may is asian american heritage month

President Obama recognized Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month earlier this week, recognizing the Vietnamese and Cambodian American fishermen of the Gulf Coast impacted by the BP oil disaster, and noting key contributions of APIAs to the United States:



Around 6:25, he makes a joke about it being easier to spot Secretary of Education Arne Duncan than Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, which is either a joke about Secretary Locke being short, or about not being able to spot him in a room full of APIAs.

Also cool, Jenn Fang at Change.org has 10 Facts You May Not Know About Asian-American History (h/t angry). Here are some good ones:

1). The first Asians whose arrival in America was documented were Filipinos who escaped a Spanish galleon in 1763. They formed the first Asian-American settlement in U.S. history, in the swamps surrounding modern-day New Orleans.

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3). Because of their race, Asians immigrants were denied the right to naturalize as U.S. citizens until the 1943 Magnuson Act was passed. Consequently, for nearly a century of U.S. history, Asians were barred from owning land and testifying in court by laws that specifically targeted "aliens ineligible to citizenship." Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, American-born children of Chinese immigrants were not regarded as American citizens until the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that the Fourteen Amendment also applied to people of Asian descent.

4). Among the earliest Asian immigrants, virtually all ethnicities worked together as physical laborers, particularly on Hawaii's sugar cane plantations. On these plantations, a unique hybrid language — pidgin — developed that contained elements of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and English. Today, pidgin is one of the official languages of Hawaii, a state that is itself 40% Asian.

[...]

7). Anti-miscegenation laws that denied marriage licenses between interracial couples specifically prohibited intermarriage between whites and Asians. For example, the 1922 Cable Act revoked the citizenship of any female U.S. citizen who married an "alien ineligible to citizenship," a phrase repeatedly used in legal documents to refer to Asians.