 2000, and 

they appear to be continuing this trajectory into the foreseeable future. This 

“racial” demographic has enormous potential to influence future policy-
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 9

making in myriad arenas. The quality and quantity of designated historic sites 

with significant AAPI linkages will have considerable impact on the ways in 

which AAPI heritage is understood and embraced by all Americans.

Like other groups that have discovered or rediscovered their need to 

establish more intimate ties to their nation, their states, and their neighborhoods, AAPIs are looking for real places that harbor (or hide) stories about 

their histories in the United States. Recent NPS attempts to include communities whose legacies were historically and effectively marginalized include 

the 2013 American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study

and the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) theme 

study project, launched in June 2014.6

The Collection of Essays

What binds these seventeen essays about AAPI heritage together most 

coherently is the collective sense among AAPIs that their history, indeed 

American history writ large, must be understood in the context of the 

United States as it developed into an American empire. The nation’s origin 

as colonies within the expansive British Empire serves as a backdrop to the 

revolution of 1776 that gave birth to a new nation. That new entity immediately embarked upon the acquisition of enormous territories at the expense 

of the indigenous hosts and neighbors who we now call Native Americans. 

Even earlier, the vast Spanish empire reaching from Mexico to the Philippines 

became a regular conduit for Asians coming to the Americas, as early as the 

sixteenth century. But living in an imperial order inevitably places individuals 

and communities in conditions requiring serious, sometimes deadly, moral 

and political choices. AAPIs became consequential victims and participants 

as a result of those decisions, as will be explored in the essays in this AAPI 

theme study. As targets, objects, and agents, they have consistently faced 

difficult alternatives, beginning with the earliest sojourners and continuing 

with contemporary generations of immigrants and their children.

 In the mid-nineteenth century, as the United States extended its reach 

to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, international European competition for 

Asia and the islands en route to that vast continent unleashed a torrent of 

imperial adventures. At the same time, the insatiable hunger for new lands 

and resources committed the U.S. to absorb the indigenous inhabitants of the 

territories it coveted and seized or otherwise acquired, as well as others who 
10 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

had settled there. Manifest destiny assumed the racial inferiority of some of 

those peoples, but there was considerable tension over democratic principles 

and rights accruing to people already living on newly acquired “American” 

soil. Did the Constitution, as some Americans argued or feared, follow the 

flag? Would these “inferior” peoples insist on rights properly claimed only by 

European Americans? If so, would that unfortunate outcome contaminate 

core principles of racial hierarchy in the homeland? Indeed, the insistence on 

equal treatment under the law/Constitution has long been anathema to white 

supremacists.

 The quest for empire incorporated Asian Americans and Pacific 

Islanders into the American body politic, even as it recruited limited but 

important numbers of AAPIs into the U.S. as immigrants. A seemingly insatiable need for cheap labor, to develop not only the newly conquered territories 

but significant sections of the metropole in which Americans lived, created 

complex and difficult contradictions. For example, the expansion into the 

Pacific and Asia necessitated the annexation of islands like the Hawaiian 

archipelago, in 1898, with its indigenous population of Native Hawaiians as 

well as growing numbers of Asian immigrant workers. But it also effectively 

created an opportunity to exploit thousands of Chinese workers recruited 

to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and Japanese laborers to 

harvest agricultural crops to feed a burgeoning population in the 1890s.

 When periodic crises in the capitalist economy resulted in recessions 

and depressions, including in the 1870s, nativist racism surfaced more 

strongly, resulting in the nation’s establishment of its first exclusion laws. 

These laws eventually barred nearly all AAPIs from entering the country or 

becoming naturalized. When the Chinese and Japanese had been effectively 

excluded, Filipinos, as part of the American empire, were recruited to work 

as sugar and pineapple plantation workers in Hawai‘i and as migrant workers 

and fish cannery laborers on the West Coast and in Alaska. Even the Filipinos, 

“nationals” as colonial subjects, were eventually effectively cut off in 1934, 

albeit at the cost of a promise of future independence for the Philippines. 

These contradictions are formidable parts of the AAPI legacy; all too often 

they helped define who Americans could be by excluding AAPIs as unfit to 

enter or be naturalized.

