In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program in 2024, we are launching this digital resource to better educate the MSU community about Asian Pacific American experiences and shed light on the history of APA Studies programing and education at MSU.
The information hosted on this site has been collected from MSU Archives (image on the left) and oral histories shared by university alumni, students, faculty, and staff. As racial climate and demography change on campus and across the country, an urgent need exists to create an accessible and engaging educational resource that better informs the MSU community about Asian Pacific American histories in local, national, and global contexts. We hope this website can help the MSU community develop connections with the past, present and future of the APAS Program.
Throughout this website, we use the term Asian Pacific Islander Desi American/Asian (APIDA/A) to recognize the diversity of the entire community we are sharing resources about. Words matter and the terms used to describe Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have changed over time, as our Program’s archive shows.
When Race and Ethnic Studies programs and departments were first being created around the country in the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies emerged as a field of scholarship focused on the history and experiences of Americans of primarily East Asian descent.
When our program was founded in 2004, Asian Pacific American was held as a more inclusive term for its recognition of people who trace their heritage to regions across the Pacific. Since this time, APIDA/A has emerged as an even more inclusive term that intentionally considers people of South Asian (Desi) descent, as well as those who have migrated more recently from Asia (hence the /A at the end). This diversity of terms reflects the diversity of our communities at Michigan State, which consciously identifies as APIDA/A in an attempt to build solidarity across the multiple axes of difference that exist within and across this community.
While no term can be complete, the terms Asian American, Asian Pacific American and APIDA/A have all, in their own ways, strived to create an identity built on the similarities of our histories and ongoing experiences of migration while simultaneously attending to the complex intersectionalities and different positionalities that are included within these terms. At different points throughout this website, we will be using older terminology to refer to the APIDA/A community and its members – terms such as Asian American or Asian Pacific American – in order to match the terminology of the archival documents. However, we continue to hold space for the complexity of all these terms and recognize the intentional change in labels over time throughout.
Recognizing the imperfect nature of any label, we remain committed to building community and identity in deliberate and reflexive ways.