Pá gi n a s Re c u p e ra d a s

‘‘Somos Asiáticos’’: Asian

Americans, Latinos, and Hispanics
of Asian ancestry

N a n c y K a n g a a n d S i l v i o To r r e s - S a i l l a n t b
a
University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD
b
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Abstract This essay seeks to challenge persistent readings of US race relations as

being a contest between black and white. It reasserts the vitality and undeniable
importance of Asian Americans and Latino/as (themselves harboring considerable
Native American ancestry in their heritage) as the two fastest-growing minority pop-
ulations in the country. Asian-Hispanic connections run the gamut from historical,
economic, political, and cultural ties to collaborations in the arts and intermarriage.
These intergroup relations have neither been wholly cooperative nor wholly adver-
sarial given the immense variety of identities involved. This discussion aims to intro-
duce a number of points of shared impact and concern, projecting a future of greater
and more complex interactions.
Latino Studies (2016) 14, 545–564. doi:10.1057/s41276-016-0019-x

Keywords: Asians; Asian-Americans; Asian-Hispanic connections; Latina/os; African

Americans; interethnic tensions; racism; intergroup solidarity; immigration; artistic
crossings; activism

P r e a m b l e o f S o l i d a r i t y, A n t i p a t h y, e t a l i a

The two fastest-growing ethnoracial minority groups in the United States today,
Asian Americans and Latino/as, have historically shared spaces of collaboration
and discord, tension and solidarity, intimacy and misrecognition. The story of

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 Kang and Torres-Saillant

their interaction is not well known because of the prevailing national lens that
stubbornly persists in upholding a black/white binary to examine race relations.
The reductive perception that prevails tends to elide Asian Americans and
Latina/os as differentiated segments of the national population. It also obscures
the experiences of Native Americans, Arab Americans, and mixed-race peoples
in general. The binary model likewise effaces internal heterogeneities within
Latino/a no less than Asian American identities. Apart from the multiple
national origins within each of these pan-ethnic labels, they arise from complex
histories of conquest, colonization, displacement, war, migration, and settle-
ment that interfere with the possibility of homogeneous social formation. In the
case of Asian Americans, the diversity of their ancestral languages is fairly well
known, whereas the association of Latina/os with only one heritage language
(namely Spanish, and perhaps Portuguese if one’s definition of ‘‘Latino/as’’
encompasses Brazilian and Portuguese Americans) thrives only as a result of our
socially induced amnesia about the many non-European languages still alive in
Latin America.
Our overview of Asian-Hispanic interactions considers moments of significant
rapport between segments of the two pan-ethnicities as they have collaborated
or quarrelled across planes of difference. Additionally, we invoke individuals
from both groups who have historically crossed the pan-ethnic divide to form
marital or otherwise intimate unions, thereby giving rise to offspring with more
variegated ancestries that further layer our current understanding of Latino/a or
Asian American identity. As to the latter, historian Sal Acosta and Asian Pacific
American studies scholar Rudy P. Guevara Jr. have compellingly documented
meaningful chapters of Asian-Hispanic crossing in Sanctioning Matrimony
(2016) and Becoming Mexipino (2012), respectively. In the former, we learn
about the marital unions of Mexicans (mostly women) with African American,
Chinese, or white spouses between 1860 and 1930 in the Arizona borderlands.
Such relationships had to weather the barriers erected by the prevailing racial
attitudes that informed antimiscegenation laws (Acosta 2016, 101). The latter
text examines the formation of interethnic unions between Mexicans and
Filipinos across several generations in San Diego, starting with the marriage in
1938 of Baja California native Felipa Castro with Ciriaco ‘‘Pablo’’ Poscablo, a
man who had come to the region from the Philippines as a US Navy recruit.
Although she was light enough to pass for white, when completing the marriage
license paperwork, Felipa identified herself as ‘‘Mexican Indian’’ as a way to
circumvent the antimiscegenation laws that prohibited unions between whites
and nonwhites (Guevara Jr. 2012, 130–132).
Overall, the story of Asian-Hispanic interactions, as with any instance of
intergroup relations involving the less-empowered segments of the US popula-
tion, offers evocative instances of memorable solidarity alongside competing
instances of disunity and strife across and within their pan-ethnic contours. The
authors of Latino Lives in America (2010) regard the precariousness of

