Where Asian Americans live

Think beyond the coasts.

Issue #33

It had been about 10 years since I left Colorado when I moved back during the pandemic. Over that decade, the state’s population grew by about 15 percent, it gained a renewed hip factor (spurred by legal pot, perhaps?), craft breweries opened on every corner and the amount of new Asian businesses in the Denver area seemed to multiply.

Where my family and I used to be able to probably name every single Indian restaurant in the Denver Metro Area, we definitely can no longer. Every few weeks, I hear of an Indian spot I’ve never been to or that recently opened.

So it wasn’t as surprising as it once would have been when I looked through the New York Times’ analysis of 2020 decennial census data and 2019 American Community Survey data and saw the southern Denver area county I now live in has more Asians of Indian descent than any other Asian subgroup.

A screenshot from The New York Times interactive

The Times’ maps show where Asian American subgroups live across the country these days. I think this quote from their story sums it up: “When people think Asians in America, they think California, Hawaii. But this population is not a West Coast phenomenon. It’s now an American phenomenon,” Neil G. Ruiz, the associate director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, told The New York Times.

More on the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States in an earlier newsletter issue…

Asian American growth

ALSO: This week, Red, White and Brown hosted its first Twitter Spaces audio conversation via @VigneshR on Twitter. Thanks to Shawna Chen of Axios/The Yappie and Varun Nikore of the AAPI Victory Alliance for taking the time to share their perspectives on the year in Asian American politics and what to expect in 2022. Still learning how to optimize a discussion in the Spaces format — and how to prevent my puppy from barking in the background.

More discussions to come on Twitter Spaces in the coming weeks. (Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions for possible conversations. Keep them coming! redwhiteandbrownmedia@gmail.com)

Thanks for joining the conversation,

Vignesh Ramachandran (@VigneshR)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media

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