Asian Americans

By 1965, the Filipino farmworkers in Delano, California’s grape fields had enough with low pay, no health benefits, and toxic working conditions.

The Filipino farmworkers voted to strike, but they had to convince Cesar Chavez, the leader of the Mexican workers, to join them. The task was left to Larry Itliong. Together Filipino and Mexicans mounted a historic and victorious grape strike that electrified the world.

Connie Yu’s family story in the U.S. almost ended at the Angel Island Immigration Station, where her grandmother was detained for over a year, separated from her American-born children. In an atmosphere of nativism and hate, exclusionary laws have made Asians the nation’s first “undocumented immigrants.” Yet those who manage to stay, build families and communities in America.

Patsy Mink always defied the odds. She was one of two women in her law school class, and when law firms wouldn’t hire her, she hung her own shingle. In 1964 she defied Hawaii democratic party bosses and ran for U.S. Congress, and was the first woman of color to be elected to the office. She championed civil rights and women’s rights and carved a path for generations of women leaders.

South Asians began arriving in significant numbers during the late 1800s. Most were men who settled in communities of color and faced segregation and laws against intermarriage with whites. Many formed multiracial families like Moksad Ali, a Bengali Muslim trader, who married an African American woman, Ella Blackman. Together they navigated race in an era of anti-Asian exclusion and Jim Crow.

Jerry Yang was part of the Asian American 1.5 generation, who were born in Asia but immigrated to the U.S. as children. With their bicultural experience and networks, he and other Asian immigrant entrepreneurs helped to establish Silicon Valley as the center of the global tech industry.

They were young men with dreams who began their lives in America building the Transcontinental Railroad. They blasted through mountains of granite and endured brutal conditions to lay tracks that connected the Pacific to the Atlantic. Some, like Lee Wong Sang, became forebearers of Asian American families that thrive to this day.

Laureen Chew grew up the sheltered daughter of immigrant parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown. But when she enrolled at San Francisco State College in 1968, it was a stunning awakening. The campus was afire with new ideas and a growing movement for ethnic studies and educational equity.

What is the meaning of loyalty when you look like the enemy? Satsuki Ina was born in a prison camp during World War II. Her family was among 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens, who were forced from their homes on the west coast and incarcerated without due process or a trial. When her parent’s loyalty was questioned, the family was torn apart.

Laureen Chew joined the Third World Liberation Front to fight for ethnic studies and educational equity. In 1968, they mounted the longest campus strike in U.S. history. Laureen and a generation of young Asian Americans, many who were first-generation college students, were forever changed.

In the lead up to WWII, Korean Americans were united by loyalty to America and resistance to Japanese rule of their homeland. Susan Ahn Cuddy was the US-born daughter of Dosan Ahn Chang-ho, a legendary community leader who died while imprisoned by Japan. She vowed to join the war effort and became the first Asian American woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy, and its first female gunnery officer.

Asian Americans is a five-hour film series that will chronicle the contributions, and challenges of Asian Americans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in America. Personal histories and new academic research will cast a fresh lens on U.S. history and the role Asian Americans have played in it.