In the recent book Feeling Asian American, social psychologist Wen Liu described a curious phenomenon: conservative Chinese American immigrants are adopting China’s rhetoric of the “Chinese dream” to buttress their own American politics as pro-police and anti-affirmative action.
Such first-generation diaspora nationalism—in which immigrants unite under ideologies from their birth and adopted countries—is not new; it extends a familiar story that goes back at least a century. Take for instance, the history of (im)migrants in California.
The agricultural heartland of California’s San Joaquin Delta was home to many hopeful migrants in the 1930s. But, as groups tussled for a slice of the pie, local tensions flared, writes historian Eiichiro Azuma. And, in a time before political alliances among Asians in the United States were the norm, Issei (first-generation Japanese Americans) tried to carve out space via conflict with their Filipino neighbors.
This animosity, which the Issei characterized in explicitly racial terms, was part of their unique new identity “as delta-Japanese immigrants,” writes Azuma. Even as they embraced American citizenship for their children, Issei clung to “overseas racial development” (minzoku no kaigai hatten)—an idea that “appeared in the pages of Japanese-language newspapers virtually every day” and circulated in books and speeches, too.
“This peculiar logic made perfect sense to Issei as well as many older Nisei,” he adds. “In their vocabulary, the concept had little association with colonialism or imperialism, while in Japan ‘racial/national development’ meant precisely colonial expansion and domination.”
Issei were acutely aware of negative attitudes in Japan toward poor farmers who had left the country. So, “overseas racial development” was one way for them to “valorize their position in relation to their homeland state,” Azuma explains.
“Juxtaposing their own struggle against racial exclusion with the rise of Imperial Japan in a world dominated by the West, Issei considered themselves the ‘forerunners’ or ‘pioneers’ (senkusha) of Japan’s overseas expansion.”
Japanese farmers had been working in the San Joaquin Delta since the start of the twentieth century, serving as tenant farmers for white landlords after restrictions on Chinese immigrants kicked in. But the Issei suffered a double whammy from an “alien land law” in 1920, which barred them from leasing and owning land, and the Immigration Act of 1924, which closed the borders to Japanese.
These changes “brought to the delta an influx of Filipinos, who quickly dominated the local labor market and gradually threatened Japanese tenancy,” notes Azuma. Many Japanese farm workers lost their jobs, with the exception of some foremen, while Filipino laborers became integral to the local economy.
The situation came to a head in 1930, after an American-born Japanese woman reportedly eloped with a Filipino laborer—and then, under pressure from her father, left her husband.