The Brief

Meaning "half" in Hawaiian, the word "hapa" first entered the Hawaiian language in the early 1800s. Originally used to describe individuals of mixed Hawaiian and European ancestry, hapa has since grown to encompass those of mixed Asian descent, often someone who is half Asian or Pacific Islander and half white.

While not inherently derogatory, there is some debate around the appropriate use of the word outside of its original Hawaiian context.

That debate has captivated artist and photographer Kip Fulbeck for decades. As a hapa person himself — his mother is from China and his father is of English, Irish and Welsh descent — growing up half Chinese and half white was not easy for Fulbeck.

Raised in Covina, California, a city in the San Gabriel Valley region in Los Angeles County, Fulbeck told Morning Edition that he was considered "the white kid" at home and among his family, but known as "the Asian kid" at school. Checking boxes for his ethnicity as a child was a regular point of contention.

"I would check white sometimes. But then I was obviously not passing for white, and so I would check one, check the other. Sometimes there would [be] this other box that said 'Other, please explain,' and I would just write 'no.'" he said. "And it wasn't until, I think, 2000 where the U.S. Census actually allowed to check more than one box. So for 35 years of my life, I wasn't able to even legally do that."

It was this examination of his own identity that served as inspiration for creating "The Hapa Project."

"The Hapa Project" is a series of portraits of people who identify as multiracial. Each photo is accompanied by the subject's handwritten answer to a question about their identity. Fulbeck started the project in 2001 — with the original installation featuring photos from about 1,200 people. The creative concept for the project consists of him photographing people who identify as hapa in the same way — from the collarbone up and without any external identifiers like clothing, jewelry or glasses. After taking their photo, he then has them "handwrite a response to the question, 'What are you?," which he stresses he never censors what his participants write in their responses.

To honor the 25th anniversary of "The Hapa Project," Fulbeck brought the series back by revisiting around 150 original participants to see how their thoughts about being mixed race have changed over time.

In some participants' "before" and "after" portraits, changes in self-perception can be perceived alongside changes in physical demeanor.

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Kip Fulbeck

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Alongside physical changes in the before and after photos, "you also see these changes in attitude as we sort of mature and grow and change as adults," Fulbeck said.

In one portrait, the person wrote for their original photo, "What am I? Shouldn't you be asking my name first?" In their revisited photo, they wrote, "Hey! I'm Christine. Nice to meet you, too."

When "The Hapa Project" first launched, it initially sparked a varied response. Some — particularly those who identified as multiracial — found the project to be a valuable affirmation of their identities and a challenge to racial stereotypes. Others, however, questioned the appropriation of the term "hapa" by those without a direct lineage to the Hawaiian context from which it originated.

For Fulbeck, the sheer exploration of the hapa identity is the entire point.

"I've had people say, 'hapa means this.' Or, 'no, hapa means this,'" he said. "To me, it's not our place to tell someone else who they are. You're the only person who gets to define who you are. You get to say that."

The reclamation and reinterpretations of the word hapa are present in a majority of "The Hapa Project" portraits, and Fulbeck thinks it represents an evolution of how people have come to feel about themselves and the way the world sees them.

"Identity is internal, but it's also this external way we relate to others. And I think as we become more comfortable in our own skin and our place in the world and where we fit in, that depends on where you're living, too," he said.

Nearly 10% of people in the United States are of mixed race, according to the latest census. That is a 275% increase from just a decade before, and is only expected to grow. The states with the largest multiracial populations in the country include California, Texas and New York.

As the number of people in the U.S. who intermarry gets larger and larger, Fulbeck's advice for parents raising hapa kids is a "million-dollar question."

"As a parent myself, I ask myself this all the time. People have asked, 'Do you talk to your kids about being hapa?' And I was like, 'I don't … because they're dealing with dad doing this all over the world. They don't want to hear about this.' My kids — they want to play Fortnite. They just want to be kids," he said. "So I always just tell parents, you just got to love your kids. Be open to them. When they want to explore it, then be willing to do it. But you can't sit there and force it."

While Fulbeck's advice for raising hapa kids isn't so definite, his opinion on the importance of defining yourself and determining your own identity is certain. "If you don't say who you are and define it correctly, other people are going to do it for you, and they're going to do it wrong," he said.

"The Hapa Project" relaunched on May 23 at the Museum of Us in San Diego and will make additional stops at the Museum of Chinese in America and Waseda University later this year.

