The Unique Challenges of South Asian American Representation Within AAPI Heritage

South Asian Americans (SAAs) make up one-third of the total Asian American (AA) population in the United States today, with Asian Indians (the biggest SAA cohort) now the largest Asian alone population group (surpassing Chinese Americans).¹ SAAs also have more than a century of history in the country, yet their heritage remains underrecognized in AA and AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander)² historic preservation initiatives.³

Why is this? The reasons include societal racism, professional and institutional biases evident in common US preservation designation criteria and city planning policies, and historically limited access of South Asians to financial and political capital. These obstacles are not unique to SAAs and are common among marginalized groups. However, other attributes make SAA resources even more challenging to designate—the huge diversity within SAA (based on nationality, religion, language, and caste), a relative newcomer immigrant status compared with East Asians, a preponderance of recent-past resources that are less than fifty years old, and a geographically dispersed settlement pattern that prevents identification of spatially defined districts/clusters at the national and local levels.

This article analyzes how SAA histories engage with historic preservation in the United States. The first section examines the internal tensions in the construction of SAA identity, and its fit (or misfit) in the larger AAPI grouping. The second section focuses on the history of the SAA community. Recent scholarship has unearthed important, forgotten histories of SAA presence in the United States since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, challenging the perception of SAA as exclusively post-1965 “new immigrants.” Instead of recounting this scholarship, I identify the more elusive place-based histories and analyze their preservation potential. The third section tracks how this history is transformed into heritage. It chronicles the rise of AAPI representation in historic preservation, noting key milestones and how they include (or omit) SAA narratives. Most important, this section identifies and analyzes the handful of SAA properties that have been designated at the national, state, and local levels in recent years. Why were these properties designated? What lessons can be learned from their preservation process? What glaring omissions or oversights are revealed? The final section proposes future directions and possibilities for the designation of SAA heritage resources. It analyzes ways preservation efforts in SAA communities have benefited and continue to benefit from their solidarity with AAPI efforts while noting key gaps and divergences.

1. Brittany Rico, Joyce Key Hahn, and Cody Spence, “Asian Indian Was the Largest Asian Alone Population Group in 2020,” US Census Bureau, September 21, 2023, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-dhc-a-asian-population.html. In the table “Detailed Asian Groups: 2010 and 2020,” SAAs make up 32 percent of the “Asian alone” population in 2020. The groups included as SAA by the author in this calculation were Afghan, Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Burmese, Nepalese, Pakistani, Pashtun, Sikh, Sindhi, and Sri Lankan. Asian Indians are the largest Asian alone group at 23 percent. In the “Asian alone or in any combination” category, SAA make up 27 percent of the AA population. Here, “Chinese, except Taiwanese” are the largest group at 22 percent, with Asian Indians a close second at 20 percent.

2. AAPI is the term used by more recent national preservation documents, most notably the 2017 NPS NHL Theme Study.

3. Of the forty-six highlighted properties associated with AAPI heritage on the National Park Service’s website, there is not a single site that relates to SAA history. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/asian-american-and-pacific-islander-heritage-month.htm (accessed July 4, 2024). This is because no SAA site has been federally designated as of August 2024.