In November 1990, a series of protests reached a head after Pomona College’s Big Bridges Auditorium hosted a production of “The Mikado” — a play which includes yellowface and racist depictions of Japanese characters.
Pomona’s Asian American Resource Center (AARC) was founded in the wake of these protests, and the years of demands for more institutional support that preceded them.
This story is one in a longer history of politically contentious origins for APIDA spaces across our campuses, as well as of other affinity spaces and Ethnic Studies programs.
In 1993, students took over Alexander Hall demanding more support for Ethnic Studies; The Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies was created a few years later. Claremont McKenna College’s Asian Pacific American Mentor Program and Pitzer College’s Center for Asian Pacific American Students (CAPAS) began not long after, in 2000 and 2001 respectively.
Years of student organizing pushed Pomona administrators to establish, in 1969, what would become the Office of Black Student Affairs and the Intercollegiate Africana Studies Department. That same year, a coalition of Chicano students put pressure on administration to diversify recruitment and academic offerings, leading to Chicano student enrollment increasing more than eightfold and the Mexican American Studies Center opening.
As affinity groups’ presences on campuses come to feel expected, we risk forgetting their hard-won origins and what made them necessary in the first place. Much of these histories lie with individuals, and are threatened by gaps in institutional memory as students and faculty cycle through leadership positions, people graduate and organizations’ structure and administrative housing changes over time.
So, how aware are students of these histories and origins? How accessible are these stories to us? How do APIDA organizations and affinity groups sustain collective memory?
The AARC and CAPAS, at Pomona and Pitzer respectively, are carrying out archival projects meant to preserve and share the history of 5C APIDA student life and organizing.
CAPAS APIDA Archive Project
This April, at their space in Mead Hall, CAPAS unveiled the APIDA Archive Project, a collection of archival materials tracing the history of APIDA students at the Claremont Colleges.
Although the showcase was spearheaded by CAPAS Lead Archival Intern Natasha Yen PZ ’25 and CAPAS Archive Intern Aaron Ong PZ ’27, the Archive Project is a collaborative effort two years in the making.
Yen first proposed the project to CAPAS in spring 2023, and began work on it with Jasmine Caniban PZ ’25, Ang Lee PZ ’25 and Kenny Le PZ ’25 that fall. Yen and Caniban had begun developing the idea while serving on the Pitzer Pacifica Asian Student Union executive board earlier that year, where they noticed gaps in the documentation and accessibility of 5C’s APIDA history, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
In spring 2024, the project was paused while Yen was abroad, but was continued by Yen and Robinson Lee PZ ’26 the following semester. Part of their work also included creating onboarding materials for Dominique Acosta, who succeeded Linda Lam CG ’22 as the director of CAPAS in spring 2025.
This fall Robinson Lee and Ong, alongside Ezriella Tang PZ ’27, have continued work on the project.
Copies of archival material collected for the project, much of which comes from Honnold Mudd Library archives, were hung in the CAPAS space for the showcase before being organized and stored this semester.
Ong described the importance of bringing the materials into a physical, communal and easily accessible space, where they can be preserved and viewed publicly.
“One of the big things was public engagement … So having a space, a physical space where anyone from the community can come and visit and see anything is a pretty big priority,” Ong said.
The archive spans the 1960s to the present day. It includes proposals, press releases, correspondences, meeting notes and petitions, many pertaining to the push for an intercollegiate Asian American Resource Center. Also featured are dozens of newspaper clippings — issues from TSL, but also from the now-defunct “Pacific Winds,” a newsletter for the 5Cs’ APIDA community and “Voices from the Margin,” CAPAS’ former newsletter, first launched in 2002.
In 1996, a coalition of students delivered a pamphlet, titled “A Call to Action,” to 5C administrators detailing a list of grievances, including the absence of a 5C-wide Asian American Resource Center. A similar pamphlet was made in 2004, listing problems that hadn’t been addressed since the 1996 report.
Ong noted that the two pamphlets, which were both displayed in the APIDA Archive Project showcase, demonstrate a continued history of student demands to administration.
“We have to keep in mind that we’ve always had to fight for our spot here at these colleges.”
“What’s important to make note of is that a lot of these complaints have been festering for a long time, and admin hasn’t always been receptive throughout history,” Ong said. “That’s why political organizing and protesting is so important to this day to continue that legacy.”
The APIDA Archive Project, Robinson Lee and Ong said, is necessarily involved in this legacy.
“We have to keep in mind that we’ve always had to fight for our spot here at these colleges, that these colleges don’t inherently make spaces for us, that we often work together, but we also fight for ourselves and our communities,” Robinson Lee said.
The project is still ongoing; Ong, Robinson Lee and Tang hope to keep adding more to the timeline and develop it into a publicly accessible digital archive.
“One of our projects this semester is to work on how can we digitize more of this stuff and how we can make it visible to just your average student,” Robinson Lee said. “I’ve heard from multiple students, when I share with them, they get really enthusiastic and they want to find out like more.”
The planned continuation of the project also involves a temporary gallery, titled “APIDA Voices in 5C Journalism,” that CAPAS will host in December.