The broadcast version of this story was edited by Ashley Westerman. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.
Copyright 2025 NPR

After California lawmakers passed a state housing law that allows taller apartment buildings near train lines, Los Angeles leaders are facing a tradeoff: If they want to delay full implementation of the law, they’ll have to choose some parts of the city to upzone.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 into law last year. Starting July 1, the law is set to allow apartment buildings up to nine stories tall to be built next to subway stations and smaller buildings within a half-mile of light rail and rapid bus stops.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and a slim majority of the L.A. City Council had expressed opposition to SB 79, in keeping with the long-standing preference of many city leaders to leave untouched the three-quarters of L.A.’s residential land zoned for single-family homes.

Now, some L.A. leaders are scrambling to pull a delay lever that was built into SB 79. The provision allows cities to put off the law’s broadest effects until 2030, as long as they agree to allow more housing development in certain neighborhoods in the interim.

“If we don't do this, what happens is SB 79 goes into effect full-on,” said Bob Blumenfield, chair of the council’s Planning and Land Use Committee, during a meeting on Tuesday. “I really want to avoid that happening.”

Options for delay

The state law lets cities delay implementation in neighborhoods deemed to be “low resource,” in areas at high risk of fires or sea level rise or are designated as historically significant. Even with those carve-outs, some higher-income neighborhoods near train stops will still be subject to upzoning.

The city’s Planning Department produced a report last week laying out three different approaches for the City Council to delay SB 79. All of them involve local incentive programs that would allow developers to build apartment buildings in neighborhoods currently zoned for single-family homes.

The first option would allow buildings up to four stories tall, while the second and third options would permit buildings up to eight stories.

During the committee meeting Tuesday, homeowners spoke against the changes the new law would bring and the city’s upzoning plans.

“Single-family neighborhoods are where families put down roots — they are the beating heart of Los Angeles and SB 79 runs a stake right through that heart,” said Shelley Wagers with the Beverly Grove Neighborhood Association. “We must use every tool to prevent irreversible harm and buy time.”

Advocates for increased housing development said they favored the report’s third option, which would allow mid-sized apartment buildings within a half-mile of existing train stops, as well as planned stations and rapid bus stops.

Scott Epstein, policy director for Abundant Housing L.A., said that approach “offers the best opportunity to meet our housing targets and ensure that neighborhoods rich in transit services and high-quality schools are doing their part.”

What happens next

The Planning and Land Use Committee could not get a three-person majority to agree on the best path forward, so the decision will now go to the full City Council for further debate.

Blumenfield said his recommendation as committee chair was to allow mid-rise apartment buildings in many neighborhoods, but only near existing train stops, not planned stations or rapid bus stops. He also recommended more exemptions for certain historic preservation zones.

Nithya Raman, a committee member who is also running for L.A. Mayor, said she found the report’s recommendations difficult to follow. Passing a delayed implementation plan could stave off changes in some neighborhoods, but only for a while, she said.

“Eventually we will have to do something,” Raman said. “So the question is just what do we do now and what do we do later.”

But council members have little time to figure out which approach they prefer. City planners told the committee that in order to have a delay ordinance in place by July 1, the council would need to decide what direction to take by early March.

This story was originally published by The LA Local on Feb. 25, 2026.

As federal immigration enforcement raids continue across Los Angeles, a broader demographic of people is stepping up to volunteer their time to monitor and document immigration raids in their neighborhoods, according to Ron Gochez, organizer with the rapid‑response network Unión del Barrio.

“We have senior citizen retirees showing up saying, ‘I’m an old white woman — how can I help?’ We have students from community colleges and universities. We have people who look like longtime activists and people who look like they’ve never done this before,” he said. “It’s solidarity being shown by Angelenos of all shapes, sizes, colors and ages.”

While longtime Latino organizers have led the patrols, their numbers are growing thanks to the new volunteers who aren’t necessarily Latino.

Unión del Barrio has outgrown their usual meeting space at the United Teachers union building in Koreatown, which used to draw a few dozen people.

Along with their patrols, the group supports families impacted by immigration raids and issues real-time alerts over social media.

In late January, the day after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, about 400 people showed up for a training session, Unión del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said.

“The very next day, we had 1,000 people on a Zoom training for educators — and we couldn’t have more because the Zoom limit was 1,000,” Gochez said.

Organizers in Pasadena expected a few dozen volunteers at All Saints Episcopal Church and were surprised when nearly 800 showed up for the training session, according to Pasadena Now.

For the first time, the majority of volunteers at a recent training session were white, Gochez said.

“I think the administration and ICE thought that by killing Alex (Pretti), that people would be scared and intimidated and would stop participating,” he said.

Instead, it has had the opposite effect.

Other immigrant advocacy groups say they’re seeing a similar surge in support. Representatives at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center report a spike in volunteers, donations, and attendance at “Know Your Rights” workshops.

The legal advocacy group says they’re going to continue sustaining deportation defense, managed information hotlines, and expect that engagement to remain strong as federal immigration enforcement intensifies.

Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio, speaks to volunteers in South Los Angeles in February 2025.

