| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
Who Are Asian Americans?
Asian Americans are a vastly heterogeneous group comprised of individuals whose ancestors originate from a variety of cultural, linguistic, religious, and political backgrounds (Espiritu, 1992). The Asian American population has been through a number of changes as the earliest recorded immigrants from Asia reached America’s shores in 1820 (as reported by the Immigration Commission; Leung, 1989). Among these changes were a reclassification of racial status (see Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind vs. the United States Supreme Court; Takaki, 1998) and an incorporation of newer Asian immigrants into the larger Asian American racial label. In fact, according to new estimates just recently released by the United States Census Bureau, the nation’s Asian population has continued to grow at a much faster rate than the population as a whole. The number of people who reported being Asian3 grew 12.5 percent, from 11.5 to 13.5 million between the Censuses taken in 2000 and July 1, 2003 (39 month period: U.S. Bureau of Census, 2003).
The 11.5 million reported in Census 2000 included 10.2 million people, or 3.6 percent, who reported only Asian and 1.7 million people, or 0.6 percent, who reported Asian and at least one other race (this information is not yet available for the newly released 13.5 million estimate; Reeves & Bennett, 2004). These trends highlight the importance of studying the experiences of Asian Americans as they are vastly changing the landscape of society in the United States. What is particularly striking about these statistics is that the high rate of immigration has substantially contributed to the exponential growth of the Asian American population over the past 3 years.