Japanese Americans of the South Bay
Title | Japanese Americans of the South Bay PDF eBook |
Author | Dale Ann Sato |
Publisher | Arcadia Publishing |
Pages | 132 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780738559612 |
Early-20th-century settlers in Los Angeles County's South Bay region found fallow rancho land worthy of cultivation, as well as roads and railways to move produce to markets. First-generation Japanese Issei immigrants became pioneering strawberry, vegetable, and flower growers and cannery fishermen. Their fields blanketed the landscape between oil derricks and along sloughs and the dry-farmed coastline. Families pooled resources and built Japanese language schools for their Americanborn Nisei children that doubled as meeting halls. Small mom-and-pop businesses and services sprang up in Gardena and elsewhere, catering to Japanese neighborhoods. The evacuation, detention, and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II devastated their sense of belonging and livelihoods that had taken 40 years to establish. Today South Bay is home to multigenerational Japanese and Asian Americans who continue that legacy of industry, beautification, and diversity.
Generations and Identity
Title | Generations and Identity PDF eBook |
Author | Harry H. L. Kitano |
Publisher | |
Pages | 228 |
Release | 1993 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN |
The Shifting Grounds of Race
Title | The Shifting Grounds of Race PDF eBook |
Author | Scott Kurashige |
Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2010-03-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1400834007 |
Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a "world city" characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles. Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige transcends the usual "black/white" dichotomy to explore the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a "white city." But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities. Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged. Connecting local developments to national and international concerns, he reveals how critical shifts in postwar politics were shaped by a multiracial discourse that promoted the acceptance of Japanese Americans as a "model minority" while binding African Americans to the social ills underlying the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Multicultural Los Angeles ultimately encompassed both the new prosperity arising from transpacific commerce and the enduring problem of race and class divisions. This extraordinarily ambitious book adds new depth and complexity to our understanding of the "urban crisis" and offers a window into America's multiethnic future.
Farming in Torrance and the South Bay
Title | Farming in Torrance and the South Bay PDF eBook |
Author | Judith Gerber |
Publisher | Arcadia Publishing |
Pages | 132 |
Release | 2008 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780738559308 |
Jared Sydney Torrance originally founded Torrance in 1912 as an industrial city. But the land and its surrounding South Bay region thrived through agricultural activities, beginning in 1784 on the Rancho San Pedro. Farming activities continued after Ben Weston became the first one to buy land from the Dominguez family's rancho in 1847. Farming remained an important part of city commerce in the transition to a thriving Los Angeles County suburb in the late 1950s. Throughout those early years, family farmers contributed to the city's economy by raising cattle, pigs, and turkeys, as well as sugar beets, alfalfa, beans, hay, oats, barley, and flowers, and operating dairy farms. Other South Bay cities also relied on agriculture for economic growth, including Carson, once home to a thriving cut-flower farm industry, and Gardena, the one-time berry capital of Southern California, as well as the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where dry farming was a successful industry.
The Gateway to the Pacific
Title | The Gateway to the Pacific PDF eBook |
Author | Meredith Oda |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 293 |
Release | 2019-01-03 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 022659274X |
In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.
WE HEREBY REFUSE
Title | WE HEREBY REFUSE PDF eBook |
Author | Frank Abe |
Publisher | Chin Music Press |
Pages | 164 |
Release | 2021-07-16 |
Genre | Comics & Graphic Novels |
ISBN | 1634050312 |
Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.
By Order of the President
Title | By Order of the President PDF eBook |
Author | Greg Robinson |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 333 |
Release | 2009-07-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0674042808 |
On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why. Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy. By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.