 Given the salience of empire running through this volume, it is fitting 

that we begin with the essay “Imperialism” by Gary Okihiro on that very 
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 11

theme. Okihiro stakes out a wide purview, suggesting that the topic should 

begin with the Greeks and Romans and not, as some scholars insist, as a stage 

of late capitalism. And he contends that “[u]nlike most standard U.S. histories 

that depict imperialism as largely restricted to the nineteenth century and as 

an aberration, this chapter maintains imperialism, both as discourses and the 

material conditions, is a crucial aspect of the republic’s constitution. The U.S. 

was made in the idea and act of expansion.” Okihiro further argues that 

advocates like Alfred Thayer Mahan in his influential The Influence of Sea 

Power upon History (1890) combined lethal doses of imperialism, manifest 

destiny, and white supremacy to solidify American intentions to secure 

strategic and material supremacy in Asia and the Pacific. These intrusions and 

conquests of places like Hawai‘i not only disrupted indigenous cultures and 

societies, but displaced Native Hawaiian peoples by the thousands, forcing 

many to work on sailing ships in the Pacific Northwest, as well as on whaling 

fleets based in places like New Bedford, Massachusetts.

In her essay “Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders,” 

Amy Stillman takes us on a journey over thousands of miles of the Pacific 

Ocean, reminding us there were vibrant peoples and cultures existing long 

before European colonialism reared its fearsome head. We now know that 

long-range, non-instrument navigational skills developed more than a 

millennium ago and extended the capacity of 

blue ocean travel for Pacific Islanders well 

beyond visible horizons, long before the 

compass and sextant were invented.

 In “Battling Imperialism,” Davianna 

McGregor uses two examples from the 

Pacific to illustrate the long and involved 

histories of indigenous resistance to imperial 

agendas in Guam and Hawai‘i. Pagat is the 

sacred site of a former village on the northeast coast of Guam, one of the spoils of war 

acquired by the U.S. after the Spanish-American War of 1898, which also incorporated 

American Samoa, Cuba, and Puerto Rico 

into the American empire.7

 Pagat was listed 

by the National Park Service in the National 

A view from the ancient village 

of Pagat on Guam’s northeast 

coast. This site is important 

to the indigenous Chamorro 

people.

Photo by Brian R. Turner
12 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Register of Historic Places in 1974. In 2012 Pagat was targeted as a live-fire site 

for 6,000 U.S. marines who were being forced to leave Okinawa, Japan, and 

scheduled for redeployment in Guam. According to McGregor, this military 

use of Pagat was sacrilegious and provoked a firestorm of protest from indigenous Chamorro people. The military backed down and is now considering 

other sites. McGregor also uses the example of Kaho‘olawe, an island used 

by the U.S. Navy for live fire exercises from 1941 into the 1990s. Sacred to the 

indigenous Native Hawaiians, military use of the island was sacrilegious; a 

sustained movement led by Native Hawaiians succeeded in 1994 when the 

U.S. Navy signed title for Kaho‘olawe over to the Hawai‘i state government. 

These are but two examples of native resistance to ongoing American 

imperial designs on indigenous properties and cultures.8

Imperialism and colonialism constitute central themes in Erika Lee’s 

essay “Immigration, Exclusion, and Resistance.” She notes the early arrivals in 

North America via the Spanish empire and the large emigration of people 

from China, partly as a result of the destructive impact of British imperialist 

incursions such as the Opium Wars of 1839-42. The modest numbers of 

Korean immigrants may be explained by Japanese control of Korea, formalized in 1910, because of Japanese concerns that Korean workers would 

undermine Japanese labor mobility and aspirations. In the U.S., Korean 

immigrants became pawns in the looming collision of American and Japanese 

empires in the Pacific.9

 A new perspective on Asian American labor in the West can help us, 

Dorothy Fujita-Rony insists in her chapter “Labor, Labor Activism, and 

Workers.” She maintains that understanding “what happened to racialized 

workers through the United States empire also had an impact on U.S. culture 

as a whole.” One example is a lesson for those seeking places to designate as 

significant historic sites. In the first decades of Asian labor on the West Coast, 

migrant laborers, with no fixed 

homes or neighborhoods, 

formed immense and vital units 

deployed to tend and harvest 

crops and process seafood. 

