Glenda Joe was born in Houston in 1952, the daughter of a Chinese father and a white mother.
When her parents were married, the U.S. Supreme Court was still over a decade away from declaring interracial marriage a constitutional right.
“For the longest time, when we drove around town and we saw another Asian in the car, we would stop and point,” she said. “I never looked like anybody else.”
CENSUS DATA: How Houston’s Asian community has exploded in growth and diversity since 1869
Over 70 years later, Texas has the largest concentration of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the South, and the Houston metro area has the one of the top ten largest Asian American populations in the United States, according to 2020 census data.
Houston is home to first to fifth generation immigrants, from Sri Lanka to South Korea and Pakistan to the Philippines. For Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month, the Houston Chronicle spoke to Houstonians about their immigration stories and what makes Houston feel like home.
“The Asian community, Pacific Islanders to South Asians, are so much better at becoming Houstonians than someone who lives in St. Louis,” Joe said. “And the reason is because families help each other.”
The first Asian immigrants
The way Glenda Joe tells it, the first Chinese person to arrive in Houston was her ancestor Jim Joe, who came in the early 1880s searching specifically for a city where there wasn’t already a large Chinese population.
Jim Joe was on the run after getting in trouble with Boston’s Chinese community, she said, and found himself in Houston, then a city of less than 30,000.
Chinese immigrants like Jim Joe were the first group of Asian immigrants to come to Texas in large numbers, according to Anne Chao, adjunct lecturer at Rice University and program manager of the…
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