Living after Wartime: Creating Japanese-Peruvians after Peru’s Second World War

• In Event: Hyphenated Identities in Postwar Latin America I: Constructing ethnic belonging in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Argentina

Abstract

This study seeks to explore the changing relationships of Japanese-Peruvians with the Peruvian nation. In the early twentieth century, public discourse by politicians and journalists revealed widespread prejudice against Japanese immigrants. For the former, the Japanese (and other Asians) did not fit neatly into conventional white-indigenous-black hierarchies of race. In the Second World War, the Peruvian government classified all Japanese immigrants as “enemy aliens.” This led to the restriction of their rights within Peru and, eventually, the deportation of some 1,800 to camps in the United States. In studying a chronology of stigmatization of Japanese-Peruvians, we nonetheless find new patterns of acceptance after the war.

Drawing on oral histories, newspapers, and archival sources, I trace the postwar development of the Japanese-Peruvian community as it rebuilt and re-negotiated its place in Peru. I argue that in the midst of continuing hostilities after the war, second-generation Japanese (or “Japanese-Peruvians”) found new ways to claim citizenship rights in Peru that stood in stark contrast to pre-war contexts. They negotiated new spaces for political participation in the 1950s and 1960s that re-shaped their immigrant identity and challenged the conventional Peruvian racial hierarchy. Helping to shape a new, alternate hierarchy, these Japanese-Peruvians came to be seen not as “aliens” or outsiders but as full-fledged citizens with the potential to run for office. All this brought them closer to the Peruvian society they claimed as home.

Author

• Benjamin J DuMontier, University of Arizona