Uprooting Community: Japanese Mexicans, World War II, and the US–Mexico Borderlands by Selfa A. Chew (review)

Selfa Chew's Uprooting Community: Japanese Mexicans, World War II, and the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship about Asians in the Americas. Its focus on the World War II era and the relatively unknown history of Japanese internment in Mexico stands as a fascinating examination of daily life among interred Japanese Mexicans whose official incarceration differed significantly from the American project. But this is not the only scholarly intervention made in this book. Chew's attention to Mexican–US diplomacy solidly affixes Mexico's internment project to its adherence to the Good Neighbor Policy. This dual lens—quotidian adjustments to internment by Japanese Mexicans and Mexico's World War II political theater—puts forth a refreshing perspective on wartime injustices long overlooked by historians.

Wartime, argues Chew, was a political turning point for the 5,000 Japanese Mexicans who were placed in camps in Mexico. At the onset of the war, the displacement and internment of Japanese Mexicans reconfigured the social fabric of the borderlands and coastal regions. Moreover, Mexico's internment project might have been a harbinger to a more robust project to militarize the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, whose bureaucratic machinery at that time directed resources toward vetting bracero workers. Chew's attention to the long immigration history at the borderlands—a narrative that reads more like historical sociology than social history—is then nicely balanced with rich oral histories and testimony from primary sources. Perhaps the most compelling first-hand source Chew draws from is the underutilized collection of the Departamento de Investigación Política y Social (Department of Social and Political Investigation). One such example is the story of Eva Watanabe Matsuo, a former resident of Baja California who was relocated to Mexico City for internment. Watanabe, a self-identified Mexican and borderlander, lived through the trauma of her family's dispossession and subsequent poverty. The Watanabe family's difficult choice—to enter a camp in the United States or to remain with their "own people" in Mexico City, where they were surveilled and contained by local police—is a story of both individual and collective resistance to internment. The transnational life of Denkei Gushiken, on the other hand, proved more complicated, if not more ill-fated. A resident of Ciudad Juárez, Gushiken used his status as a legal resident of the United States to move unfettered between his place of residency and El Paso, where he owned and operated a grocery store. His wife, Tsune Gushiken, a Japanese national, raised three children in Ciudad Juárez, the place of their birth. The national rules of internment, however, were harshly felt in Gushiken's family. Because Denkei was a legal resident of the United States and not a Mexican national, he was forced into confinement at a detention camp in Crystal City, Texas. The Gushikens faced a difficult decision: to stay in Mexico and be assigned to an internment camp without their father or to cross into the United States to join their father at the Crystal City family internment center.

Chew's book is a solid contribution to the burgeoning historiography about Asians in the Americas, a collage of scholarship that has been dominated by the history of Chinese communities in Latin America and the US.-Mexico borderlands. Chew concedes that there is much to learn from Mexico's treatment of its Chinese population, but she also believes that a crucial part of the Asian diasporic past has been obfuscated by this narrative. Uprooting Community seeks to remedy this imbalance, and for the most part, the book succeeds because it has something new to say, through a transnational lens, about the violation of human rights.