Milwaukee hosts first official AAPI Heritage Month celebration as community marks 150 years

Milwaukee held its first official Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month celebration on Friday, May 1, an event organized by the city’s AAPI Employee Resource Group (ERG) and sponsored by Alderwoman Sharlen Moore.

The gathering kicked off a month of recognition with speeches, cultural performances, and food in the rotunda of City Hall. It was attended by hundreds of area residents, including city employees, community members, and leaders from Milwaukee’s AAPI organizations.

The event marked a formal acknowledgment that, by most measures, was overdue. The recognition comes as Milwaukee’s AAPI stories are increasingly being documented through local reporting and community profiles. Milwaukee’s AAPI community has been part of the city’s fabric for more than 150 years, but the May 1 celebration was the first time the city officially recognized AAPI Heritage Month at City Hall.

For comparison, Black History Month observances at City Hall began only 10 years ago in 2017, suggesting a longer pattern of belated institutional recognition for the city’s communities of color.

> READ: Photo Essay: City Hall hosts inaugural Black History Month program

“What’s interesting is that I did not realize this wasn’t an official event,” said Alderwoman Moore. “And so the ERG group is the one that came to me and asked if I would be willing to support and sponsor this. I said, absolutely. And also because I wasn’t born here, since I’m from Jamaica. So being naturalized to this country gives me an opportunity to showcase what inclusion looks like and feels like. And especially here in my role at the city level.”

She emphasized that recognition cannot end when the month does, saying that AAPI leadership, culture, and contributions need to be infused into city operations year-round rather than spotlighted once and set aside.

The AAPI Employee Resource Group, established in 2025 through the Department of Employee Relations, organized the City Hall event. The ERG functions as an interdepartmental network supporting AAPI employees across municipal government, with priorities that include professional development, mentorship, recruitment and retention, and increasing the visibility of AAPI staff within city operations.

Its leadership — Nuducha Yang Jackson, Ah Ong Cha, Maly Vang, Chris Lee, and Pachia Vue — draws from multiple agencies, a structure designed to connect workers across departments rather than operate within a single office. The group is positioned as part of a broader effort to formalize diversity, equity, and inclusion within the municipal workforce, and as a bridge between city government and Milwaukee’s AAPI community.

“It’s okay to be extra. It’s okay to be loud. It’s truly okay to be who you are,” said Jackson. “You can be Asian, and you can be American. You can be both. To know that diversity is a pillar of the city of Milwaukee, it is a pillar of our country, and to just indulge in that knowledge is so liberating. So, I’m grateful, and I think this event truly was able to bring all our AAPI communities together and just enjoy being in this space with each other.”

Mayor Cavalier Johnson addressed the gathering and presented a city proclamation that officially declared May as Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. He framed the AAPI experience as interwoven into the American story, a statement that carried particular weight given the federal climate around immigration enforcement.

“Milwaukee’s AAPI communities are an integral part of the fabric of this city. It’s important to honor that,” said Mayor Johnson. “I know from my own experience just how much representation matters, and so I look forward to continuing this tradition for many years to come. Happy AAPI Heritage Month, Milwaukee.”

The AAPI celebration at City Hall blended institutional recognition with substantive testimony. After the opening remarks and the mayor’s proclamation, organizers turned the rotunda over to a keynote address built around personal experience, introducing stories from within the AAPI community.

Krissie Fung, who serves on the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission and is associate director of the Milwaukee Turners, delivered the keynote remarks. Fung traced her personal arrival into Milwaukee’s Asian community alongside the broader history of AAPI presence in the city.

She opened her remarks by noting that May was also Mental Health Awareness Month, and described a period of depression after she moved to Milwaukee.

“My therapist at the time told me something I will never forget, ‘you need to find an Asian community,'” said Fung. “The advice felt so simple that it couldn’t possibly be correct.”

She also shared a quote that her friend Adam Carr had given her, saying, “To be Midwestern and Asian is a beautiful thing. It means you know loneliness and you also know how precious it is to be together.”

That quote, and the advice from her therapist, turned out to be correct. Fung explored local Asian grocery stores whose smells refreshed memories of her childhood in Hong Kong, and she eventually became involved with a network of AAPI organizations that now anchors much of her civic life in the city. What Fung also discovered was that Milwaukee’s Asian history ran far deeper than the city’s current cultural map suggested.

Chinese immigrants began arriving in Milwaukee in the 1870s, and although many faced hostility — rioters burned down a Chinese laundry in 1889 in protest of Chinese immigration — the community persisted. By the 1930s, roughly 60 Chinese laundries operated in the city. A 2025 historical marker at the YWCA building on King Drive commemorates that era. A new state historical marker installed this year at Forest Home Cemetery also recognizes the more than 200 Chinese immigrants buried there. While not as expansive as coastal cities, Downtown Milwaukee once had what functioned as a Chinatown.

“As it turned out, the Asian community is here — it was just built different,” Fung added. “It needed to be sought out, to be nurtured, to be intentional.”

That community today is among the most varied in the country. Wisconsin has the third-largest Hmong population in the United States, with many Hmong families arriving as refugees after assisting American forces during the Vietnam War 50 years ago. Milwaukee is also believed to be home to the country’s largest Rohingya population, a community working to increase literacy and preserve its language. Those populations sit alongside Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, South Asian, and Pacific Islander residents whose arrivals span more than a century and reflect very different circumstances of migration.

Celebrating AAPI history has taken on new urgency given federal actions targeting immigrants and reshaping the boundaries of citizenship. The descendants of Wong Kim Ark, the young San Francisco cook whose 1898 Supreme Court victory established birthright citizenship, are again contending with challenges to that ruling. The Alien Enemies Act, once used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked again in current federal enforcement. Hmong, Lao, and Chinese immigrants are among those facing fear and confusion as ICE operations expand.

Last year, the AAPI Coalition of Wisconsin, Hmong American organizations, and allied groups secured passage of Wisconsin Act 266, which required the teaching of Hmong American and Asian American history in K-12 schools. The AAPI community did not view the measures as a conclusion to its advocacy work, but just the beginning.

What filled the City Hall rotunda on May 1 was not a single narrative, but a presence that has long existed without a formal place in the story of Milwaukee. For generations, that AAPI presence has been sustained without consistent recognition, built in families, in small networks, in cultural practices that endured whether they were acknowledged or not. Elevating such awareness with a municipal event did not complete that history. But it took an important step in the long process toward sustained visibility.