HISTORY

Founder & Chair: Bill Watanabe, first full-time Executive Director: Huy Pham, & first volunteer Executive Director & now Past President: Michelle Magalong at Isamu Noguchi Plaza, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, CA - Labor Day, 2023

APIAHiP was formed in 2007 when Asian and Pacific Islander American leaders noticed a lack of representation at state and national professional convenings on historic preservation and heritage conservation. With this gap, those founding members developed an API Caucus at the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference the same year.

In June 2010, the API Caucus developed and hosted the first Asian Pacific Islander American National Historic Preservation Forum in San Francisco, California. This Forum brought together for the first time Asian and Pacific Islander Americans across the United States and its territories to share various issues and approaches to recognizing, preserving, and celebrating the places that best tell the stories of not only our diaspora but also our shared heritage.

In October 2018, before our fifth biennial Forum, APIAHiP obtained 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and officially registered as a nonprofit organization out of Los Angeles, California.

By September 2023, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place program, APIAHiP was empowered to hire full-time staff for the first time ever to carry on the mission and legacy set forth by its founders, board members, volunteers, supporters, and partners from around the world.

Today, APIAHiP is a multi-generational, pan-ethnic, and interdisciplinary community of preservationists, urban planners, historians, educators, activists, and advocates who share the common goal of elevating Asian and Pacific Islander American history and heritage through a place-based ethic.

MISSIOn

Board Members: Michelle Magalong, Christina Park, and Bill Watanabe join the Rancho Cucamonga Historical Society and other local advocacy groups to save the Chinatown House, one of the last surviving examples of historic Chinese worker housing in the region.

APIAHiP is dedicated to protecting historic places and cultural resources significant to Asian and Pacific Islander Americans through historic preservation and heritage conservation by:

  1. creating an information-sharing network that can provide support for established and emerging historic preservation programs;

  2. establishing educational programs for raising public awareness and impacting historic preservation policy on local, state, and national levels;

  3. increasing public and private resources that enable “historic preservation” and “heritage conservation” practices to meaningfully include educational and community development activities that preserve, conserve, and protect tangible and intangible historic and cultural resources.

REACH

Board Members: Lisa Hasegawa, Tejpaul Bainiwal, Michelle Magalong, and Bill Watanabe ride the historic cable car during Forum 2018 in San Francisco.

The moniker “Asian and Pacific Islander Americans” or “APIA” within the APIAHiP name was carefully chosen by our founding members, who observed that Pacific Islanders were often underrepresented or excluded in the discourse surrounding American and Asian American histories. Therefore, placing the “A” for American after “API” was a deliberate choice to reaffirm inclusivity in the organization’s mission. While continuing to honor the namesake, we also recognize the diverse perspectives for self-determination of any persons, groups, or communities that we serve who may identify with APIA, AAPI, API, APA, and AANHPI including:

  • Asian Americans, Asians in America, including:

    • East Asians: Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, Korean, Macanese, Mongolian, Ryukyuan, Taiwanese, and Tibetan.

    • South Asians: Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Fijian, Maldivian, Nepalese, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan.

    • Southeast Asians: Bruneian, Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Iu Mien, Karen, Laotian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, Timorese, and Vietnamese.

  • Pacific Islanders, Pacific Islander Americans, including:

    • CHamoru / Guamanian / Saipanese / Mariana Islander; Fijian; French Polynesian; Hawai’ian / Native Hawai’ian; Marshallese; Micronesian; Palauan; Polynesian; Polynesian with New Zealand citizenship: Māori / Tokelauans / Niueans / Cook Islanders; Samoan; and Tongan.

  • Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) or Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) including: Arab, Armenian, Assyrian / Chaldean / Syriac, Berber, Coptic, Cypriot, Iranian, Israeli, Kurdish, and Turkish people in America may have historically identified as Asian or Asian Americans, while others have identified as another ethnicity or nationality. We recognize Southwest Asian, Middle Eastern and North African Americans as underrepresented communities within American history and the field of preservation, and we commit to sharing our resources in solidarity.