We will need, she implies, 

some considerable wisdom, to 

imagine actual places that can 

Pokaneloa, also known as 

Loa‘a, is a collection of 

petroglyphs and cupules 

located on the top surface of 

this 3 x 4-meter boulder located 

in the hardpan area on the 

island of Kaho‘olawe. Studies 

indicate that the boulder 

may possess an archaeoastronomical significance in 

Hawaiian culture.

Photo by Stanton Enomoto
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 13

function to commemorate their pain, 

their loneliness, their contributions, 

and their agency. She reminds us as 

well that, in the imperial competition 

for land, resources, and labor, the United States was not the only destination 

point for migrants seeking jobs. For example, fewer than 100,000 Indians left 

for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Argentina, Panama, and Mexico, while over 

thirty-two million of their countrymen and women went to the Caribbean, 

Southeast Asia, and British and French colonies in the Pacific and Indian 

oceans. Truly, AAPI history helps us better understand the transnational 

nature of the American experience. 

The forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, 

primarily on the West Coast of the U.S., was the quintessential culmination 

of necessary consequences for the racialized war between the American and 

Japanese empires. While Brian Niiya does not overtly utilize imperialism as an 

analytic tool in his essay “World War II and AAPIs,” he reminds us that many 

white Americans had long sought to remove Japanese Americans from their 

midst: “This is our time to get things done that we have been trying to get 

done for a quarter of a century” – referencing one Californian’s outburst on 

February 6, 1942, urging mass removal only 13 days before Roosevelt signed 

Farm families of Japanese 

ancestry boarding buses in 

Byron, California, for Turlock 

Assembly Center 65 miles away. 

An official of the WCCA is 

checking the families into the bus 

by number.

WRA photo by Dorothea Lange, 

May 2, 1942. Courtesy of the U.S. 

National Archives and Records 

Administration.

Inset photo: Exclusion orders 

are posted on April 1, 1942. 

The order directs the removal 

of people in San Francisco of 

Japanese ancestry by noon on 

April 7, 1942.

WRA photo by Dorothea Lange, 

April 11,1942. Courtesy of the U.S. 

National Archives and Records 

Administration.
14 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Executive Order 9066, officially authorizing the army to begin. Niiya’s 

descriptions of the WWII internment/concentration camps, where West Coast 

Japanese Americans were forcibly sent, provide stark notice that, at least for 

some groups at some times, the notion of internal colonies invoked by Third 

World Liberation Front activists in the 1960s and 1970s could be graphically 

depicted. The experiences of AAPI groups and individuals, in other words, 

illuminate critical parts of American history shaded by neglect or design. 

WWII had demonized Japan and Japanese Americans and provided 

a brief racial respite to other Asian Americans. Japan was effectively using 

America’s anti-Asian racism, including the exclusion acts and the mass 

incarceration, to tout its own aggression as part of a race war in which it 

would lead other Asians to victory. In order to counter that propaganda, the 

U.S. amended the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by agreeing to admit a paltry 

105 people of Chinese descent. But even with this concession, immigrants of 

Chinese descent from any part of the globe (not, as with other nations, from 

that country alone) counted against that quota. Still, and very importantly, it 

did permit resident Chinese Americans to become naturalized citizens. That 

respite, however, was short-lived because the American empire’s preeminence as the world’s only super power was being contested by the Soviet 

empire and what was perceived to be a monolithic global communist threat. 

Rick Baldoz explains in his essay “The Cold War” that Asian Americans 

were part of “long-standing stereotypes characterizing Asians as an ‘enemy 

race’ that threatened to destabilize the global political order.” This unfortunate development followed a brief period of several years when post-WWII 

policies appeared to favor Asian American communities, whose leaders urged 

the celebration of wartime heroism demonstrated by ethnic groups loyal to 

their American homeland.

Daryl Maeda’s essay, “AAPIs and Cultural Retention/Assimilation,” 

explores the origins and meanings of Asian American and Pacific Islander

Top left: Topaz—the Central 

Utah Camp—as it appeared in 

the 1940s and recently. The site is 

a National Historic Landmark.

WRA photo courtesy of the U.S. 

National Archives and Records 

Administration.

