By Marie-Theresa Hernández The plane, with the name “Tommy Joe” painted on its nose, is in the front yard of a private home on Navigation Boulevard. I wish Tommy Joe was still around to tell us stories about the plane in action. Photo by Golnar Makvandi. In spring 2021, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, […]
Debbie Harwell and Stephen Klineberg at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. A Conversation with Stephen L. Klineberg and Debbie Z. Harwell This year marks the thirty-ninth annual Houston Area Survey produced by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University under the direction of Dr. Stephen Klineberg. The survey, which […]
What is Houston’s DNA? By Debbie Z. Harwell “Discover your ethnic origins,” find the “source of your greatness,” trace your “health, traits, and ancestry,” and “amaze yourself…find new relatives.” Ads proliferate from companies like AncestryDNA, 23andMe, and MyHeritage enticing us to learn more about who we really are. People who send a saliva sample for […]
By Alex La Rotta Growing up, my siblings and I occasionally asked our parents how we ended up in Houston. I was particularly interested in trying to find meaning in my dual Colombian-American identity. Here we were, this large Colombian family (forty-plus members and counting) spread across Houston, yet it seemed so happenstance. We did […]
Download the full pdf. Vol. 13, No. (Summer 2016) Letter from the Editor by retiring Editor-in-Chief Joseph A. Pratt 2 Carolyn Farb: Fundraiser Extraordinaire A Conversation with Carolyn Farb and Bob Boudreaux 10 Los La Rottas de Houston: A Colombian Family’s Immigration Story By Alex La Rotta 15 Binding People Together in The Church of Jesus Christ […]
The year 2015 marks a half century since the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, a comprehensive immigration reform that abolished the racial quota system established in 1924 that was based on national origins. The new law admitted people based on criteria such as family reunification, skills needed in the U.S. workplace, and […]
E. K. T. Chen spent half his life a Texan and died a patriot in Washington, DC, on October 16, 1957, while preventing Chinese internment during the Korean War. This is the story of the extraordinary things accomplished by this ordinary son of Chinese immigrants that benefited all Americans, and my efforts to continue his […]
In 2012, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University declared Houston to be the most diverse city in the nation, replacing Los Angeles and New York at the top of the list. Of the nearly 2.1 million people in the city, fewer than 130,000 were Asians according to the 2010 Census, with Japanese […]
By Jessica Chew For many Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, an international refuge meant hope for survival. Other Asian ethnicities, including the Chinese, looked to the United States with optimism for a better future. Several Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants found their new home in Houston, raising first-generation, American-born children while trying to preserve a piece of their old society. Vietnam War refugees faced […]
The history of Filipinos in the southern United States stretches back to the mid-eighteenth century, when burgeoning trade routes between the two lands encouraged small numbers of Filipino migrants to settle in some of their first enclaves in the Americas.
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