The Emerging Hapa Community

Wei Ming Dariotis

In the year 2000, there were around 2.1 million Asian Pacific Americans of mixed heritage, or what today is increasingly being called “hapa.” Originating in Hawai‘i to describe those of mixed white and Hawaiian descent, the term hapa has caught on strongly during the last decade to describe those of part-Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry. The 2000 Census was the first time that the U.S. Census Bureau attempted to count the numbers of both mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity. It was about time: not only is the hapa population growing fast, it’s already sizeable. Hapas constitute the second-largest APA subgroup, behind only the Chinese. By the next Census, depending on immigration and birthrate trends, hapas could very well top all other APA sub-groups in population size.

What are the implications for how we discuss race and ethnicity today? Indeed, the emerging APA hapa community makes the terms that are used today — by the U.S. Census, by the general populace — not just problematic, but potentially obsolete.

Hapa is a Native Hawaiian word, originally meaning simply “part” or “mixed,” with no racial or ethnic meaning. It became associated with the phrase hapa haole during the influx of European immigrants, many of whom intermarried with the ali’i, or land-owning class, of Native Hawaiians. Later, as Japanese immigrants were imported as plantation labor, the Japanese Hawaiian population adopted the term hapa, mostly to refer to people of mixed Japanese and European heritage. Today, the word hapa includes AfroAsians, EurAsians, Latin Asians, Native Asians and mixed APAs. The hapa community also includes trans-racial adoptees, such as Koreans or Chinese raised by white parents.

The same situation exists with the nearly 900,000 Pacific Islanders, but to an even greater degree. More than half of Pacific Islanders are mixed with some other race. Around one-third of Pacific Islanders, in fact, also claim part-Asian descent. Meanwhile, the percentage of Pacific Islanders of only mixed-ethnic background, i.e. Hawaiian-Samoan, is just around one percent. (Note: A detailed methodology for calculating this population using the 2000 Census data will be set out in the book.)

Because the 2000 Census was the first year that the Census Bureau counted people of mixed heritage, it is difficult to determine the growth rate of the hapa population. What we do know is that the number of children living in mixed-race families (which includes non-APAs of mixed-race) was around 460,000 in 1970. This more than doubled to 996,070 children in 1980, and doubled again to reach almost 2 million in 1990, when it accounted for 4 percent of all children in households.

Early Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese, Filipinos and Sikh Indians, came to the United States under restrictive laws that prevented significant numbers of women of these populations from arriving, until the Immigration Act of 1965 significantly altered this situation. Despite anti-miscegenation laws that technically prohibited racial intermarriage as late as 1967, these male laborers often found ways around these tactics designed to leave them in so-called “bachelor societies.”

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Early Sikh immigrants to California often intermarried with Mexican American women; business partners often sought pairs of sisters to marry. This occurred in the early part of the 20th century, particularly in California’s Central Valley, where there is a large, fairly-affluent land-owning farming community composed of their descendents. More recent information on Sikh intermarriage is hard to come by. There were 1.9 million Asian Indians counted in the U.S. Census in 2000; of these, about 11.6 percent were Asian Indian hapa.

One Out of Three: Japanese Americans

Nearly one third (30.6 percent) of Japanese Americans are hapa. This number reflects the high outmarriage rate in the post-internment camp era among the Japanese nisei (second generation) and sansei (third generation), but it also includes the children of the so-called Japanese war brides from the 1950s and 1960s. Many Japanese American hapas grew up on U.S. army bases in Japan or the United States, isolated from the larger Japanese American community.

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After Japanese Americans, Filipino Americans report the next highest percentage of people of mixed heritage among APAs, at 21.8 percent. But due to their larger numbers, Filipino hapas — more than half a million — rank as the single largest contingent. The U.S.-Philippines War (1899-1902) gave rise to a small but significant population of African American Filipinos, living mostly in the Philippines. Their ancestors were African American soldiers who were convinced to desert during the war, because of their own or their parents’ recent status as slaves. Filipino American outmarriage was also encouraged by the limited number of Filipinas immigrating into the United States, relative to the number of Filipino men.

Less than 1 in 10: Vietnamese Americans

Of the six largest Asian American groups, Vietnamese Americans are the least likely to report being of mixed heritage, at only 8.3 percent. While the majority of these may be of the Vietnamese Amerasian population, born during the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, some are also from current Vietnamese American outmarriage, and some also derive from earlier French colonial involvement in Vietnam. Somewhat undocumented is the large number of people of mixed Chinese and Vietnamese heritage, descended from large Chinese settlements over several generations in Vietnam.

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What is currently emerging as a hapa community challenges traditional definitions of community that are based on shared ethnicity, culture, tradition, language, food, etc. Yet we are still faced by the limits of this emerging community. Who belongs? Who is outside this community? Trans-racial adoptees certainly fit into the idea of “Asians of mixed heritage,” which is used as a synonym for hapas. Can we legitimately claim Tiger Woods as fellow hapa, even if he chooses a term like “Cablinasian” to describe himself?

From looking at the statistics on hapas, those who are part-white outnumber all other hapas by a large margin. About 58 percent of hapas today, or 1.21 million, are part-white. While hapas of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander descent and Filipino ancestry rank first and second, overall, hapas of East Asian ancestry, especially Chinese and Japanese, predominate. What this means is that our community is primarily East Asian and white, not only in numbers, but also in positions of leadership and power. Most of the academics leading hapa studies are EurAsian — white and Chinese or Japanese. As a result, efforts to construct a hapa community must pay particular attention to the differences within our community. Like the APA community at large, hapas also have to contend with divisive hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality and even ethnicity.

Wei Ming Dariotis is an assistant professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.