Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations

Yu Tokunaga's book, Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations, is a tremendous addition to the historiography of transnational Japanese American history and interethnic labor history. With clear prose researched from multiple angles and driven by details, Tokunaga's work brings into conversation not only the complexity of the Japanese American farming community's networks in Los Angeles prior to World War II but also the transborder relations of that community as they farmed across the Mexican border. Against the backdrop of major immigration legislation affecting migration from Japan such as the Gentlemen's Agreement, the Alien Land Law, and the 1924 Immigration Act, Tokunaga takes the reader through the effects of the Mexican Revolution, the Great Depression, several key labor strikes, contemporary ideas about eugenics and growing nationalism, and the lead-up to the World War II–era incarceration of the Japanese American community.Tokunaga expands upon the historiography of transnational Japanese American history and Mexican American history. He weaves together the relationships of Japanese tenant farmers (who leased farmland from white landowners), and their proximity to the Mexican farmworkers whose labor was, and continues to be, indispensable to California's agriculture. Interethnic cooperation and conflict were inevitable. Japanese farmers learned how to communicate in Spanish, illustrating their willingness to form close relationships with Mexicans who worked on their farms on either side of the border. The US-Mexico border region has always reflected cultural and linguistic fluidity. Tokunaga demonstrates how that fluidity included businesses, capital, and the lesser-known but influential political pressure of Japanese farmers in Baja California, Mexico, who encouraged their compatriots in the United States to negotiate labor conflicts during the El Monte Berry Strike of 1933 and the Venice Celery Strike of 1936. Transborder Los Angeles reveals unexpected alliances across the border.Tokunaga asserts how the trinational relationship waxed and waned, especially during the racial shifts of the first half of the twentieth century. The anti-Asian movement led to legislation in 1908, 1913, 1921, and 1924 that restricted Japanese immigrants and shaped the boundaries of Japanese laborers and their business ventures. The tone of American nativism changed in 1924 from the "'Japanese problem' to the 'Mexican problem'" (53). During the growth of the Japanese empire in the 1930s that coincided with a prolabor and anti-Asian New Deal era, Japanese tenant farmers relied on non-white labor, namely Mexican and Filipino migrant workers. The Mexicali Japanese community was caught between increased Mexican nationalism, anti-Japanese sentiment in Mexico, and the international news of Japan's growing Asian empire. Rather than take on the ideals of white supremacy in the United States, Japanese immigrant nationalism served as a basis for interethnic accommodation.The existing Japanese American scholarship on the World War II incarceration centers the removal of the Japanese American community and the subsequent injustices of the breach of civil rights and civil liberties. In Transborder Los Angeles, Tokunaga expands upon that scholarship within the context of agricultural labor history by acknowledging the Japanese American incarceration as an "agricultural labor crisis" (9). Justified by national security (but fueled by racism and wartime hysteria), Japanese and Japanese American removal proceeded swiftly in 1942. Even the threat of economic loss in California agriculture from the incarceration did not reduce anti-Japanese sentiment (150). Americans needed food during the war, and without Japanese American farms to produce and distribute it, the manufactured crisis was of the government's own making. The government resolved the labor vacuum created by the absence of the West Coast Japanese American community by importing Mexican laborers via the Bracero Program to meet the demands of wartime food production. The war revealed the priorities of labor, racial hierarchies, and the negotiation of the Japanese community's departure and the subsequent arrival of Mexicans in the Bracero Program. The removal and incarceration of the Japanese American community reshuffled the power, businesses, and leadership in the postwar period.Transborder Los Angeles is thoroughly researched using archival sources in Japanese, Spanish, and English. The maps, newspaper articles, and images showcased the best of the archives. The book is accessible to the reader and highlights the delicate relationship between transborder communities, Japanese immigrant farmers, Mexican laborers, and how they competed for power. It includes pithy micro-level details and how events at the international level transformed these communities. It is a powerful history of a transpacific workplace, showcasing how those involved continued to interact together well into the 1970s. Transborder Los Angeles will most certainly have a very long shelf life.