The Asian Faculty and Staff Association (AFSA) is spearheading efforts to create safe spaces for the Asian, Pacific Islander and Desi American (APIDA) community at Fresno State.

AFSA previously hosted the first APIDA listening session in March for the community to express their concerns, questions and feelings about the surge of Asian-American crimes throughout the United States.

The campus had a population composed of approximately 12.1% students identified as Asian in fall 2020, according to Fresno State enrollment statistics, and AFSA board President Varaxy  Borromeo expressed concern for the lack of APIDA resources in the university.

“Many in our community are attempting to continue living their daily lives, but the fears and anxieties related to the current events are highlighting how impossible it is to ignore what’s happening,” Borromeo said.

David Yang, AFSA board secretary and academic adviser for the Lyles College of Engineering, said that providing opportunities for the APIDA community at Fresno State is important due to a lack of resources for the community at Fresno State.

Yang expressed his thoughts, stating that listening sessions and future events planned by AFSA are important resources for the community to find safe spaces to express their feelings and concerns.

“I feel that APIDA [is] identifying [that] students may not have many spaces for discussion and may often feel invisible and so offering these types of listening sessions to hear their concerns may provide more opportunities of this type in the future,” Yang said. 

Alongside emphasizing that AFSA seeks to provide APIDA students a safe community to speak and ask questions, Aguilera said long-term solutions should come about through institutional efforts and changes.

In particular, he noted that AFSA is working toward formally proposing to expand Asian American studies and courses at Fresno State, an area Aguilera said is lacking in regards to professors of Asian American studies.

“We do not have an [Asian American studies] major here on campus and our professorship is very, very small … keeping that in mind, what we’re aiming for is really to better develop an understanding of the history of the relationship between Asian Americans and the dominant cultures of the U.S.,” he said.

Nationally, the United States has witnessed an increase in anti-Asian violence largely attributed to race-related rhetoric in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Davorn Sisavath, assistant professor in the Asian American studies program, said anti-Asian sentiment have been rooted into the history of the United States with examples such as laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for a number of years, or the presidential executive orders in 1942 that resulted in Japanese-Americans being held in internment camps.

“I mean, in California … if we look at how Chinatown was spatially created right are marked within San Francisco or other cities. Oftentimes, Chinatown was basically demarcated as this place that was seen as unsanitized, and Nayan Shah … [from] USC writes in details about how Chinatowns were viewed and seen during the 1900s. We can still see it today,” Sisavath said.

Borromeo expressed her hopes for AFSA to begin a discussion at the university about the difficulties anti-Asian sentiment has on the wellbeing of the APIDA community and offer a safe space for such individuals to process and understand the hardships caused by racial injustice. 

“We need to cultivate spaces on campuses and in our classes to process the harm that is occurring, not only against our AAPI [Asian-American Pacific Islander] communities but all communities impacted by racial injustice and violence,” Borromeo said.

Earl Aguilera, AFSA board technology officer, also emphasized that anti-Asian sentiment has existed in the history of American culture.

“Anti-Asian sentiment has been part of the historical development of the United States. However, prior to the rise of the internet, it’s been very easy to sweep all that under the rug, write it out of the history of books or just brush it away as an accident of history rather than a product of design,” Aguilera said.

For Melissa Tav, AFSA public relations chair and communication specialist for the College of Health and Human Services, the anti-Asian sentiment arising nationally does not come as a surprise but is a disappointing reality in the United States.

“Growing up within my family-owned bakery, I experienced racism, hate crimes and prejudice early on. It is a feeling that I became accustomed to, but it does not have to and should not be the norm,” Tav said. 

With the national attention on xenophobia, Tav noted that the discussion around anti-Asian rhetoric has brought about important conversations about the impact such ideologies have on the AAPI community.

“A silver lining of these incidents is that it has created both awareness and solidarity for AAPI’s among many communities throughout the world — and brought to light much of the xenophobic rhetoric Asian communities have silently felt for far too long,” she said.

Sisavath said students should continue to educate themselves on ethical issues and race-related issues that are emerging in society, attributing it also to a need for ethnic studies.

“Oftentimes, people don’t even know about Asian American studies, they stumble across it, because they have to take a GE course, but I really encouraged students to take ethnic studies courses to learn a lot about their relationship to the society but also to Central Valley because a lot of the materials really make connections to the Central Valley,” Sisavath said.

Aguilera further said that the movement to offer APIDA students and staff safe spaces at Fresno State does not rely solely on AFSA.

“I also want to be careful that this movement… [for] racial justice on the side of API students here on campus is not solely located as the responsibility of AFSA. Like the reality is, it is our entire responsibility as a university community, to advocate for racial injustice, broadly,” Aguilera said.

Borromeo said that AFSA will continue to actively advocate for open conversation and safe spaces for APIDA students at the university, and encourages Asian American community members to utilize resources listed on their website and to report any hate crimes or incidents to Stop AAPI Hate.

“AFSA is committed to building the capacity of our campus and our community to engage in the difficult, but necessary, conversations focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences,” Borromeo said. “We hope our community — members, allies, and advocates — will join us in this charge.”