Interview with Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada on Othered Histories of Race: “Mexican and Japanese relations demonstrate the existence of an open, decentred world characterised by multiple overlapping structures.”

By Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: Firstly, for those who might be unfamiliar with the topic, can you give us a brief overview of the history of race and power in Mexican-Japanese Relations?  

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: Histories of race cannot be understood without reference to issues of power and change. However, most histories of race have been framed with a North Atlantic focus, reproducing and maintaining a Eurocentric approach that dominates most of the social sciences and humanities. My research on race and racism in Mexican and Japanese relations seeks to break through this nearly insurmountable barrier to decentre both North Atlantic and Eurocentric approaches and unlock alternative connections and disconnections in the margins. Mexican Japanese race relations are not limited to Eurocentric understandings on race and ethnicity, but neither are they necessarily free from them. Given the dominant power of both the US and Europe, North Atlantic understandings on race and racism continue to shape the intellectual, cultural and social circulation of the meanings of these notions as well as their material undertakings.

Given this general context, it is usually unknown outside specialist circles that European empires’ colonial enterprises had had their eyes on East Asia, particularly Japan and China, before the so-called discovery of, or encounter with, what is now known as Latin America. For instance, following Marco Polo’s and other explorers’ writings, beginning in the 16^th century, Iberian powers, particularly Portugal and Spain, had great ambitions to colonise China and Japan, and deployed Christian missionary projects and trade initiatives to this end, but they failed and instead ended up colonising Latin America and the Caribbean. This failure is often overlooked in global histories because it demystifies and unsettles the superiority often ascribed to Europe to rule and dominate the world in these early stages of globalisation. It also demonstrates the existence of an open, decentred world characterised by multiple overlapping structures that challenge self-centred European, USA, and North Atlantic hegemonic narratives of domination.

In the early stages of European empires’ global expansion, Japan and Japanese peoples, for instance, had also begun to arrive in Latin America, particularly Mexico, and Europe. There are some exciting accounts that provide insights on non-European interactions, between indigenous Náhuatl elites, who inhabited what is currently known as Mexico, and Japanese diplomatic and trade missions, beginning at least in the 16^th century. There are also some equally fascinating non-state encounters between Japanese and Mexican people that complicate western classifications, categorisations and hierarchies. As we know, unlike East Asian countries, including Japan, the expansion of European empires reached a global dimension, colonizing most places on earth, and has therefore significantly shaped the world we live in currently. As a corollary, European global expansion has also influenced the contemporary relations of non-European countries, such as Japan and Mexico in meaningful ways.

From the 19^th century to the present, the relations between Japan and Mexico have been mediated or triangulated by the role of the US most saliently. However, I would argue that Mexican Japanese relations, as well as most non-European relations, are much more varied, unstable, and intriguing than a Eurocentric triangulation, mediation and framework allows us to see. Therefore, in a way, my research asks how we can think about individual and broader social relations between non-European entities, such as Mexico and Japan, within, alongside, and beyond the power of European, Western or North Atlantic hegemons? And what are the capabilities of these types of more or less unstable relations to challenge, reproduce or transform normative understandings of race, power and resistance in specific time periods and places.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: Can you tell us a bit about your own research? •What inspired your research? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: I was born in a medical clinic in the rural town of Jiutepec, Morelos, in southern Mexico. The doctor who helped my mother give birth was an indigenous Otomi young man from Hidalgo, who became my godfather. At the time, my father was a 28 year old, dark-skinned man, very likely from an afro-indigenous heritage. His family were from another town in Morelos, and Iztapalapa, one of the most marginal, poorest, and indigenous looking boroughs in Mexico City.  My mother was a 19year old woman, and third generation descendant of Japanese immigrants from Fukuoka. She grew up in a cramped apartment in a working-class massive housing unit in Mexico city. Neither of them had finished either their high school or university education, partly as a result of deep rooted structural inequalities in Mexico. Despite coming from very different places, they were brought together by the circumstances of their lives and gave life to me.