Top right: Current photo from 

the collections of the National 

Historic Landmarks Program.
American activism in the 1960s and 1970s. While he correctly points to 

influences from Black Power, Brown Power, Native American protests, civil 

rights advocacy, and the anti-war movements, he also notes the linkages to 

anti-imperial/anti-colonial struggles roiling much of the globe. These 

struggles, loosely combined and acknowledged domestically as the “Third 

World Liberation Front” (TWLF), gave rise to a pan-ethnic, pan-racial, united 

front confronting colonialism abroad and what some leaders termed “internal 

colonialism” within the United States. This direct comparison energized large 

numbers of both old and new left activists. The student strike in 1968 at San 

Francisco State College (now University) heralded a new era of unity for 

activist students of color in the U.S. and generated a host of new movements 

to bring about positive change for AAPI communities. Followed soon after by 

student strikes at the University of California, Berkeley, and then across the 

country, the TWLF movement proved to be emblematic of a generation of 

social justice activism.

 While primarily focusing on the post-1965 influx of AAPI immigrants 

Students gathered recently in 

the quad at San Francisco State 

University to protest budget 

cuts proposed for the College of 

Ethnic Studies. Similar protests 

in 1968 and 1969 led to the 

introduction of ethnic studies at 

San Francisco State and other 

colleges and universities around 

the country.

Photo by Tomo Hirai/Nichi Bei 

Weekly.
16 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

and refugees, Linda Vo’s essay “Asian American 

Activism and Civic Participation/Battling for 

Political Rights, and Citizenship” points to the 

fact that the wars in Southeast Asia were direct 

results of the clash between imperial and colonial 

ambitions inherent in American/Western and 

Soviet/Chinese empires. These wars, like the 

previous one in Korea, led to economic and 

political immigrants arriving in the U.S., as well 

as increasing numbers of Amerasian infants and 

children born to American GIs and Asian women. 

These children, despised and abandoned in their 

Asian homelands, were adopted mainly by white 

families in the U.S. Tens of thousands of Southeast 

Asians found their first temporary homes in four 

military bases: Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Camp 

Pendleton in California, Elgin Air Force Base in 

Florida, and Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.

Moving beyond the initial confrontation and 

intersections between AAPIs and the American 

empire, the other essays focus primarily on the existence of these communities within the U.S. Not surprisingly, many of the narratives hark back to 

troubled times when neighborhoods and the nation attempted to remove or 

eradicate AAPIs as too foreign and too unalterably different to be assimilated 

into the American body politic. For the millions of Asian migrants seeking 

better economic conditions away from their homelands, their reception in 

many countries was unfortunately similar to hostilities faced by compatriots 

in the U.S. One result is the striking accomplishments in the field of Chinese 

diaspora archeology in places like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Doug 

Ross also mentions Japanese American archaeology in passing, noting that 

much of it deals with an entire cottage industry involving the WWII incarceration of that ethnic group. In his essay “Archeology as Methodology for 

AAPI,” Ross notes that much of Chinese American archeology centers on 

early Chinese mining camps and Chinese laborers on the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific led from Sacramento, California, up and through 

the formidable Sierra Madre mountain range and eastward to meet the Union 

Lafcadio Hearn called attention 

to the Filipino settlement near 

New Orleans in an essay 

published in Harper’s Weekly on 

March 31, 1883. Hearn’s house 

still stands in New Orleans.

Photo from the collections of the 

National Register of Historic Places.
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 17

Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit in Utah, finally connecting both 

coasts in 1869. An analysis of artifacts sifted from old sites, especially in 

Nevada, California, and other western states, seems to confirm that early 

Chinese laborers continued traditional cultural lifestyles even as they adopted 

western foodstuffs, clothing, and other cultural elements.

 In the face of often hostile and intermittently violent lynchings and 

“drivings out,”10 AAPIs used old cultural forms and newly learned American 

strategies to protect themselves and advance their community standing. 

