The intersection of Asian and Latin American studies has produced a burgeoning new field in transnational studies.
Dr. Jerry García was so taken aback when he first heard of Japanese Mexicans that his curiosity about them never faded during his military service or subsequent college career. For his dissertation, he wanted to write about Mexican immigration but didn’t find an aspect that hadn’t already been done, in some cases multiple times.
Ultimately, he explored Japanese migration to Mexico and subsequent assimilation. The decision added a unique dimension to his ongoing research in Mexican American labor history.
“The struggles of the Japanese in Mexico have some parallels with Chicanos in the United States,” says García, now an assistant professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies at Michigan State University.
García is among a growing number of U.S. scholars whose expertise and writings shine a spotlight on the connections between Asian and Hispanic populations and cultures.
“So much of the focus in popular culture and the media is on strife, but there are a great deal of interrelations between Asians and Hispanics,” says Dr. Jinah Kim, a Northwestern University lecturer and assistant director of its Asian American Studies program. Among other things, she examines the differential racialization of Hispanic and Asian immigrants through multiculturalism and romanticized representations of the Asia- Pacific region.
Of course, the notion of Asians living and thriving among U.S. Hispanics as well as the Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, Mexico and South America is by no means unfathomable. Nor is it new. Take world politics, for example. Peru elected Alberto Fujimori its president in 1990, an office he held for 10 years. Fujimori’s parents had emigrated from Japan before World War II.
Only about 20 years ago did U.S. scholars begin taking a closer look at the stories of how and why people left the Far East for countries such as Brazil, Cuba and Peru, says Dr. Evelyn Hu-De- Hart, a Brown University professor of history and ethnic studies who is considered a pioneer in the study of Asian-Hispanic intersections. She is also director of Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.
