Hapa is a Hawaiian word used to refer to someone of mixed ethnic ancestry. In Hawaii, the word refers to any person of mixed ethnic heritage, regardless of the specific mixture. In California, the term is used for any person of East Asian or Southeast Asian admixture. Therefore, the two uses are concurrent.
Historical and Hawaiian usage
The word, "hapa," entered the Hawaiian language in the early 1800s, with the arrival of Christian missionaries who instituted a Hawaiian alphabet and developed curriculum for schools. It is a transliteration of the English word "half," but quickly came to mean "part," which could be combined with numbers to form fractions. For example, hapalua is half, hapaha is one-fourth, and hapanui means majority. In Hawaii, the term can be used in conjunction with other Hawaiian racial and ethnic descriptors to specify a particular racial or ethnic mixture. An example of this is hapa haole. Pukui states that the original meaning of the word haole was "foreigner." Therefore, all non-Hawaiians can be called haole. In practical terms, however, the term is used as a racial description for whites, with the specific exclusion of Portuguese. Portuguese were traditionally considered to be a separate race in Hawaii. Hapa-haole also is the name of a type of Hawaiian music in which the tune, styling, and/or subject matter is Hawaiian, but the lyrics are partly, mostly, or entirely in English. Many hapa-haole songs had their musical roots in the Western tradition, and the lyrics were in some combination of English and Hawaiian; these songs first gained popularity outside the Territory of Hawaiibeginning in 1912–1915, and include titles such as "My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua" and "Sweet Leilani". Hapa haole is also used for Hawaiian-language hula songs that are partly in English, thus disqualifying them as "authentic" Hawaiian hula in some venues such as the Merrie Monarch Festival.
Controversy
Some see the use of the term as a misappropriation of Hawaiian culture, but there are kama'aina and kanaka maoli who see it as hypocritical to protest anyone using what was originally taken from another culture to begin with. Still others take a stronger stand in discouraging its usage and misuse as they consider the term to be vulgar and racist. However, the term, unlike other words referring to mixed-race people has never been a derogatory term when it is used in its original Hawaiian context although there is some debate about appropriate usage outside this context. As Wei Ming Dariotis states, "'Hapa' was chosen because it was the only word we could find that did not really cause us pain. It is not any of the Asian words for mixed Asian people that contain negative connotations either literally or by association."