In various forms, this context enabled me to gain insights into contrasting experiences of racism from my early years. Growing up, I had been curious about our family histories, of which I knew little. Yet because I grew up in poverty – a legacy of the symbolic, cultural and material dispossession of my Japanese immigrant and my afro-indigenous families – I knew that I had first to gain a degree in a ‘practical’ discipline such as law, which would enable me to attain a certain degree of mobility. Then, as my wise maternal grandmother advised me, I could embark on pursuing the kind of questions that were more important, personal and interesting to me. I am fortunate that it somehow worked out. After completing my BA degree in Law at UNAM, and working for some years at the Mexican Government Competition Authority, I was able to study at for an MA in Latin American Studies abroad with a full scholarship and other awards and bursaries.

Outside Mexico, I began studying race and racism in Latin America, and during the writing up of my master’s thesis, I encountered a book about Japanese migration to Mexico by Ma. Elena Ota Mishima. This served as an important basis for the doctoral research proposal that I successfully submitted to Cambridge University, where I won a full-scholarship from the Gates Cambridge Trust. At the time, I had no idea of everything that I was going to find with my doctoral research, including the ethnic cleansing of people of Japanese ancestry in Mexico during my family’s lifetime. These findings continue to unsettle many ideas on which I had built my national identity as Mexican, and shed light on the racialised and gendered underpinnings of the Mexican nation and Japanese national identity, in which notions of skin-colour and racial purity figure prominently to determine one’s position in the social hierarchy and various forms of inequalities and violence.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: What was the most interesting piece of research (and if different, the most unexpected piece of research) you discovered during the course of writing? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: This is a particularly fascinating question. For me, everything that I discovered was so unexpected that it unsettled any sense of anchorage, however precarious, that I had cultivated over the years.  This research compelled me to interrogate everything I knew about Mexico, Japan and anything in between. However, learning about my personal and family history was probably the most intriguing – and frustrating – part of my research. It was so frustrating because I could not get all the answers that I needed or wanted as there are many records that have been lost, missed or destroyed, mostly as a result of violence and trauma. Yet family histories remain such an interesting lens to illuminate wider social historical processes, for instance, the everyday making of (mixed) race nations, and their multiple reproductions and contestations.

I learned, for instance, that one of my Japanese great-grandfathers, Mitsuru, had married Carmen, an orphan, working-class Mexican woman from Guanajuato. I understood how they both had been orphans in a way, because Mitsuru lived most of his life without a family in Mexico, after being denied the possibility to return to Japan and being racially and culturally ostracised by both the community of Japanese immigrants and Carmen’s Mexican relatives and acquaintances. Their orphanhood was thus compounded by the exclusion that they both faced from their respective communities in Mexico, due to their interracial marriage and mixed-race offspring, who were often deemed racially inferior, undesirable and underserving of belonging by both Mexicans and Japanese.

This single fragmentary historical thread sheds light on the making of desirable and undesirable racial mixtures in ‘mestizo’ (Spanish-Amerindian) mixed-raced regimes, such as Mexico, the multiple violences that are deployed to produce normative ideals of race and nation (from family, institutional and state-led structural racism), to the ways in which individuals seek to challenge these ideas by using a variety of means, including the assertion of other identities, such as Japanese ancestry, that may also be oppressive, racialised and gendered. The fact that non-Spanish/non-European racial mixtures, such as Japanese and Asians more generally, are not considered when thinking about national identity construction in Latin America, despite the existence of many people who have this heritage, tell us a lot about the operation of racism, the dominance of whiteness as a norm, and racial privilege and inequalities on a global scale.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: Within the history of Latin America, there has been a strong focus on understanding the concepts ‘Mestizaje’ and race during colonisation and after, what does your research tell us from other experiences in Latin America like, i.e. Brazil? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: I think that my research shows that we should not assume the existence or uncritical applicability of presumably universal frameworks that seek to generalise the positions, experiences and responses of different groups of people. It asks us to attend to the specificities of different locations, time-periods and the diversity of ethno-racial minorities of immigrant origins, particularly their demographic composition, numbers and influence or lack thereof, in relation to their places of arrival, transit and incorporation. The experiences of people of Japanese ancestry in Mexico are different from that of others in other Latin American countries, in particular Brazil and Peru, who received larger migratory flows, partly because Mexicans of Japanese descent are a very small ethno-racial minoritarian group, who still occupy a low economic and political position on the whole, as a result of structural racism and the impact of Second World War mass dispossession. There are similarities between these groups as well, given their shared racialisation and states’ policies aimed at these groups, but we must be careful to avoid generalising and pay attention to the specificities of the differences between and among each group across different spaces and locations.