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Residents living near Koreatown and Pico Union have seen a sharp increase in immigration raids in recent months. Unión del Barrio volunteer, Oscar, who provided only his first name out of concerns over retaliation from the federal government, has seen firsthand the effects of the raids.

“This part of Los Angeles — Pico Union, K-town, MacArthur Park, Westlake — has been hit incredibly hard throughout the last year,” Oscar said, pointing to raids along the El Salvador Community Corridor in Pico Union. “They’ve gone up and down Pico multiple times.”

Westlake, a dense immigrant neighborhood predominantly made up of renters and noncitizen workers, has also been identified as one of the most vulnerable areas in L.A. to ICE raids, according to a county-sponsored study.

Oscar leads patrol training sessions, but before joining Union del Barrio, he patrolled his neighborhood with a friend to report on immigration enforcement. “It just didn’t feel like enough,” he said. “I wanted to be part of a space of dedicated organizers.”

Overall, he’s seen more people working together across racial and gender lines, with a common goal of protecting their communities, helping deliver groceries to impacted famlies, monitor their neighborhoods and feel like they have something to do in the face of the ongoing immigration raids.

Immigration agents detain a man selling flowers in Boyle Heights on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026.

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“People are coming in angry, determined,” he said. “but ultimately I think people feel empowered during the training.”

Unión del Barrio has expanded beyond its usual territory in South Los Angeles and the group now patrols in Boyle Heights, Long Beach, the San Fernando Valley, Beverly Hills and Brentwood, Gochez said.

“We have eyes and ears everywhere,” Gochez said. “I’m very comfortable saying there are thousands of people patrolling in the greater L.A. area.”

Although the group rarely solicits donations, Gochez said they have seen an uptick in funding, which helps cover costs from patrolling and printing “Know Your Rights” flyers and other materials.

Despite the heightened attention, Unión del Barrio has not altered its training curriculum, making sure that volunteers are following the law, but also aware that their safety is not guaranteed when they head out to monitor the immigration raids.

Organizers strongly discourage undocumented individuals or those on probation or parole from participating in community patrols, instead encouraging them to contribute in other ways.

“We’re not trying to become martyrs,” Gochez said. “We don’t want to be arrested, beaten or killed. But there is risk involved.”

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to make permanent a city pilot program that diverts police away from some mental health crisis calls.

Since launching in 2024, clinicians with the city’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response have handled more than 17,000 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. According to city reports, about 96% of those calls were resolved without police.

“We can’t keep deploying armed officers to handle mental health crisis calls because the outcome is Angelenos paying with loss of life and millions of their tax dollars for legal settlements,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who co-authored the motion to enshrine the program, said at Tuesday’s meeting.

According to Hernandez, in 2023, more than a third of LAPD shootings involved someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson said the data from city reports was "incontrovertible and unassailable," showing the program’s success at diverting police and fire first responders away from mental health crisis situations.

Council members said the move to make the unarmed model permanent was also a matter of fiscal responsibility. According to a news release from the offices of Hernandez and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, on average it costs the city roughly $85 per hour to dispatch LAPD officers, while a response from a UMCR team costs roughly $35 per hour.

Last fall, progressive policy advocacy group LA Forward, convened a summit of local and state officials with the goal of making UMCR permanent and expanding it.

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of LA Forward, told LAist his group was “incredibly excited” to see the city make the pilot program permanent.

Plata said he sees enshrining the program as a first step in expanding the program citywide, which his group hopes to do by the 2028 Olympics.

How the program works

In 2024, the city partnered with three nonprofit organizations — Exodus Recovery, Alcott Center and Penny Lane Centers — to provide teams of trained clinicians in service areas spread across L.A. The teams are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week within the Police Department’s Devonshire, Wilshire, Southeast, West LA, Olympic and West Valley divisions.

Crisis response workers are trained in de-escalation techniques, mental health, substance use, conflict resolution and more, according to a report on the program from the Office of City Administrative Officer. The teams don’t have the authority to order psychiatric holds for people in crisis, but they can work with them to find help locally, and spend more time on follow up than law enforcement can.

In its first year, Los Angeles’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response sent teams of unarmed clinicians to  more than 6,700 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. Only about 4% were redirected to the LAPD. Average response times have been under 30 minutes.

Examples of these interactions include members of the teams taking food to a woman who was crying and hungry, working with a business owner to engage with someone sleeping in a parking lot and sitting with a family for nearly three hours to help resolve a conflict involving a relative.

What’s next

The motion approved Tuesday also directs city officials to form a working group made up of the LAPD, the L.A. Fire Department and other agencies to address inefficiencies in the dispatch system. The goal of the working group will be to centralize unarmed crisis response dispatch and improve response times.