The Mexican Transpacific

Ignacio López-Calvo

Description

The Mexican Transpacific considers the influence of a Japanese ethnic background or lack thereof in the cultural production of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican authors, performers, and visual artists. Despite Japanese Mexicans’ unquestionable influence on Mexico’s history and culture and the historical studies recently published on this Nikkei community, the study of its cultural production and therefore its self-definition has been, for the most part, overlooked.

This book, a continuation of author Ignacio López-Calvo’s previous research on cultural production by Latin American authors of Asian ancestry, focuses mostly on literature, theater, and visual arts produced by Japanese immigrants in Mexico and their descendants, rather than on the Japanese community as a mere object of study. With this interdisciplinary project, López-Calvo aims to bring to the fore this silenced community’s voice and agency to historicize its own experience.
Foreword by Emma Nakatani

Introduction: Nikkei Cultural Production and Transpacific Studies from a Latin Americanist Perspective

Part I: Immigrant, Literary Negotiations of National Identity
1. Nonaka's Memoir: From Captain in the Mexican Revolution to Enemy of the State
2. Challenges to Nihonjinron in Nakatani's Memoirs
3. Strategic Essentialism in Akane's Performative Tanka

Part II: Japanese Mexican Visual and Performance Arts
4. Resignifying Yamato-damashii and Utopian Socialism in the Manga Los samuráis de México
5. Nishizawa's Bicultural Dialectics and the Critical Stereotyping of His Art
6. The Transpacific in Akiko's Theatrical Performance

Conclusion: Another Past Is Possible

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• Mexican
• Yamato-damashii
• Luis Nishizawa
• Konohanasakuya-hime
• Nihonjinron
• Memoir
• Mexican Revolution
• Japanese
• Caribbean
• Nikkei

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826504951
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

