Growing up in New Jersey, Shreya Sunderram did not learn about Asian American and Pacific Islander history until she attended Barnard College.
Now she’s spearheading an effort to change that, at least for New York City schoolchildren. An Indian American and doctoral candidate for Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, Sunderram also serves as the director of the Localized History Project at the Asian American/Asian Research Institute at CUNY. The initiative seeks to create and establish a local community and youth driven AANHPI history curriculum in New York City.
Earlier this month, the New York City Council approved the Education Equity Action Plan to allocate $2.5 million in funding for an AAPI curriculum in the 2026 budget.
Members of the Localized History Project were at the steps of City Hall to advocate for more funding for an AAPI curriculum. Sunderram says there are plans to test out the Localized History Project curriculum in some NYC public schools this fall.
“History curriculum and classrooms rarely center the experiences of many of our immigrant origin youth or young people whose families are of immigrant origin,” says Sunderram, who also taught in New York City public schools.
The Hidden Voices: Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the United States curriculum, which focuses on national AAPI history, piloted in NYC schools in 2022 and launched officially in 2024. This new project takes on a more local perspective.
The localized approach aims “to ensure that local New York City history is being incorporated and included and centered in the curriculum,” according to Sunderram.
The project recruited youth researchers and students across NYC to draw from their experiences in the classroom. They also collaborated with local organizations such as the Indo-Caribbean-founded Caribbean Equality Project in Richmond Hill, Queens. Indo-Caribbean history will be incorporated in a broader AAPI curriculum. “They’re often a community that is ignored when it comes to the broader narrative of what it means to be Asian American in America,” says Sunderram.
The issues hidden by the model minority myth
A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that the majority of Asian Americans have been stereotyped as model minorities. And yet, Sunderram notes many Asian Americans in NYC are poor; a 2022 Columbia University report found that almost a quarter of the city’s Asian population lives in poverty.
“We often ignore the fact that there’s a massive proportion of our community suffering in poverty that need language access, that need support, that need policies tailored towards them,” she says. “Because we don’t disaggregate our data, and because we don’t talk about it, and we don’t, you know, uplift our histories, and we’re not made aware of these things.”
The youth researchers are part of the project focused on capturing the working class labor movements in NYC, such as Chinatown hunger strikes and garment strikes that happened throughout the 70s, the 90s, and even early 2000s. Their work also highlighted the solidarity among Asians, Black Americans and Latinos in the city.
Sunderram refers to herself as an ally with youth researchers in the forefront.
“I’m not a public school student in New York City. I never went to the New York City public schools. They’re the experts on that. They’re the experts in what the gaps are, right?,” she says. “They’re actively experiencing history curriculum that is omitting their community’s histories. And so it’s about ensuring that we are learning actively from one another, honoring each other’s expertise, and contributing as much as we possibly can to our joint effort.”
The Localized History Project is empowering students to hone their voices to diversify how history is taught in more accessible mediums that would resonate with students better. The youth researchers found creative pathways, from zines to oral history interviews to collages.
One researcher, Clarissa Kunizaki from Brooklyn Tech High School, created a project called “A Chinese Latino Migration Archive.” Drawing inspiration from her mixed heritage, she gathered documents to show how the Asian and Latinos diaspora in the city have historically intersected and intertwined. Soriya Potter, a Khmer American student from Queens, made a zine about “the histories, displacements, and resistance of the Khmer Refugee community of New York.”