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solidarity, say, between communities differentiated by national origin within

each segment, as a reflection of comparative racial chronologies. Latino/as and
Asian Americans, they posit, have had a ‘‘much shorter historical experience’’ of
living together, negotiating, and even ‘‘transcend[ing]’’ differences than African
Americans (Fraga et al. 2010, 147). One might also factor in the extreme process
of racial othering shouldered by people of African descent through slavery,
which practically neutralized any viable conditions for considering the diverse
origins and myriad heritages within their midst.
As we have already noted, Latino/as can imagine themselves unified by the
Spanish language and Catholicism – both shared legacies of Iberian conquest
and colonization in their ancestral homelands – but the fractious histories of the
Western Hemisphere may thwart any overarching unity. Nationalisms of
various kinds, political regimes drawn apart by dissimilar ideologies, disparities
borne of distinctive regions and cultural heritages, particular forms of
interaction with the United States (including corresponding chronologies and
types of immigration), among other discrepancies, help to maintain fissures
among the countries involved. In comparison, Asian Americans, lacking the
narrative of a common ancestral tongue or an overarching shared religion, may
encounter greater difficulties in establishing bonds of pan-ethnic solidarity,
especially given the ongoing history of cross-national conflicts in their lands of
origin (Fraga et al. 2010, 147). The residues of Japanese colonization of Korea
from 1910 to 1945, coupled with the institutionalized sex abuse of the so-called
comfort women by the Imperial Army during World War II, may not be too
remote in the minds of Koreans or the Korean American diaspora. Likewise, the
genocidal killings of civilians and unarmed combatants in Nanking, the former
capital of China, by the soldiers of the Japanese Army in 1937, may still elicit
bitterness in Chinese men and women affected by the nefarious action through
family histories. One wonders how such a past event might affect a Chinese
American youth learning about it in a US college classroom, especially a student
involved in activism around pan-Asian community-building, including, among
others, advocacy for the creation of Asian American studies programs, still an
absent field in many higher-education curricula.
In December 1941, two weeks after the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor,
Life magazine published a piece that aimed to instruct readers on the differences
between the Chinese and the Japanese. A number of Chinese Americans had
lately suffered violent attacks by angry ‘‘US citizens’’ (read: racist whites) who
mistook them for Japanese, which caused concern given that Chinese ancestry
had recently risen in status in US society due to China’s decision to join forces
with the Allies against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in the
ongoing war. Thus the article calls them ‘‘friendly Chinese’’ to distinguish them
from ‘‘enemy alien Japs’’ (‘‘How to Tell Japs from the Chinese’’ 1941, 81). The
Life piece showed no interest in discouraging violent attacks but only in giving
potential perpetrators helpful taxonomic tips so they would not target the wrong

