Dallas Asian American Society Finds a New Home in the Cedars

Stephanie Drenka was born to Korean parents and adopted as an infant to a family living in Southlake. Her adoptive mother was a children’s librarian, and young Drenka spent countless hours reading books. It wasn’t long before she noticed that she wasn’t seeing herself represented in any of her favorite stories.

She has turned that revelation into a life’s work. Drenka graduated from DePaul University with a minor in Asian American studies, and she’s the founder of Visible, an online magazine that uplifts historically marginalized individuals.

In 2022, she and Denise Johnson co-founded the Dallas Asian American Historical Society with the intention of retelling and reclaiming Asian Americans' effects on the city. Drenka first operated as a collector of sorts, building an archive of artifacts that tell the story of Asian Americans in Dallas. Drenka came upon vintage family photos, decades-old restaurant menus, event programs and countless other uniquely Dallas relics.

“Unlike other metropolitan cities with similar cultural centers, museums or institutions, any physical traces of Dallas’ earliest Asian residents have been erased," Drenka says.

Since founding the nonprofit organization, Drenka’s ultimate dream has been to find a space to permanently display the collection and host events dedicated to her mission. This weekend, that dream finally came to fruition. The Dallas Asian American Historical Society has moved into a vacant space located in the artist quarter of the South Side at Lamar building in The Cedars.

“Our unit includes a front gallery, which will be on display and lit 24/7,” Drenka says. “We will offer resources and programming to the community, including oral history recording, artifact digitization, educational workshops and other events.”

Drenka says that the space will also have a community library with books and resources on Asian American history, as well as two artists-in-residence, Christina Hahn and Leili Arai Tavallaei from the Dallas Asian American Art Collective, which will have studios there.

The organization has a 15-month lease on the space, made possible through individual donations and a grant from the Orchid Giving Circle, a North Texas-based nonprofit composed of Asian women.

“We see our space as a re-envisioning and reclamation,” Drenka says. “Answering the hypothetical question, ‘What would it have looked like if Dallas had preserved our history from the beginning?’ Imagine what resources our community might have accumulated over more than a century, had our early innovations not been met with racism and exclusionary barriers.”

One of the prominent stories of Drenka’s collection is a Chinese man named J.L. Chow, who was the first person of Asian descent to be listed on a Dallas city directory in 1873. Chow opened a successful laundromat in downtown Dallas, encouraging a number of other Asian immigrants to open similar businesses in the same area.

Around that time, the Dallas Daily Times Herald ran a story with the headline “Danger In Inferior Laundries” in response to Chow’s influence. On a national level, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which banned Chinese workers from immigrating to the United States and wasn’t repealed until 1943.

“In a time when many community members feel powerless in the face of injustice, threat of racist violence or threats of deportation,” Drenka says, “it is imperative that we continue to dream of collective liberation and build from history towards that future.”

Drenka is refusing to let Dallas and the world at large turn a blind eye to the hardships Asian Americans have faced but makes sure that the new space is a celebration as much as it is a historical indictment.

“We do see this space as an Asian American cultural center,” she says. “Especially with the intersection of art and historic preservation.”

Dallas Asian American Historical Society's grand opening was Sunday, Feb. 9, and included a celebration of the Lunar New Year; 2025 marks the Year of the Snake.

“In many Asian cultures, the snake represents wisdom and transformation,” Drenka says, due to the ability of the snake to shed its skin. “As we enter into a new political administration, our role as historical preservationists, culture bearers and storytellers is more critical than ever.”