Transnational Crossroads

Transnational Crossroads joins the growing literature of transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the Pacific region. Young scholars, trained in a time of intense globalization, are increasingly turning their attention to subjects that transcend national, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. This new scholarship disrupts canonized epistemic systems, recuperates neglected histories of formerly marginalized peoples, and reveals interracial and transnational connections that challenge the myopic viewpoints of more traditional approaches to area studies and ethnic studies. In Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.'s volume, essays that foreground Asian and Latin American relationships (such as Filipino and Puerto Rican activists, Filipino and Mexican labor organizers, Japanese American internees and Mexican braceros, and Asian and Latino students in Los Angeles) or that situate native Hawaiians at the center of the history of U.S. imperialism go against the grain of paradigmatic racial discourses based in the black-white binary and national narratives that ignore complex transnational and multiracial negotiations. The methods here are multifarious; scholars from ethnic studies, American studies, sociology, media studies, political science, history, women's studies, religion, and English, as well as community activists use historical case studies, ethnography, cultural studies analyses, and literary criticism to illumine heretofore underexamined aspects of the Americas and the Pacific region. For example, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez's essay on the Hawaiian quilt—purveyed as a precious artifact symbolizing native Hawaiian crafts(wo)manship to tourists in search of cultural authenticity—contains within it an old story of American colonization and domestication of an indigenous people and a newer story about the contemporary production of Hawaiian quilts in the Philippines and their distribution by other Asian settlers in the islands. Erika Lee's essay traces the influence of the U.S. anti-Japanese movement (from the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 to Executive Order 9066 in 1942) on the popular sentiment and state policies of Peru. The nation enacted similar legislation to stem Japanese immigration and even deported its Japanese residents to the United States to be incarcerated in internment camps. Through interviews with dozens of Asian and Latino students at a southern California high school Gilda L. Ochoa, Laura E. Enriquez, Sandra Hamada, and Jenniffer Rojas demonstrate how prevailing racial stereotypes continue to inform and reproduce educational inequality and social separation

American studies · Ethnic group · Globalization · Humanities · Indigenous · Latino studies · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Law

• Can aMestiçabe aHaafu? Japanese-Brazilian Female Migrants and the Celebration of Racial Mixing in Contemporary Japan

  Tamaki Watarai•Journal of Intercultural Studies•2014

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