Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

4. Dismantling Privileged Settings: Japanese American Internees and Mexican Braceros at the Crossroads of World War II

The creation (or production) or a planet-wide space as the social foundation of a transformed everyday life open to myriad possibilities—such is the dawn now beginning to break on the far horizon. . . . I speak of an orientation advisedly. We are concerned with nothing more and nothing less than that. We are concerned with what might be called a “sense”: an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing towards the horizon. And we are concerned with nothing that even remotely resembles a system. —henri lefebvre, The Production of Space Tanforan Assembly Center, a black-and-white photograph by Dorothea Lange, commemorates the first bracero workers as they came into Los Angeles on September 27, 1942, just in time for the sugar beet harvest. Braceros (arms) are Mexican immigrants and nationals recruited to work in U.S. agricultural and railroad jobs by an official guest worker program started in 1942, soon after the United States formally entered World War II. Braceros arrived by train to Mexico’s northern border; their arrival altered the social environment and economy of many border towns such as Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and their border twins El Paso and San Diego. This photo features these men as they disembark and walk away from Chapter 4 Dismantling Privileged Settings Japanese American Internees and Mexican Braceros at the Crossroads of World War II Jinah Kim 122 the train. They are well dressed, hats in hand or on their head, and they are carrying suitcases. Some are smiling, perhaps symbolizing the hope they felt at the opportunity to work and earn a wage. A passenger train looms in the background and fills the entire horizon, an uncanny and unwelcome comparison to dispossessed Japanese Americans who just months earlier rode perhaps these same trains into desolate desert camps. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on May 3, 1942, which authorized the forced displacement of all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or noncitizens, to “relocation centers” located throughout the Southwest and the mountain states. Seen in this light the workers filing out of Lange’s picture seem to be framed as much by danger as by possibility. The train is an important symbol that lends the event the sense of modernity .1 However, the juxtaposition reminds us that linearity and development over time is a privileged fiction. 1. Dorothea Lange, Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno, California, April 29, 1942. (War Relocation Authority, courtesy of the National Archives) dismantling privileged settings 123 This chapter aims to provoke a re-visioning of these two events, which are “privileged settings” in Asian American and Latina/o studies, to vastly broaden a notion of justice toward something collective and transformative.2 The internment of more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens and the exploitive contract labor bracero program highlight how the state deploys spatial mechanisms of displacement, resettlement, deportation , and incarceration to manage its racial subjects, redraw territorial boundaries, and broaden its sovereign domain. More broadly a commitment to theorizing space in relation to race and power contributes to our understanding of the complex, multidimensional racial order that existed in the United States during and after World War II. For example, a consideration of the spatial mechanisms that managed braceros and internees has the potential to differentiate the treatment allotted to racialized immigrants from the treatment of Jim Crow policies for African Americans and of reservation policies for Native Americans. Highlighting the shared state and capitalist logics by which these two programs were managed also unearths shared practices of resistance , histories, and experiences as bracero workers and internees occupied similar and sometimes the same spaces in the U.S. West and Southwest. A comparative analysis that spatially plots racial domination will help to shake up and decenter the parallel narratives that tend to get set up in separate ethnic studies fields. As Ann Laura Stoler has written, however, “Attention to the historical categories of comparative practices refuses the comfort of discrete cases, highlighting instead those uneven circuits in which knowledge was produced and in which people were compelled to move. Not least, it brings into ‘sharper resolution’ the kinds of knowledge generated—and on which people might draw—across imperial terrains and within them.”3 Thinking about how the white imagination constructed Mexicans and Japanese relative to each other and relative to...