Mixed Race Studies

“We Have Created Our Own Meaning for Hapa Identity”: The Mobilization of Self-Proclaimed Hapas within Institutions of Higher Education

Amerasia Journal
Volume 35, Number 2 (2009)
pages 191-213

Patricia E. Literte, Associate Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This article examines Hapa student organizations on two university campuses—one public and one private. Drawing on qualitative data, this research interrogates the processes whereby young people who identify as Hapa come to: (1) recognize that race has importance in their lives, (2) rearticulate or reinterpret dominant racial thinking, and (3) translate their racial identities and experiences into organizations to negotiate the concrete and symbolic implications of race. This research also examines how institutions of higher education, in particular, student services that have a racial orientation (e.g., Asian Pacific American Student Services), are responding to Hapa organizations.

He’s [Keanu Reeves] the face of globalization. Born in Beirut to an English mother and a father of Hawaiian and Chinese descent, he’s a citizen of the world.

From Keanu Reeves, to Tiger Woods, to Barack Obama, multiracial people have increasingly received media attention, and as reflected in this description of Reeves, multiracial people are perceived as manifestations of the grand melting pot. Yet they can also be unsettling figures, symbolizing the breakdown of racial, cultural, and national boundaries which are central to the construction of identities.

While society often fixates on public figures who are mixed race, the creation of multiracial identities is the story not just of individuals, but of a post-Civil Rights generation. While racially mixed people have always existed, a concurrent rise in interracial marriages and racial tolerance in recent decades has resulted in a population that increasingly seeks to assert multiracial identities. As a group, multiracial people tend to be disproportionately young and concentrated on the West Coast, particularly in California and Hawaii. According to data from the 2000 Census, 26.3 percent of the two or more races population is between the ages of 18 to 34 versus 23.7 percent for the total population. These age based discrepancies are larger with younger persons. 15.5 percent of the two or more races population is between 10 and 17, compared to 11.5 percent of the general population, and 25.2 percent of the two or more races population is under age ten, in contrast to 14.1 percent of the total population. The median age for the two or more races population is 23.4…

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Multiraciality Reigns Supreme? Mixed-Race Japanese Americans and the Cherry Blossom Queen Pagent

Amerasia Journal
1997
Volume 23, No. 1
pp. 113-128

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Lecturer in Sociology
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

The notes of the koto echo through the hall and I am mesmerized by the vision on stage.  Beautiful Japanese women dressed in kimono who seem to glide across the stage as if it were ice, their arms outstretched as if to begin a hug so that their ornate sleeves flap slightly in the breeze.  But then I squint to get a closer look, and I suddenly can hear the synthesized drum beat accompanying the plaintive sounds of the koto and can see that not all of the faces look completely Japanese.

Since 1968, a northern California pageant has chosen a queen to reign over the Cherry Blossom Festival held each April in San Francisco’s Japantown.  The queen has come to symbolize northern California’s Japanese American community in many ways.  However, in the past five years half of the candidates, and two of the queens, have not been racially 100 percent Japanese.  The increased participation of mixed-race Japanese Americans has an effect on both the mixed-race and the mono-racial participants in the Queen Pagent as well as the community at large.  This article examines how mixed-race Japanese American women define themselves in what has traditionally been a monoracial setting.  In the context of the pageant, what does it mean to be Japanese American?  How is that defined and how is that definition changing due to the increased participation of mixe-race Japanese Americans?…

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Chameleon’s Fate: Transnational Mixed-Race Vietnamese Identities

Amerasia Journal
University of Califonia, Los Angeles Asian American Studies Center Press
ISSN: 0044-7471
2005
Issue Volume 31, Number 2
Pages 51-62

Fiona I. B. Ngô, Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies & Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The chameleon’s fate is an apt metaphor for the lives of mixed-race Vietnamese children, many of whom were born of these kind of brutal cultural contact. In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, a number of mixed-race children told the story of the war. Though the story of the war is physically signified by these individuals, the meanings produced through mixed-race identity are multiple and unfixed. The fluidity of meaning comes partially through shifting historical and geographical contextualizations of transnational mixed-race identities.