The Push for Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions: Highlighting the Perspectives of Student Activists

ABSTRACT

This paper documents the involvement of students who advocated for what eventually became the federal designation for Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs). Through interviews with 12 student activists, we document students’ motivations for mobilizing, as well as the challenges they encountered. Students identified motivations such as gaining additional resources, seeking recognition through the legislation, and fostering proactive approaches to activism. Challenges included motivating their peers beyond immediate self-interest and the overshadowing of individual subgroup concerns within the broader Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We comment on the ways in which the push for AANAPISIs represents a racial project within a broader process of racial formation, and highlight both the possibilities and limitations of student advocacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• Asian Americans
• Asian Americans And Pacific Islanders
• Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions
• Higher Education Act
• activism
• minority-serving institutions
• panethnicity
• racial formation

Acknowledgments

We thank the UCLA Institute of American Cultures for funding data collection.

Disclosure statement

There is no potential conflict of interest regarding how this research study was conducted.

Notes

1. Note, depending on the context we will alternately refer to either AAPIs generally or Asian Americans as a group that is distinct from Pacific Islanders.

2. Summer internships with Asian American/AAPI civil rights organizations in Washington, DC and other major metropolitan areas were a particularly influential avenue that influenced student leadership in the AANAPISI campaign. NAASCon itself came about through relationships built through internships, and subsequently, students learned about the legislative process and in some cases, the AANAPISI legislation itself, through summer internships.

3. This phenomena likely occurred in part because the majority of participants themselves did not come from underrepresented subgroups, which could be an issue with the relatively small size of the sample. However, the sample reflected the general demography of the student leaders who organized around the issue (as well as some of the dynamics of general AAPI enrollment in higher education, wherein Southeast Asian American and Pacific Islander students are severely underrepresented, see CARE, 2011).