Mixed Race Asian American Identity on Display

As communities from colonial Latin America in the seventeenth century to the U.S. in the twentieth century began to diversify in terms of race and ethnicity, racial mixing was a reminder that those communities were on a course of change. Edward Said's concept of Orientalism is evoked when theorizing mixed-race identity -- that identity is developed as a result of the interaction between the self and the other. This article examines several heritage museum exhibitions that focused on exhibitions on the topic of multiracial people, in particular the multiracial Japanese American history exhibition, Visible and Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History. Ethnic arts institutions function to legitimize marginalized stories by providing the gallery space to support public history, and create memory for displaced communities.