Pacific-ing Asian Pacific American History

The positioning of the Pacific Islands and Pacific Islander Americans within the disciplinary arena called Asian American Studies can best be described as vexed. Heated debates between Pacific Islander members around a proposal to change the name of the Association for Asian American Studies in 2003–2004, by adding "Pacific" or "Pacific Islander" between "Asian" and "American," represent only the latest periodic recurrence of ongoing negotiations around the positioning of Pacific Islands Studies scholars and scholarship, and the Pacific Islander communities about whom the scholarship focuses.

There exists, to be sure, merit for various arguments that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have different experiences, especially in the contexts of U.S. history and contemporary society, and that potentially significant insights about each group—internal heterogeneity notwithstanding—might be lost if the two groups were combined within one field of study. Such perspectives are often related to advocacy for outcomes that are particular to each group. Among Asian Americans, the paradigmatic experience of immigration has informed both historically racist exclusion from mainstream U.S. society and perpetuation of the stereotype that Asians are forever foreigners and inassimilable aliens. Pacific Islanders, on the other hand, assert a paradigmatic experience of indigeneity that is informing contemporary political movements, particularly among Native Hawaiians and the Chamoru people of Guam, for self-determination and sovereignty.

Underlying arguments based on the contemporary condition of Asian American and Pacific Islander presence in the U.S., however, is a centuries-old history of engagement and entanglement among the two groups that begins in the Pacific region and continues on U.S. soil. Moreover, such a history even predates systematic migration to, and settlement on, the North American continent, from across the Atlantic as well as the Pacific oceans. It is crucial to remember that prior to the invention of air travel in the twentieth century, movement across the Pacific was on the earth's surface, by some mode of ocean-going vessel. When European explorers during the age of exploration entered the region in the 1500s, developments in the technologies of cartography and mapping opened the Pacific to subsequent vessels: maps and charts were key to marking locations that could be reached anew as well as repeatedly. When Asian peoples began moving toward North America, they, too, moved across the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The historical records tell us that all of this movement of people and vessels involved not only travel but also stopping in at islands between the two continental landmasses of Asia and the Americas.

In the path-breaking article, "Where and When I Enter," Gary Okihiro deftly proposed a radical conceptualization of the beginnings of Asian American history.¹ The work of historical recovery of Asian Americans' presence in the United States gained momentum with the activism of ethnic minority groups in the late 1960s. However, while historians initially focused on documenting first arrivals of various Asian peoples and subsequent waves of immigration, Okihiro pointed to moments in which Asian peoples entered the consciousness of European colonists in North America, centuries prior to the actual corporeal presence of Asians in the Americas. The widespread use of Okihiro's article in university-level Asian American History courses, and its repeated anthologizing in edited volumes, speaks to such a conceptual move meriting sustained consideration. By this logic, it also follows that a history of Asian Americans must acknowledge that encounters among Asian and Pacific Islander peoples are very much a part of the entire process of Asian peoples moving into American spaces and spheres of cultural influence, and that those encounters took place not only on continental American lands but in American-controlled Pacific Islands locations as well.

By the use of maps, I propose to highlight some of the ways in which a history of Asian peoples in the Americas must simultaneously be a history of Asian peoples interacting with Pacific Islanders in the Pacific as well as...