More specifically, previous studies on Japanese migration to Latin America tended to focus on Brazil, which has the largest number of people of Japanese descent in the Americas, on post-war migrations to Bolivia, and on Peru. Peru follows Brazil in the number of migrants, and it remains the only country where a Latin American citizen of visible Japanese descent was elected president. Even so, Brazilians of Japanese descent represent less than 0.9 percent of Brazil’s population, while Peruvians of Japanese descent only constitute 0.3 percent of Peru’s population. People of Japanese origin in these and other Latin American countries are infinitely small as a proportion of the total populations, hence their status as ethno-racial minorities in white/mestizo dominated countries. This is important because at times, based primarily on some token ‘successful’ cases and the activities of elites in these countries, some US, Japanese and Hispanic or Latin American scholars have downplayed racism and assumed uniform Nikkei diasporic ties, mobilisations and affluent status. However, bearing in mind the uneven trajectories observed among these communities and individuals, we should consider Latin American Japanese identities as processes of becoming rather than fixed objects.

Even though Mexico is the fourth main receiving country of the Japanese diaspora, with an estimated 76,000 Mexicans of Japanese descent of a total 130 million Mexicans in the country, it has distinctive characteristics. Japanese immigrants in Mexico reached only 15,000 before the Second World War, and after it their number, including their descendants, was reduced to 4,000. As mentioned before, while in other Latin American countries, particularly Brazil and Peru, the income and standard of living of some people of Japanese origin may be above the average, in Mexico, people of Japanese origins remain an exception as they have not achieved the same success, continue to be employed by Mexicans, and work in low-paid positions. My research shows that the precarious economic status of Japanese Mexicans was caused by the Mexican revolution, racism and discrimination, which furthered their racial and cultural assimilation through intermarriage, sometimes by force and under violent conditions. Consequently, my research filled existing gaps in the relevant literature on race, ethnicity and migration by explaining the operation of race and racism and their impact on the limited economic, social and political rights and participation of Mexicans of Japanese origins, and indicated the (dis)continuities with other cases in the region.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: You present the concept ‘unforgetting’ as a form of resistance against the racial project of mestizaje. Could you elaborate on this? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: Unforgetting, as a form of resistance against racist projects of forced assimilation and elimination, is connected with my ‘writing in reverse mestizaje’ decolonial method, which I elaborated in my doctoral thesis. They are both forms of counter-memories that foreground the disconnect between official and statist history on the one hand, and personal embodied histories, memories and experiences that are left outside it on the other. Unforgetting, in other words, aims to make legible other forms of knowing that have been rendered illegible through violence, in particular lived experiences that connect different individuals, who may have nothing in common, but their shared racialisation and experiences of racism.

If we look at some of the allegedly ‘scholarly’ history of Japanese people in Latin America, most of it has been written by agents of imperial states, who have sought to control migrants to maintain white supremacy linked with European and USA colonial enterprises in Asia and Latin America. Some important writings by Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry are often used as mere raw material for academic extraction and colonialism by white scholars, who embody normative identities and seek to maintain their position of privilege in relation to non-white, racialised minorities, and ignore the important role that racism plays in these histories and relations. Foregrounding the actual experiences of ordinary people allows us to challenge these renderings and provide different understandings that centre the role of state apparatuses and infrastructures, including academia, in producing race and violence.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: What are some of the current themes, or trends in studying trans-pacific migrations? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: This has been a trendy field for some time now, but one of the developments that seems to have gained a degree of interest is bringing together Asian Studies and Asian American Studies, or for example Japanese Studies and (American) studies of race, ethnicity and migration about Japanese migrants. What these initiatives aim to do, in my understanding, is to highlight the connections between Japan and Japanese migrants abroad, whether in East Asia or in Latin America, by tracing the circulation of ideas, peoples and projects of expansion. This field makes important contributions to the history of ideas for instance, but runs the risk of establishing a problematic equivalence between states and people on the move, as though they had the same motivations, affinities and destinies or determinations.

