This ambitious work confronts the complex question of who and what is a Nikkei, that is, a person of Japanese descent, by studying their communities in seven countries in the Americas: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States. It also considers the special case of the many Latin American Nikkei who have returned to Japan in recent decades to seek employment.
The contributors draw upon a range of disciplines to present a multifaceted portrait of people of Japanese descent in the Americas, the destination of 90 percent of Japanese emigrants. Thus, for...

This book shows how Zapotec peasants migrating to Mexico City utilize "paisanazgo"--which prescribes solidarity among people from the same locale--as the basis for cooperation and mutual aid within a new environment. This study focuses on three groups of Mountain Zapotecs to explain why migrant associations were created and why they took different forms, citing regional variations in ethnicity, solidarity, occupational pursuits, and sociopolitical articulation to the nation in the three points of origin.

During World War II, over thirty American anthropologists participated in empirical and applied research on more than 110,000 Japanese Americans subjected to mass removal and incarceration by the federal government. While that experience has been widely discussed, what has received little critical attention are the experiences of the Japanese and Japanese American field assistants who conducted extensive research within the camps. How did these field researchers carry out data collection in American-style concentration camps? What kinds of constraints and pressures did they face? How did they...