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Last fall’s wildly successful Sifting & Reckoning exhibit resonated with most individuals who visited the Chazen Museum of Art to immerse themselves in it. Tucked among the difficult tales of prejudice and racism that mark UW-Madison’s history, there was one specific incident that hit home for UW’s Asian American community.

It’s known as “The Fiji Incident.” In the 1980s, the Madison chapter of the fraternity Phi Kappa Gamma, known on campus as “FIJI,” routinely held an annual island-themed party. In 1987, members parked an enormous cardboard cutout in the fraternity’s front yard on Langdon Street. The effigy depicted a Black man dressed as an island native, with gargantuan lips and a bone through his nose.

When outraged Black students protested the statue, fraternity members, in a truly tone-deaf response, claimed that the effigy wasn’t intended to be Black, but rather Filipino. Suddenly, what’s known today as the Asian, Pacific Islander and Desi American (APIDA) community on campus had a strong reason to join with other communities of color and fight for change, too.

Portrait photo of Lori Kido Lopez

Lori Kido Lopez, Director of Asian American Studies Program.

That incident and subsequent protests bore many fruits, including the genesis of the UW’s Asian American Studies Program, which marks its 35th anniversary this year. Remembering it has been a spur to further action for the program’s current director, Lori Kido Lopez.

“The Asian American Studies Program has been on campus for a really long time,” says Lopez, a Professor of Communication Arts. “And we're just trying to dig back into our own history and say, where did it come from? How did it get started? Who fought for it in the beginning? We'll be able to tell the story of how we've grown, what kinds of exciting things we're doing now, to try to really cement our place here on campus.”

There are seven professors who are part of the Asian American Studies Program in 2023 — not affiliates, but budgeted professors, who are jointly appointed in departments such as English, Dance, History and Gender and Women’s Studies. The program’s course offerings attract hundreds of students each year.

Lopez admits the program’s actual genesis is somewhat difficult to pinpoint. A year after the Fiji Incident, a group of faculty members and activists offered then-Chancellor Donna Shalala an official proposal to create the program, but navigating the governance process meant the first full-time director, Amy Ling, wasn’t hired until 1991. Students’ ability to earn a certificate in the program arrived several years later.

Those gaps are what Lopez is trying to fill.

“We're trying to flesh out the entire history of the program,” she says.

Peggy Choy 1996

Associate professor of Dance and Asian American Studies Peggy Choy (1996)

A big part of that effort has involved constructing an oral history through interviews with key figures, faculty members and students who were vocal in the 1980s and continued to support the program for decades afterward. A second part of the oral history focuses on more recent students who helped found the APIDA Student Center, located on the fourth floor of the Red Gym. As part of an art installation in the Red Gym’s 1973 Gallery, panels have been installed calling out highlights in the program’s history.

One of the big themes that emerged from the interviews was the critical role of Asian American women and the community they formed. Women like Peggy Choy, an associate professor of Dance and Asian American Studies. Choy, a Korean American who was raised in Hawaii, was the founder of the Pacific Asian Women’s Alliance (PAWA), the group that first petitioned campus to create a program in the wake of the Fiji Incident.

“We couldn't be passive,” Choy recalls. “And we were outraged. At that point, it was the right time in a way, for solidarity and collectivity to occur, because it cannot occur all the time.”

One of the women who worked closely with Choy through PAWA was Jan Miyasaki, a Japanese American whose family also settled in Hawaii. Miyasaki earned a law degree from Marquette University and came to work as a program assistant at UW-Madison in the 1980s. Despite the dearth of Asian Americans on campus at the time, she quickly found her community.

Jan Miyasaki (1998 photo)

Lecturer Jan Miyasaki in 1998

“We were sort of like magnets to each other, whether we were just the Hawaii people, the Asian American people, the women of color, we were like magnets,” says Miyasaki, an activist who has worked on issues like violence against women during her time in Madison. “We were a critical mass of people.”

The same kind of powerful relationships that led to the program’s creation help fuel its growth today. As, unfortunately, do the sorts of incidents that occurred back in the 1980s.

“Racism and prejudice are a really important part of this program’s history,” says Lopez. “Unfortunately, it's often the thing that helps to get a change to happen. And it's an awareness of those incidents and issues that make those who have the power to do something like give a budget to a program, authorize a new hire, be able to start a whole new program. That's what provides the incentive to push forward and make a huge change.”

The push continues. In 2019, the program created a Hmong American emphasis for certificate students who have a special focus on that group’s history. Hmong Americans represent the largest Asian immigrant community in Wisconsin. Lopez knows there’s a still much work to be done and many goals yet to meet. She’s hopeful the program can eventually become a full-fledged department that offers a major, like the Department of Chican@/Latin@ Studies will begin doing next fall.

And there are still so many misperceptions and prejudices to overcome. Just last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic was winding down, the UW-Madison campus was hit with a series of incidents that involved racist, anti-Asian graffiti. The incidents spurred Lopez and some of her colleagues to create the #AtlantaSyllabus, a set of educational resources named for the 2021 mass shooting in Atlanta that claimed the lives of five Asian American massage workers.

Raising awareness, says Lopez, is the thread that unites everything.

“I think the fact that I was surprised about some of these stories about the Asian American Studies Program means that I think a lot of people will be surprised, too,” she says. “It's really exciting to be able to finally honor the histories of the activists and the scholars who put so much work into this.”