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 Kang and Torres-Saillant

people. The article includes a photo of journalist Joe Chiang wearing a

prominent sign on his chest that announces, ‘‘Chinese Reporter. Not Japanese
Please,’’ to ensure his safe admission to a White House press conference (1941,
81). One wonders about the level of guilt, if any, felt by those Chinese
Americans who, like Chiang, devised ways of alerting any potential aggressors
that they belonged to the ‘‘friendly’’ portion of the ‘‘yellow race,’’ thus helping
deflect the violence accurately to the ‘‘enemy Jap.’’
With geopolitical rivalries abounding in Asia today, especially over contested
territories in and around the Pacific Ocean, Asian Americans may harbor strong
feelings about the power struggles overseas, especially if they feel connected
through work, personal ties, or immigration histories to the areas in question. As
is the case with Latina/os, one will also find among Asian Americans those who
voluntarily distance themselves from any sense of ethnic community, choosing
to assert their individuality as Americans and resolute English speakers. They
assiduously avoid enclaves organized around their ancestral heritage, shun in-
group friends and associates, and shy away from any particular set of ancestral
cultural traditions that would render them ‘‘less American.’’ We might recall the
leading role played by Canadian-born, Japanese American Senator Samuel
Ichiye (S. I.) Hayakawa in the English-only movement that gained momentum
beginning in the 1980s. Concomitantly, two Mexican–Americans figured among
the staunchest allies of this movement: the essayist Richard Rodriguez and
conservative political commentator Linda Chavez. Rodriguez and Chavez
launched fulminating attacks against bilingual education and affirmative action
policies in their books Hunger of Memory (1983) and Out of the Barrio (1991),
respectively. The foregoing parallels notwithstanding, the authors of Latino
Lives in America contend that ‘‘shared identification and cooperation are even
more daunting’’ among Asians and their American-born descendants than
among other groups, including Latino/as (Fraga et al. 2010, 147).
Comparative discussions about US race-based inequalities may find Asian
Americans ignored or omitted because of their relatively high rates of
educational attainment and economic mobility (Pew Research Center 2013).
At approximately 5.6 percent of the national population, they are the group
most likely to inhabit mixed neighborhoods and intermarry with non-Asian-
descended individuals (Pew Research Center 2013). When they are included in
the popular racial discourse, the ‘‘model minority’’ construct is seldom absent.
We owe the term ‘‘model minority’’ to sociologist William S. Petersen, who
coined it in 1966 for a New York Times Magazine article praising Japanese
immigrants as hard workers. This mythic stereotype of unobtrusive, respectable,
self-sufficient newcomers has since been deployed against other minorities,
including Latino/as. Yet not all subgroups among Asian Americans enjoy similar
degrees of access to opportunities for advancement, whether economic, political,
or social. The myth masks a number of internal stratifications and tensions,
including gender biases and clashes based on class, generation, region, and

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citizenship status. Asian Americans continue to face poverty, racial prejudice,

and discrimination from whites as well as nonwhites. Lateral violence toward
Asian Americans by other minorities fails to elicit much, if any, media attention.
The victims may even be declared deserving of their pain because of alleged
linguistic deficiencies (that is, failure or refusal to speak English), ‘‘un-American’’
cultural values (such as being stingy, rude to customers, or susceptible to
mercurial business practices), or prey to their own deeply entrenched racism (a
charge especially prevalent when Asian-Black tensions arise).
The perception of their ‘‘foreign-ness,’’ coupled with competitiveness and the
influence of noxious stereotypes, may render Asian immigrants and, by extension,
Asian Americans less likely to elicit sympathy or compassion from other minorities. A
passage in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the successful first installment of
Maya Angelou’s serial autobiography, speculates about the psychopathology behind
one minority group approaching another’s misfortunes with indifference or even
opportunism instead of empathy. In 1942, African Americans from the rural South
jumped at the chance to access housing, business ventures, and new solvency that
opened up in San Francisco by the wholesale removal of the West Coast Japanese to
the internment camps. They built new homes and livelihoods there without even
mentioning the plight of the Japanese, whose coerced absence enabled their thriving
presence (Angelou 2009, 207). Granted, they arrived after long years of laboring as
sharecroppers, domestics, and other economically nonviable positions. Coming in to
fill spaces previously occupied by the Japanese gave them the opportunity to have
something of their own after abject poverty and subsistence living. Yet, as the
narrator explains, there was something else: the Japanese, the whiteness of their skin
notwithstanding, had a language, set of customs, and even differently shaped eyes
that made them profoundly alien to the black newcomers. As such, the narrator
concludes, the exiled Japanese ‘‘were not whitefolks,’’ and ‘‘since they didn’t have to
be feared, neither did they have to be considered’’ (207).

Pan-Ethnic Organizing and Its Challenges

Asian Americans and Latina/os have long had to contend with alarmist fears that
racists continue to voice, as they have over nearly two centuries, about excessively
fertile brown migrant tides and an encroaching ‘‘Yellow Peril’’ sapping the resources
and snatching the birthright of ‘‘real Americans.’’ From minimally skilled, low-wage
positions to high-profile leadership roles in government, health care, education, and
other sites of concentrated social power, Latino/as and Asian Americans have
cultivated a reputation as hard workers while also suffering disparagement and
violence. They have endured official and unofficial forms of employment discrim-
ination, curtailed professional opportunities, and even physical attacks (including
lynching) for apparently threatening Euro-American economic and cultural
supremacy. Such was the case with the Workingmen’s Party of California during

