Mixed-race people represent a rapidly growing share of the population of the United States. Yet American society continues to understand their multiple racial identities in predominantly monoracial ways and pressures them to define themselves in terms of only one racial group.

This book explores how mixed-race Asians—people who are a mixture of Asian and non-Asian ancestries—make sense of their multiracial identities in a society where monoracial conceptions are still dominant. Takeyuki Tsuda traces the categories and practices through which mixed-race Asians express and assert their multiraciality, resist monoracial social pressures, and demand membership in multiple ethnic communities. Although most of them prioritize their Asian heritage, they continue to lay claim to all of their ancestries instead of subsuming them under a unitary racial classification that denies or conceals certain heritages. At the same time, many of them describe their multiraciality by combining preexisting monoracial categories in order to make it legible to others, limiting their ability to challenge the dominant system.

This book is based on extensive, in-depth interviews with a diverse research sample that includes not only individuals of mixed Asian and white ancestry but also those with Latinx, Black, and Indigenous heritage as well as multiracial people of three or more ancestries. By capturing the nuances of the mixed-race Asian experience, Navigating Multiple Ancestries offers a new perspective on the complexity of race and ethnicity in the United States.