AARCivist
In 2018, Pomona’s AARC also developed a timeline of 5C APIDA history. “Looking Back: 5C APIDA Activism,” which can be accessed online, is a “brief overview” of these histories, as its website reads.
AARC Production Interns created the timeline seven years ago. The last milestone listed, establishment of the South Asian Mentorship Program and Indigenous Peer Mentoring Program (IPMP), is from 2016. In 2021, IPMP disbanded after a restrictive restructuring proposal from Pomona administration, and was replaced with the Native Indigenous Student Union.
Since 2018, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted programming; APIDA students’ activism and spaces have evolved; APIDA identity has changed and expanded, increasingly considering groups like Native and Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Southwest Asia & North African students.
AARC Intern Joanna Lam PO ’27 described these disparities in representation across the variety of identities represented by the APIDA umbrella.
“There’s certain demographics within APIDA identity that are sometimes missing from these timelines,” she said. “I don’t think it’s an intentional exclusion, I think it’s just that people have been becoming more aware of certain identities.”
Now, AARCivist — one of several committees housed under the AARC — is beginning to revise the timeline, contending with these shifts and adding events of the last seven years. AARCivist handles the AARC’s public-facing presence, including their social media and newsletter, as well as long-term projects like the timeline.
Although AARC and CAPAS’ timelines are unaffiliated, students from both groups are pooling their information and materials. Robinson Lee noted the necessity of collaboration and teaching in continuing CAPAS’ work and passing down knowledge.
“It’s always been about making sure that we have the support of amazing, incredible staff like Asena [Taione-Filihia] at the AARC, because students can’t just do this work by themselves,” he said.
Right now, AARCivist interns are also working on two other projects meant to promote intergenerational memory, support and knowledge transfer: an oral histories project and a rejuvenation of AARC’s alumni network.
The oral histories project was first conceived in 2022, according to Lam, although interviews are only starting to be conducted this year. Lam is one of five AARCivist interns developing the project, alongside Gigi Perlman PO ’28, Jolina Le PO ’27, Dylan Zulueta PO ’27 and Victoria Veak PO ’26.
Perlman described the impetus for preserving institutional memory through oral histories following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You kind of lose the micro-narratives within the broader macro events…”
“There was an idea that, in the wake of 2020 with a lot of Asian American violence and what it meant to have activism spaces for Asian Americans at the 5Cs, [AARC] really wanted to recollect all this history and go towards archive work,” Perlman said.
Much of this history is carried within the largely-unrecorded firsthand accounts of those who were there at the time. Lam described the importance of documenting these “micro-narratives.”
“The reason why I like oral histories, and just like history in general … is because I feel like even though you get these big overview events, you don’t really know how people felt at the moment, or you kind of lose the micro-narratives within the broader macro events,” she said.
The oral histories project is currently trying to collect testimony from professors who were at the 5Cs during the 1980s-2000s. Perlman particularly mentioned Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona, who started at Pomona in 1983 and is set to retire next year.
Yamashita was part of the wave of demonstrations in the late 1980s demanding more institutional support for Asian American students. He was involved in the Mikado Protests; in 1990 prior, he had encouraged students to protest for Asian American faculty members, counselors and history courses by wearing yellow armbands at graduation.
Much of this history remains not well documented or known to students.
“I feel like my own understanding of what’s happened on this campus is really shaky,” Lam said. “I don’t feel like I know that much about it. So, I think just being able to find that out for myself is also really interesting, and I’d also be really interested in learning more about how the work of APIDA students intersects with the works of other affinity groups.”
This kind of intergenerational memory, passing along knowledge and experience, also falls on alumni and current students and faculty. AARCivist is in the process of strengthening their alumni network, expanding their alumni board and potentially revitalizing their mentor/mentee alumni program.
“At the AARC … there is a lot of intergenerational community … there’s a lot of resources set up for community, solidarity and institutional memory,” Perlman said. She noted, for example, the 7C Asian American Advisory Board, and communication between past and present AARC staff members.
Intergenerational community also persists through mentor programs on campus, including the Asian American Mentor Program (AAMP). Lam said that her understanding of 5C APIDA history developed during her training as an AAMP mentor. Becca Choe PO ’27, a former AAMP mentor and mentee, similarly recounted learning about APIDA organizing at the 5Cs during mentor trainings and the annual AAMP mentee retreat.
“It’s a history that’s extending into the current day, it’s not just something that is distant from us,” Choe said.
That kind of political education remains a focus, although, she said, it might not be as front-facing as it was two or three decades ago. Robinson Lee similarly emphasized the centrality of political education to CAPAS’ work.
To forget these histories — the narratives that the Archive Project, 5C APIDA Activism Timeline and oral histories project are trying to preserve — is also to forget the necessarily political roots of these spaces.
Preserving the histories and support networks of organizations like CAPAS and the AARC has become increasingly important at a time when DEI initiatives are coming under threat.
“I don’t think that [CAPAS] is in imminent threat, but I do think that we can see ourselves being threatened, let’s say, from Trump’s DEI stuff … they’re looking for ways to silence those resources,” Robinson Lee said. “I think for me personally, the answer comes down to solidarity with other Asian organizations at the Claremont Colleges.”
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