Nayan Shah distinguishes four analytically separate categories of such 

advocacy and social movement in his essay “Establishing Communities.” They 

include: 1) social, mutual aid, and spiritual institutions; 2) transformation of 

the physical landscape; 3) labor, advocacy, political, and nationalist organizations; and 4) commercial and entertainment cultures. Among the earliest 

mutual aid societies was the Sociedad de Beneficencia de los Hispano Filipinos, established in 1870 in the tiny, deliberately hidden, village of St. Malo, just 

outside New Orleans, Louisiana. Lafcadio Hearn visited this remote village in 

1883 and wrote an essay about the early Filipino settlers. He included several 

images of drawings by Charles Graham after sketches by J.O. Davidson. The 

essay was published in Harper’s Weekly on March 31, 1883.11

These men had probably jumped ship to escape terrible conditions as 

seamen aboard Spanish galleons, while Spain maintained colonial control of 

Mexico and the Philippines. The Manila Galleon trade flourished in an era 

predating the American colonies and through the first decades of the young 

nation, 1565-1815.

 AAPI communities were highly diverse from their earliest beginnings. 

The workers who created railroads, canneries, farms, ranches, sugar and 

pineapple plantations, seafood industries, and myriad urban businesses are 

occasionally recognized in our histories, on markers, and as memorials. However, there were also numbers of Asian immigrants who arrived with money 

and savvy. They were armed with financial and social capital, ambitious to 

do more than earn a basic wage. Lane Hirabayashi chronicles some of these 

entrepreneurial ventures on the U.S. continent with a wide-ranging account 

of ventures, including the owners and operators of early gold mine claims. 

In his essay “Asian Americans and Agriculture, Innovation, and Business,” 

Hirabayashi explains that they extend to more recent businesses, like the 

Vietnamese businessman who built a veritable empire based on the chili-
18 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

based Sriracha sauce and the Hmong from Southeast Asia who created farms 

in California and urban enterprises in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. 

A few became seriously wealthy: some formed family and kinship-related 

corporations—such as the Patels from India who, beginning in the 1950s, 

created a formidable national network, now owning as much as two-thirds of 

the budget hotels and perhaps as much as forty percent of all hotel and motel 

rooms in America.

 In her essay on AAPI architectural legacies in the chapter “Architecture 

and Landscape Architecture,” Gail Dubrow focuses on the singular achievements of Japanese Americans. Other AAPI groups also have distinguished 

accomplishments in this area, but Dubrow seizes this opportunity to use one 

ethnic group as a model for research into and potential designation of properties to highlight the AAPI experience. For example, she makes two critically 

important points that may usefully be extended to other AAPI ethnic groups. 

First, American society followed many European counterparts in widespread 

fascination for Japanese design in arts and architecture (Japonisme) but, 

unlike Europe, the U.S. was forced to deal with significant Japanese immigration that was met with widespread hostility and racism. Second, while some 

of the built environment using Japanese design principles was created by 

Japanese or Japanese American professionals, much more was attributed to 

white artists, architects, and businessmen, who had free and easy access to 

these styles while their Japanese or Japanese American counterparts faced 

varying degrees of discrimination. Dubrow also points to the fact that design 

professionals contributed to the growth of Japanese styles in the built environment or the landscape, but much more credit should be assigned to the 

communities where vernacular processes allowed a multitude of carpenters, 

contractors, gardeners, nursery owners, Buddhist and Shinto priests and 

parishioners, and donors, to design and build large numbers of Japanese 

gardens and buildings across much of Hawai‘i and the West Coast.

Indigenous people found themselves literally outgunned in the numerous battles and struggles against colonial onslaughts and were involved in 

continuous efforts to protect dwindling resources, including land, people, 

cultures, and heritages. As Mary Yu Danico points out in the essay “The 

Interconnections: Cultural Production, Exchange, and Appropriation,” Asian 

immigrants and refugees were quickly put to similar tests. Their collective 

acts surely included resistance to restrictive laws and policies, exploitative 
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 19

labor practices, racist wartime conditions, and degrading images in the media 

and popular culture. But they also responded to hostile assimilation forces 

with wide-ranging claims to maintaining and creating their own languages, 

education systems, theater, writings, political movements, and media expressions. The sheer range of these acts of resistance to forced assimilation into a 

mythical American mainstream is astonishing. Collectively, they constitute a 

notable testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

 In Catherine Ceniza Choy’s essay, “New Immigration, Migration, and 

Refugees,” she notes that both Korean and Southeast Asian communities 

developed rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, largely because 

of the wars between empires representing communist and capitalist interests. 