The Mexican Transpacific
CRITICAL MEXICAN STUDIES
Series editor: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Critical Mexican Studies is the first English-language, humanities-based, theoretically focused academic series devoted to the study of Mexico. The series is a space for innovative works in the humanities that focus on theoretical analysis, transdisciplinary interventions, and original conceptual framing.
Other titles in the series:
The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation , by Cristina Rivera Garza
History and Modern Media: A Personal Journey , by John Mraz
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance , by Irmgard Emmelhainz
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture , by Oswaldo Zavala
Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production , by Rebecca Janzen
Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City , by Ben A. Gerlofs
The Mexican Transpacific
Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance
Ignacio López-Calvo
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: López-Calvo, Ignacio, author.
Title: The Mexican transpacific : Nikkei writing, visual arts, and performance / Ignacio López-Calvo.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, [2022] | Series: Critical Mexican studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022010469 (print) | LCCN 2022010470 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504937 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504944 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826504951 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504968 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Mexican literature—Japanese authors—History and criticism. | Japanese in literature. | Art, Mexican—Japanese influences. | Japanese—Mexico—Ethnic identity. | Japanese—Intellectual life—Mexico. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PQ7134.J37 L67 2022 (print) | LCC PQ7134.J37 (ebook) | DDC 860.9/8956072—dc23/eng/20220930
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010469
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010470
To my loving mother, María Teresa Calvo Matesanz, who would cry every time I went to the airport.
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
Foreword
INTRODUCTION. Nikkei Cultural Production and Transpacific Studies from a Latin Americanist Perspective
PART I: IMMIGRANT, LITERARY NEGOTIATIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
1. Nonaka’s Memoir: From Captain in the Mexican Revolution to Enemy of the State
2. Challenges to Nihonjinron in Nakatani’s Memoirs
3. Strategic Essentialism in Akane’s Performative Tanka
PART II: JAPANESE MEXICAN VISUAL AND PERFORMANCE ARTS
4. Resignifying Yamato-damashii and Utopian Socialism in the Manga Los samuráis de México
5. Nishizawa’s Bicultural Dialectics and the Critical Stereotyping of His Art
6. The Transpacific in Akiko’s Theatrical Performance
CONCLUSION. Another Past Is Possible
Notes
Work Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude for the University of California MEXUS-CONACYT collaborative research grant that I, along with my colleague Emma Nakatani, received in 2017. I would also like to thank Martín Camps, Selfa Chew-Smithart, Aiko Chikaba, Irene Akiko Iida, Lucero Estrella, Hugo López-Chavolla, Paulina Machuca, Emma Nakatani, Jaime Ortega, Víctor Hugo Pacheco, Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Cristina Rascón, Miyuki Sakai, the Asociación México-Japonesa, Ignacio Sánchez-Prado, Ana Valenzuela, and Juan Villoro for their kind support to my research, and especially José I. Suárez, who proofread the manuscript, and Randy Muth, Seth Jacobowitz, Juan E. de Castro and Nicholas Birns, who provided valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Vanderbilt University Press editors Gianna Mosser and Zack Gresham for their support throughout the writing process.
A Note on Translation
Whenever possible, I used published translations of the original quotations, which are acknowledged after the quotation and included in the works cited. Otherwise, the translation is mine and, for that reason, has no page numbers and does not appear in the works cited.
Spelling of several Okinawan and Japanese words, particularly for long vowels, changes from author to author and from text to text, as authors often try to transcribe phonetically terms that they learned at home.
Foreword
I first heard about Ignacio López-Calvo, a scholar of Asian–Latin American cultural production, in 2010 through another colleague. In my first written contact with him, he kindly asked me for a copy of my undergraduate thesis, which contextualized my Japanese grandfather’s memories and presented them as a historical document. Without hesitation, I sent him an electronic file with my undergraduate thesis, which I presented at Universidad Iberoamericana in 2002. After he thanked me, we lost contact until 2016, when Ignacio asked me to participate in a project sponsored by a University of California MEXUS-CONACYT collaborative research grant. The project’s aim was to interview Mexican artists and writers of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. As a historian, I was somewhat unfamiliar with such an objective; however, I saw it as an opportunity to delve into an unknown world. At last, in 2017, he and I met in person.
I am elated that this study is partially based on those years of collaboration and, particularly, by two of its components. First is a detailed and careful literary analysis of my grandfather Yoshihei Nakatani’s memoirs. As a historian of the Nikkei community in Mexico, I have spent over twenty years reading, contextualizing, interpreting, and analyzing these memoirs, which as a teenager studying history I happened to find in a drawer at home. Having read my grandfather’s memoirs numerous times since, it was refreshing and motivational for me to revisit the document through López-Calvo’s reflective and analytical perspective. This new reading has raised questions that I will try to answer in the near future. Second, reading this book was a unique personal experience. At times, I paused to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in my life, I deeply identified as a Nikkei. Although I am the granddaughter of a Japanese immigrant and my family has always kept my grandfather’s memory alive through Japanese traditions (especially those related to food and singing), the truth of the matter is that my contact with Mexico’s Japanese community has not been constant. It is perhaps for this reason that I grew up without a clear consciousness of or attachment to my Japanese origins. It was not until after my grandfather’s demise, along with my subsequent thesis on his memoirs and the history of the Japanese colony in Mexico, that I began to see with greater clarity what it means to be Nikkei. However, I must confess that I still tended to view the concept in distant and alien terms. In this context, I found López-Calvo’s study truly evocative, because it forced me reflect on my Mexican and Japanese roots.
My personal and emotional reflections notwithstanding, readers are presented with a work that is innovative in several ways. As López-Calvo points out in the introduction, it has been only in recent years that the history of the Japanese Mexican community has begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves, yet this is the first study to focus on its cultural production. It features the autobiographical writings of Issei Kingo Nonaka, Yoshihei Nakatani, and Akane; the contemporary Nisei Irene Akiko’s theatrical performance; the renowned painter Luis Nishizawa Flores’s artwork; and a manga dealing mostly with the history of the famous Enomoto Colony, a work translated and published by the Japanese Mexican Association.
These six diverse case studies demonstrate how an ethnic community can be studied through its cultural production. In López-Calvo’s words, these memoirs, poems, manga, visual artworks, and theater pieces reflect the Japanese Mexican community’s individual and collective self-image. These works also reflect the group’s diasporic nature, as its Japanese culture is altered upon coming into contact with the host society. Consequently, this book interprets identity as a dynamic element that evolves in various ways and for different reasons.
López-Calvo manages to shed light on several other key issues regarding Nikkei cultural production in Mexico: the emergence of transpacific studies, a field that addresses socioeconomic and cultural relations among regions along the Pacific Rim; the conceptualization of Asian–Latin American literature; racism and xenophobia as inextricable elements of migration studies that take on greater relevance in light of current events; the remembering and forgetting that shape immigrant identity; and the visibility and empowerment of an ethnic group that, despite its relatively small number, has had a profound impact on Mexican culture. Finally, I want to express my deeply felt gratitude to Ignacio López-Calvo for giving me the opportunity to be part of this project. Meeting Mexican writers and artists of Chinese and Japanese ancestry has enriched my understanding of these immigrant groups and their descendants. I also want to thank him for allowing me to write this foreword to a study that, I am sure, will reveal new ways of seeing, studying, and understanding the Nikkei community in my country, Mexico.
Mexico City, June 2021
Emma Nakatani (Department of History, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas)
Introduction
Nikkei Cultural Production and Transpacific Studies from a Latin Americanist Perspective
Most studies about the transnational Japanese, or Nikkei, diaspora in Mexico have traditionally ignored cultural production, thus missing out on the community’s self-definition. In this introduction, I theorize transpacific literary and cultural production from the perspective of Latin American studies, but firs