Star Trek map

[dr_whom]

 A map of Star Trek major characters who canonically were born on or grew up on Earth, and where they’re from. Across the bottom row are several characters who are canonically from or implied to be from Earth, but there’s no specific location that they’re from directly stated in canon.

Some things to observe:

• The majority of these characters are from the U.S. Most of them are white; notable exceptions include Sisko (from New Orleans) and Sulu (from San Francisco). Sisko and Sulu were very valuable representation for men of color and I love them both, but the writers weren’t very creative in having them be from a couple of the most obvious cities for a Black American and an Asian American to be from. Kudos to the Voyager writers for defying stereotypes and deciding Harry Kim was born in South Carolina.
• Not a single character from China or South Asia, and only one from Southeast Asia—the most densely populated regions on the planet. Nobody canonically from the Middle East or North Africa either. (Alexander Siddig is from North Africa, but there’s no canonical information on where Julian Bashir is from, and it seems implied that he’s from England.)
• Basically there’s what the writers obviously think of as the Default Places someone can be from on Earth (the U.S. and a handful of places in northwestern Europe), and then a handful of characters from Exotic Foreign Places such as Russia, Japan, and Africa™.
• The distribution hasn’t gotten noticeably better over the fifty-something years of the Star Trek franchise.

Some methodological notes on how locations and pointers were chosen:

Pointers indicate specific cities that characters are stated to be from, if possible. In some cases, if all we know is the country a character is from but not what city, the pointers point to a location they’re associated with: e.g., Keiko O’Brien is from Japan, and her mother lives in Kumamoto, so she gets a pointer to Kumamoto.

Riker, Rios, and Chekov don’t have pointers to specific locations because all we know canonically is that they’re from Alaska, Chile, and Russia respectively, and those places are quite large. We don’t have more specific information for Miles O’Brien and Malcolm Reed than Ireland and England respectively, but the photos are bigger than the countries appear on the map, so pointers it is for them. 

Archer is stated to have been born in Upstate New York but grown up in San Francisco; he’s attached to San Francisco on the map. However, Harry Kim was born in South Carolina and didn’t grow up there, but he’s attached to South Caroline because we don’t know where he grew up.

Worf is implied to have lived in Russia or Belarus; there’s been dialogue associating Culber with Puerto Rico and M’Benga with Kenya, but there’s no canonical information that they’re actually from those places.

Information is from Memory Alpha.