The large Filipino American community owes much of its size, complexity, 

and vibrancy to the colonial history of their homeland within the American 

empire. But her essay focuses on the development of the five largest ethnic 

groups within the AAPI demographic: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, 

and Vietnamese. Japanese Americans are the sixth; until the 1970s, Japanese 

Bok Kai Temple.This traditional 

Chinese temple is located in 

Marysville, California.

Photo by Elaine Jackson-Retondo.
20 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Americans were the single largest AAPI group. When the 1965 Immigration 

Act reforms were implemented, they unleashed dramatic increases from 

the rest of Asia. So, while there are imperial roots in all their legacies, Choy 

emphasizes the fact that these AAPI communities have their own trajectories 

within the U.S.

 The final essay in this theme study is an overview of AAPI political 

history as it intersects with mainstream political institutions. Kim Geron 

notes in his essay “Insider/Outsider Politics,” that few Asian Americans were 

elected or appointed to local, territorial, state, or national bodies before 

WWII, even in areas like Hawai‘i, where AAPI populations far exceeded 

whites or haoles. A large part of the reason was, to be sure, the existence of 

racist laws preventing the large population of Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens. In Hawai‘i, the indigenous Kanaka Maoli had always 

been significant parts of the elected and/or appointed political officials, even 

as ultimate political authority resided in the minority white community. Some 

progress was made after WWII, especially in Hawai‘i where returning veterans were supported by a large and organized labor union work force. But the 

astonishing growth in sheer numbers of AAPIs in the late twentieth and early 

twenty-first centuries has been accompanied by noticeable increases in federal, 

state, and local officials from, now, nearly all major AAPI ethnic groups.

How this Theme Study Can Contribute to Historic Preservation 

Activities in the U.S.

This AAPI theme study of seventeen essays is intended to inspire all 

Americans to consider the history of the many Asian American and Pacific 

Islander groups that contributed to the development of the United States and 

to the rich diversity of this nation’s cultural heritage. Historic properties related

to AAPI heritage have been neglected among many historic preservation 

initiatives, and this theme study should inspire their designation as National 

Historic Landmarks and their listing in the National Register of Historic 

Places. To that end, the concluding chapter of this collection addresses the 

potential for National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic 

Places listing among properties associated with AAPI history.

Multi-volume Asian American encyclopedias already exist; they complement a rapidly growing store of monographs, magazines, journals, social 

media resources, websites, documentaries, and blogs filling the growing 
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 21

demand for content and analyses of AAPI issues. In addition to recognition 

through the NHL and National Register programs, historic houses, museums, 

national parks, and other places associated with AAPI heritage are sorely 

needed to provide the general public with easily accessible, readily digested, 

readily affordable, educational, recreational, and historically responsible 

information about this rapidly growing “racial” demographic in America. 

Providing these resources will help AAPIs better understand their places in 

American history. This understanding will empower the U.S. to act positively 

to secure their roles going forward in complex times, when issues of race, 

class, gender, and religion make increasing demands on the political and 

moral character and stamina of the entire nation.
22 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Finding a Path Forward: Asian American/ 

Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks 

Theme Study 

Essays and Authors

Essay 1

Introduction to the Theme Study

Franklin Odo

Essay 2

Contact, Imperialism, Migration, and “Exploration”

Gary Okihiro

Essay 3

Early Foundations and Mobilities of Pacific Islanders

Amy Stillman

Essay 4

Archeology as Methodology for AAPI

Doug Ross

Essay 5

Immigration, Exclusion, and Resistance

Erika Lee

Essay 6

Establishing Communities

Nayan Shah

Essay 7

Labor, Labor Activism, and Workers

Dorothy Fujita-Rony

Essay 8

Asian Americans and Agriculture, Innovation and Business

Lane Hirabayashi

Essay 9

Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Gail Dubrow
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 23

Essay 10

Battling Imperialism

Davianna McGregor

Essay 11

World War II and AAPIs

Brian Niiya

Essay 12

The Cold War

Richard Baldoz

Essay 13

AAPIs and Cultural Retention/Assimilation

Mary Yu Danico

Essay 14

Asian American Activism and Civic Participation/Battling for Political Rights, 

and Citizenship

Daryl Maeda

Essay 15

New Immigration, Migration and Refugees

Linda Vo

Essay 16

Community Development including Community Building and Dismantling

Catherine Ceniza Choy

Essay 17

Insider/Outsider Politics

Kim Geron

Conclusion

Registration Requirements for AAPI Properties
24 | NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