This equivalence makes more sense in the case of the global expansion and dominance of European empires and people for most of the last five hundred years, which cemented white supremacy as the desirable norm. However, this is not the case for Asian peoples, or people of Japanese ancestry in particular, who have not gained that degree of universality or normativity on a global scale. Asians and Japanese people are still racialised as non-white, and therefore the power of their respective states, such as Japan, does not necessarily protect them against racism, and does not give them unrestricted privilege, as the case of Mexicans of Japanese ancestry clearly demonstrates. Establishing such equivalence, between states and immigrants, therefore risks reproducing racism and state violence against racialised minorities from Asian countries, and particularly Japan, many of whom may not even be considered fully human or fully Japanese, as is the case for Nikkei communities, often deemed as inferior to the Japanese and at times as less than human by their Latin American nations to which they belong.

Iker Itoiz Ciaurriz: What have been the biggest developments in race studies in Mexico over the last decade? 

Jessica A. Fernandez de Lara Harada: In my view, the most exciting developments in race studies in Mexico are embodied, interdisciplinary, cross-regional research projects that break away from methodological nationalisms, Eurocentric politics of comparison, and violent disciplinary and statist frameworks. Some brilliant scholars who are doing this work in the Americas as a whole – and at times from an Pacific Ocean perspective – are Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil, Rachel H. Lim, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Marcia L. Hattori, Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito, Jordan Stanger-Ross, Alan Lopez Pelaez, Sho Yamagushiku, Axel Elias Jimenez, among others. They are developing sophisticated frameworks to understand and explain connections that disrupt the surfaces of self-evident knowledges to show the layer after layer of complexity in the world we live in. They complicate the narratives that we often take for granted, ask questions that challenge our normalised assumptions, and open windows to see the world more fully in all its plurality, multiplicity and complexity.

Recommended readings by the author

Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020) “The Map and the Territory: National borders have colonized our imagination” The Baffler.

Hattori, M. L. (2020) “Undressing Corpses: An Archaeological Perspective on State Violence”, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 7.2. pp. 151-168.

James, M, Fernández de Lara Harada, J., Izumi, M., Okamoto, M. and Stanger-Ross, J. (2022) “Separate National Apologies, Transnational Injustices: Second World War Oppression, Anti-Japanese Persecution, and the Politics of Apology in Five Countries”, Global Studies Quarterly, 2:4.

Kim, J.V. (2017) “Asia–Latin America as Method: The Global South Project and the Dislocation of the West”, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 2: 97-117.

Lim, R. H. (2021) “Ephemeral Nations: Between History and Diaspora in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower”, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 197-219.

Lim, R. and Fernández de Lara Harada, J. (2023) “Anti-Asian Racism”, Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, Ed. Ben Vinson, New York: Oxford University Press.

Navarrete, F. (2013) Alfabeto del racismo mexicano, México, D.F.: Malpaso.

Pelaez Lopez, A. (2020) Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, The Operating System.

Saito, N. (2022) “Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa”, American Quarterly 74(3), 567-589.

Stanger-Ross, J. (Ed.) (2020) Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Uprooting

and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Vinson III, B. (2017) Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yamagushiku, S. (2023) “Uyafaafuji’s Refusal: An Ode To The Yanbaru” available at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEDmb1LBX9cLinks to an external site.

Biography

Dr. Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in Race, Decolonial and Intersectional Studies, based at the Center for Japanese Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Previously, Jessica studied Law as an undergraduate at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and an MA and PhD in Latin American and Japanese Studies at University College London (UCL) and at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Fernández de Lara Harada’s doctoral research examined the ‘mestizo’ (Euro-Amerindian) racial system, citizenship and state violence, as well as repertoires of resistance in Mexico, in relation to the overlooked historical experiences of Mexicans of Asian and Japanese origins. This study built upon her master’s dissertation on graphic novel representations of mestizaje (an Euro-Amerindian racial regime), the positioning of afro-descendants, and the operation of race and racism in Mexico from a transnational lens. Dr. Fernández de Lara Harada’s research interests include trans-pacific histories, nation-state building, race-making, inequalities and marginalisation. Her work has been published in the ASAP/Journal, Global Studies Quarterly, the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH 20th anniversary publication, Oxford Bibliographies, among others.