Erasure in the Asian American Context

We tend to think of government records as an authoritative source of information, such as the birth date, place of birth, and race of an individual. But as any genealogist can attest, this is not always the case. And in the case of Asian Americans, incorrect information on government records can be difficult if not impossible to correct, with serious consequences for individual Asian Americans and their families. Take for example Chinese immigrants, whose surnames are their first names, but whose surnames were often swapped with their given names during the immigration process. Their descendants carry the given names of their ancestors, while their ancestral surnames were lost. Or we can look at the early South Asian immigrants to New Orleans, who were considered racially ambiguous in Jim Crow Louisiana, and at various times were identified in records as Indian, Arab, colored, black, mulatto, or white. Another example are the Filipinos who were listed on their birth certificates as "colored" under segregation, then went to court to change their racial classification to white in order to gain access to schools or the right to work and to marry. This is an article on the erasure of Asian American identity in New Orleans in government records, the challenges to using such records as historical sources, and the long-term effect of erasure on the Asian Americans themselves.