Endnotes

1 Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose and National Book Award in 1977 for The Spectator Bird. 2 Paul Loether, Chief of the National Register of Historic Places and National 

Historic Landmarks Division, assumed authority over this project; Alexandra Lord, 

Branch Chief, directly supervised this project until she moved to the Smithsonian’s 

National Museum of American History. Barbara Wyatt, Historian/Reviewer, provided guidance as the essays were prepared for publication. Theodora Chang is Advisor, 

NPS, and principally responsible for bringing the project to fruition. The Advisory 

Panel was instrumental in setting initial guidelines for the content, suggesting scholars who might write the essays and reviewers for the essays. 

 3 There are, now, increasing numbers of such useful reference works. See, for 

example, Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia, ed. Mary Danico. Los Angeles: 

Sage Publications, 2015; Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, ed. 

Huping Ling and Allan Austin. NY: Routledge, 2010; and The Oxford Handbook of 

Asian American History, ed. David Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma. NY: Oxford University 

Press, 2015. 

 4 Immigrants and refugees from West Asia, the region usually referred to as the 

Middle East, is sometimes considered part of this complex group. This region might 

include Afghanistan and Iran to the east, stretching to Morocco in the west. At times 

the reference is to the “ethnic” group and Arab Americans or Iranian Americans 

become the subjects or agents; at other times, the reference is to a religion: Islam 

can then become the reference point and the fact that the largest Muslim country 

in the world is Indonesia, clearly within Asia, makes the point. These then, make it 

clear that, in the U.S., mosques should be apprehended as historical sites in addition 

to Indian American Hindu “gurdwaras.” The fact that Asian Americanists have 

abandoned the terms, “Orient” and “Oriental” should not obscure the fact that, as 

Edward Said made clear, “Orientalism” was first systematically applied to the Middle 

East. The fact that a number of key nations, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, are also in Africa, complicates the issue. See, for an early exploration, Sunaina 

Maira and Magid Shihade, “Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies: Thinking Race, 

Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.” In Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 9, 

Number 2, June 2006. 

 5 “The Pew Research Center’s 2012 Asian-American Survey is based on telephone interviews conducted by landline and cell phone with a nationally representative sample of 3,511 Asian adults ages 18 and older living in the United States. The 

survey was conducted in all 50 states, including Alaska and Hawai‘i, and the District 

of Columbia. The survey was designed to include representative subsamples of the 

six largest Asian groups in the U.S. population: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, 

Korean and Vietnamese. The survey also included Asians from other Asian subgroups.” This report was severely criticized by AAPI scholars who condemned its 

rosy message of super-achieving, model-minority, communities. 

 6 See NPS websites for more: www.nps.gov.

 7 More directly relevant to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom is the 

NHL, Iolani Palace. There is now a lesson plan about the coup and annexation by 

the U.S. in the 1890s. In the lesson, students have opportunities to investigate American expansionism, how indigenous cultures responded to colonization, and how 

some historic sites hold great power as sites of contemporary activism and political 

protest. This is the 161st lesson plan from the NPS. Find out more about Iolani Palace
A Brief Glimpse: AAPI National Historic Landmarks Theme Study | 25

at the new Teaching with Historic Places website: http://nps.gov/subjects/teachingwithhistoricplaces/lesson-plan_iolani-palace.htm

 8 Of course, the United States was but one of several Western powers competing in Asia and the Pacific. Samoa is a good example of societies torn asunder by 

imperial contestation; where the sun first rises over Guam in the American empire, it 

finally sets over American Samoa just over the international dateline. Initially divided 

between the U.S. and Germany, Samoa [formerly Western Samoa] is an independent 

nation while American Samoa remains firmly under American control.

 9 Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism 

in Japanese America. NY: Oxford University Press, 2005. 

 10 See, especially, Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese 

Americans. NY: Random House, 2007.

 11 Bronner, Simon, ed. Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and 

Editorials. Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior

Cultural Resources, Partnerships, and Science Directorate

1849 C Street, NW

Washington, DC 20240

www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/index.htm

EXPERIENCE YOUR AMERICATM