Building Interethnic Borderlands: Japanese-Mexican Relations and Memory-Making in Texas and Mexico, 1907 – Present
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Lui, Mary
Abstract
This dissertation is a cultural history of Japanese American and Japanese Mexican communities in Texas and Mexico. Focusing on Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras, Monterrey, N.L., and the Rio Grande Valley, it explores identity formation in mining and farming communities as critical to histories of race, migration, and empire. It examines the conditions and racial ideologies at the transnational, national, and local levels that shaped Japanese migration to the southern Texas-Mexico border. Ideas about what it meant to be Japanese and have ties to Japan shifted across the twentieth century, and it illustrates how these ideas influenced the complex identities of Japanese communities in Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Texas. Based on oral histories, archival work, and fieldwork from Mexico, Japan, and the United States in Spanish, Japanese, and English, this project traces the arrival of Japanese labor migrants to northern Mexico and Texas at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of these communities across the twentieth century. It shows how communities of Japanese origin contributed to social, cultural, and economic developments by marrying Mexican women, starting their businesses, and working alongside Mexican American, Indigenous, African American, Chinese, and white communities. I argue that Japanese communities fundamentally shaped regional race relations, and their presence complicated questions of citizenship and belonging near the border. Studying these communities and their development across time complicates histories of migration, policing, and race at the southern Texas-Mexico border. In historicizing these significant developments, “Building Interethnic Borderlands” shows how Japanese communities in Texas and Mexico, as well as the national and global forces that structured their lives, shaped the history of the border region.
Recommended Citation
Estrella, Lucero, "Building Interethnic Borderlands: Japanese-Mexican Relations and Memory-Making in Texas and Mexico, 1907 – Present" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1446.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1446
