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Before World War II, Japanese immigrants, or Issei, forged a unique transnational identity between their native land and the United States. Whether merchants, community leaders, or rural farmers, Japanese immigrants shared a collective racial identity as aliens ineligible for American citizenship, even as they worked to form communities in the American West. At the same time, Imperial Japan considered Issei and their descendents part of its racial expansion abroad and enlisted them to further their nationalist goals. This book shows how Japanese immigrants negotiated their racial and class positions alongside white Americans, Chinese, and Filipinos at a time when Japan was fighting their countries of origin. Utilizing rare Japanese and English language sources, the book stresses the tight grips, as well as the clashing influences, the Japanese and American states exercised over Japanese immigrants and how they created identities that diverged from either national narrative.

Spanning two centuries, this collection documents the lives of fifteen remarkable Latinas who witnessed, defined, defied, and wrote about the forces that shaped their lives. As entrepreneurs, community activists, mystics, educators, feminists, labor organizers, artists and entertainers, Latinas used the power of the pen to traverse and transgress cultural conventions.

The distinctive thesis of Faces of Inequality is that a state’s racial and ethnic composition, as much as any other factor, shapes its political processes and policies. To understand state politics, therefore, we must consider them from the perspective of social diversity. Scholars have broadly acknowledged that racial and ethnic diversity are central to American political history, but Rodney E. Hero is the first to posit and systematically examine this diversity as essential to our understanding of contemporary American politics. In these pages, Hero regards race/ethnicity as an American “dilemma” whose importance transcends state boundaries, yet whose impact upon U.S. politics varies widely. He classifies states’ social diversity patterns as homogenous, heterogeneous, or bifurcated, and demonstrates how these patterns influence political tendencies. Social diversity, he finds, is strongly related not only to political processes, but also to specific policies and outcomes, such as educational policies, incarceration rates, and infant mortality. Hero’s interpretation provides a new way of looking at state politics, one that causes us to broadly rethink U.S. politics from the standpoint of social diversity. A bold interpretation of the American political experience (especially at the state level) that is as challenging as it is timely, Faces of Inequality will be of interest to all students of race and politics in contemporary America.

In the ongoing struggle for racial justice over the last four decades, measures of victory and defeat were not always as clear as they tended to be in elections or on battlefields. Were civil rights advocates “winning while losing”? The answer depends on how one does the measuring. In sports, a percentage of success in one game looks very different in another. Consider the figure 40 percent. In baseball, a .400 hitter is a rarity and a superstar. In basketball, a 40-percent free-throw shooter is an embarrassment, a “brick-layer” tossing up shots with clanking imprecision. In elections, as Charles Zelden demonstrates in his essay here, problems with vote counting in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004 created serious doubts about the legitimacy of the outcome, but at least there were outcomes—the elections of George W. Bush—and concessions from the other contenders. In the long-term pursuit of social justice, by contrast, various advances and retreats mixed together over time in a manner that prevented ready mathematical evaluation...

Wong Chin Foo was a player who strutted and fretted his three decades upon America’s stage and then was heard no more. Few of the institutions that he built survived him; those that lived on did not do so for long. After his death, his writings were mostly forgotten, and he was rarely mentioned in the American press again. The prohibition against the naturalization of Chinese that he sought so feverishly to overturn remained the law of the land for nearly half a century after his death. Wong’s tale was surely one full of sound and fury. But what did it signify?...

This chapter examines the election of President Obama and his take on civil rights policy. The chapter argues against the idea that Obama’s election means that civil rights are no longer necessary. It suggests that citizenship rights and human rights actually need to be expanded. Obama has tended to emphasize personal responsibility and has deemphasized race-specific policies. In the end, the election of a black president has not led to aggressive governmental policies to end social and economic inequality.

By deconstructing advertisements and décor from Italian-themed chain restaurants, such as Maggiano’s Little Italy, Bertucci’s, and Olive Garden, the chapter proposes that “eating the Italian other” today in these Italian-themed environments accounts for the consumption of a hyperreal simulacrum of Italian American life. In the chain restaurants the chapter analyzes authenticity is a “product”—a company strategy carefully crafted with the methodology of postmodern pastiche. These establishments refer to traditions from Italy, its past, and the nostalgia it often elicits to promote a recognizable brand to large audiences and market a specific aspect of contemporary American popular culture: casual dining chain restaurants. The Italian American culinary heritage is invented—or at least recreated—and charged with relevant emotional and symbolic connotations as a marketable experience to respond to contemporary preferences and imaginations.

Shipping, and other related businesses, not surprisingly, made giant strides during these years. It made enormous profits for firms and individuals and gave employment to tradesmen, artisans and many kinds of laborers. The chapter looks at the shipping trade, especially the passenger trade, and describes the operation of some of the companies. It shows how chartering was conducted, how shipping provided investment opportunities and how shipping activities expanded and thickened the networks across the Pacific. The saga of how companies in Hong Kong and San Francisco fought for the lucrative trade reveals much about the transpacific business world. This chapter fills an important gap by foregrounding the shipping business, and several colorful characters such as Charles Bosman and Frederick Macondray Jr.

This chapter describes voting problems surrounding the 2000 presidential election that provided the margin of victory for George W. Bush over Al Gore. The chapter historicizes electoral intimidation and disenfranchisement of minority voters. The chapter sees the events surrounding the 2 and 2004 elections as a reinvention of older conservative electoral strategies of voter denial.

The magnitude of Italian imports in the United States before World War II reflected the role that immigrants played in fostering the commercial flows. Italian immigrants’ conspicuous fondness of imported goods, from cigars to laces to olive oil, witnessed their attempt at articulating their diasporic nostalgia, identity, and taste through shopping, as well as the centrality of consumption in the project of diasporic nationalism—regularly encouraged as it was by the local/transnational immigrant mercantile elites and their supporters in the Italian government abroad. The chapter expands on scholarship by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and Meg Jacobs who describe consumption’s role as a complex but ultimately successful tool of U.S. nation and citizenship building. The chapter concludes that, instead, by buying and consuming items from Italy, immigrants acted as transnational consumers who formed their national identities around goods from their homeland, as well as around those in their host countries. It was not only Italians’ participation in U.S. consumer culture that turned migrants toward consumption; rather, it was also migrants’ transnational familial, community, and national sentiments that made consumption increasingly acceptable among a people more used to saving than spending. The consumption of Italian exports abroad in some cases strengthened migrants’ ties to their homeland, while fostering a more distinct ethnic and Italian identity in the United States.