Southern Mix exhibit in Student Union celebrates diverse stories of Asian Americans

Faculty, students and alumni mingled throughout the Student Union Art Gallery on Saturday morning, celebrating the opening of the Southern Mix exhibit. 

Southern Mix is a project at UNC that partners with the Southern Oral History Program, Carolina Asia Center and the Asian American Center. It was co-founded in 2017 by alumna Anna-Rhesa Versola with the goal to share the stories of Asian Americans in the South through oral histories. 

The exhibit at the gallery highlights some of the stories of individuals who participated in recording their oral histories. Photographs of the participants line the walls, accompanied with snippets from their interviews and QR codes to sound bites from their oral history recordings. 

Director of the Asian American Center and English professor Heidi Kim said that the exhibit was an effort from the AAC to get oral histories back into the community and to provide pathways for students to get involved with the work. 

Kim said the exhibit was first displayed at the AAC, before it traveled throughout the state to various schools and public libraries. Now, it will be displayed at the Union until Jan. 24, after which it will move to more off-campus locations. 

“It’s very important when you’re doing oral history work that it not just be extracting information from the community,” Kim said. “It should also give back to the community.” 

Sophie Tô, a recent PhD graduate from  Gillings School of Global Public Health, was first introduced to the use of oral histories in health research through their advisor. 

“Oral history, I think I was drawn to because, at its best — it’s not a perfect method, just like anything else — I felt like it really humanizes people and their relationships,” Tô said. 

Being a health researcher, Tô said she likes that oral histories are an approach which highlight not only individual experiences, but also the context of those individuals within their larger community. 

Christina Huang, a junior majoring in American Studies, started working with Southern Mix after taking classes with the Southern Oral History Project. 

“I came to UNC excited to learn about Asian American history and to my dismay, there is still no Asian American studies program,” Huang said."The number of faculty we have every year is so small. Their bandwidth is so thin. I think Southern Mix was the first place where I was like, here is this institutional project where I can funnel my path into this.” 

Huang and Tô both emphasized how “Southern” and “Asian American” are terms that are often not seen together and how the diverse and growing population of Asian Americans in the South is often underrepresented in scholarship and media. 

Tô said that they hope the work they have done with Southern Mix can honor the distinct cultural pieces and different ways people have been marginalized and the expansiveness of the Asian American experience.

Huang said that the lack of scholarship connects to the limited records of Asian Americans at UNC, which is all tied with broader questions about structural violence, exclusion and racism. 

The term “Asian American” holds so many complexities and nuances as a political identity, Huang said, and it’s one of the insights that the Southern Mix public exhibit showcases.

Much of history research can be inaccessible to the public, Huang said, which makes public history projects so important. This work is especially relevant for her in wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion bans throughout the state and country. 

“You see the way Asian Americans and Asian American bodies are evoked and manipulated to fit a certain narrative for a political agenda,” Huang said. 

At the gallery opening, attendees learned about the work behind Southern Mix and had the opportunity to share their own stories, as well as what “home” and “the South” meant to them. 

Feeling included, Kim said, directly contributes to student success and confidence in engaging with the community. 

“People want to be seen and want their stories to be heard, and want also to figure out where they themselves fit in this Southern identity and Southern history,” Kim said. “So we really hope that the Asian American Center can help to boost education and conversation about these issues and help people just feel included.”

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