2013 Research Showcase

Karla Lucht | klucht@illinois.edu

A "Mixed" Bag: Searching for Hapa Characters in Youth

Literature

Defining “Hapa”

• Mixed Race• “Two or more races” (U.S. Census Bureau).• 9 million individuals identified themselves as mixed-race. • 2.6 million Americans identified themselves as part Asian.

• “Hapa”• Defined as “part” or “mixed,” with no racial or ethnic

meaning.• Stems from the phrase “hapa haole.”• Commonly used to describe Asian Pacific Islanders of mixed

race heritage.

The Search

LOC Subject HeadingRacially mixed people – Fiction

Racially mixed people – Juvenile Fiction

Racially mixed children – Fiction

Subject Indices

Search Engine Keywords

Folksonomies

Keyword Frenzy

Asian American

mixed-race

hapa

Asian Canadian

blasian

Eurasian

Multi-racial

biracial

Amerasian

orientalAfro-asian

Racially-mixed

“When my mother met my father, she was a Japanese schoolgirl and he was an American sailor.”

-How My Parents Learned to Eat

“She was both Vietnamese and American—but she felt like a nobody.”

-The Face in my Mirror cover