| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
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sociocultural values. For example, Valéria, a third generation Japanese Brazilian living in a Japanese Brazilian commune had been identified as Nihon-jin (Japanese) by some members of the commune when she came to live there. However, after divorcing her commune-born husband, leaving the commune, and taking their children with her, she was identified as a gaijin (foreigner). According to the Issei commune members I talked to, she could be regarded as a third-generation Japanese in Brazil, but she had revealed gaijin (i.e., non-Japanese Brazilian) cultural values when she pursued her personal happiness instead of her children's and family's happiness. In other words, they thought at first that she would be “Japanese” (Nihon-jin) because of her physical appearance and that she would accept communal life. But when she disobeyed the community's philosophy, they realized that it was not her race that mattered, it was that she was enculturated as a Brazilian and held different cultural values. Thus, they referred to her as a foreigner even though she looks Japanese. Her ethnicity, then, was based on her relationship with the community.
Furthermore, Reyes-Ruiz (chapter 7) argues that ethnicity not only emerges through relationships, but such relationships are made through constructed, created, or imagined cultural values. When the economies in Brazil and Peru fell in the 1980s and 1990s, many Nikkei from those nations migrated to Japan to be temporary laborers (e.g., Tsuda, 2004). Many are still working there today. Because Japan was suffering a labor shortage, the Japanese government issued special work permits to Nikkei people, whom they felt would fit into national culture more easily than migrant workers of other backgrounds. The government naively believed that despitethe fact that these workers had never been to Japan, since they were Nihon-jin (Japanese) there would be no cultural or social barriers between them and the Japanese in Japan. However, these “returnee” Japanese Brazilian dekasegi (temporary migrant) workers experiencedtreatment no better than that of other minorities in Japan. They faced social, cultural, economic, and political discrimination as great as that experienced by those from other countries (if not more so).
Although each Latin American nation has different foods and ingredients, these products are more likely found at a Latin American grocery