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 Kang and Torres-Saillant

the 1870s. Under the leadership of Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, the crew declared
their war on Chinese railroad workers with the menacing rallying cry ‘‘The Chinese
Must Go!’’ This platform helped galvanize the broader public racism that made the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 possible. More than a century later, in 1982,
innocent bystander Vincent Chin was viciously beaten at his bachelor party in the
Detroit suburb of Highland Park, Michigan. The two white perpetrators were angry
about Japanese competitiveness in the auto industry and used the young man as their
scapegoat. Ironically, Chin was not of Japanese ancestry; he had come to the US
from China as a child. His eventual death, coupled with an extremely lenient penalty
for the killers, helped to revitalize Asian American activism with a pan-ethnic focus.
The demonization of minorities, especially undocumented workers, whom
whites often construe as social parasites and charity cases, belies the reality that
Asian American and Latino/a labor histories have included extremely exploitative
conditions, especially those relating to agricultural work in heavily populated
states like California, Texas, and Florida. One example is the Bisbee, Arizona,
deportations of 1917. The mining company Phelps Dodge rounded up over 1000
striking mine workers along with their supporters and illegally shipped them by
train to New Mexico. Their strike had aimed to protest the routinely discrim-
inatory working conditions directed at Mexican and Mexican–American workers
in the mines, and their train journey amid searing temperatures added additional
abuse to their grievous plight. Decades later, unfair and inhumane working
conditions would lead to the formation of labor advocacy organizations, among
them the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), which rose to prominence
under civil rights leaders César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Groups such as these
addressed unlivable conditions in the fields, including a lack of clean drinking
water and inadequate restroom breaks. They also spearheaded the push for access
to better schooling for the workers’ children, which was already complicated by
frequent moves and other impediments to optimal learning.
In light of their common challenges, the two groups have often enough tackled
them together. A recent example of such coalitional action is the Reynolds
Boycott, instigated in June 2012 after sweatshop-like conditions in a Kearny, New
Jersey, factory prompted Wan Zen Huang, Lili Cisneros, and other mostly
women of color labor leaders to embark on a national campaign against forced
overtime, company coercion, and retaliatory layoffs (Boycott Reynolds 2012). As
the 1949 short story ‘‘Seventeen Syllables’’ by National Book Award–winning
Japanese-American fiction writer Hisaye Yamamoto would imply, Asian Amer-
icans and Latino/as have been working alongside – as well as for – one another for
a long time. These instances have included acrimony, ambivalence, and tension as
well as fellowship and bonding. In Yamamoto’s much-anthologized story, set in
rural California, the Carrascos are Mexican–American migrant workers whose
son, Jesús, is around the same age as teenage protagonist Rosie Hiyashi, the child
of Japanese immigrants. While the Carrascos pick strawberries and tomatoes for
the Hiyashi family, a secret romance blooms between the young people. The

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ending, however, is indeterminate, overshadowed by a tragic history of social

restrictions endured by immigrant women like Rosie’s mother. The narrative of
Tome Hiyashi, who had been involved back home in a socially inappropriate love
affair that resulted in a stillborn baby and a near suicide, parallels and perhaps
foreshadows the problems her daughter might face should she pursue a
relationship across racial and class lines with the young Jesús.
Narratives like this one underscore how the West Coast remains a historical
epicenter of connections between Latino/as and Asian Americans. For example, in
Los Angeles between 1910 and 1924, eugenic discourses praised the rise of white
birthrates but panicked about ‘‘race suicide’’ when immigrant or African American
birthrates followed a similar upward trajectory (Molina 2006, 48). In addition to
the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which were meant to stanch the immigration of
competitive workers in industries such as mining and the railroad, the Alien Land
Laws of 1913 and 1920 prevented noncitizens – namely the Japanese and Chinese
– from owning land in California. Natalia Molina (2006) cites racist smear
campaigns against Asian Americans by such high-profile figures as Senator James
Phelan, who embarked on a special tour to promote his agenda of routing out ‘‘The
Japanese Evil in California.’’ Another well-positioned racist was Dr. John Larabee
Pomeroy, head of the Los Angeles County Health Department from 1915 to 1941.
Pomeroy characterized his constituency’s Japanese-descended farmers as dirty and
hence vectors of diseases such as typhoid. As would be expected, county housing
and health officials declared the group’s living habits to be unsanitary, thereby
branding the fresh produce they gathered and sold as unfit compared to the output
of white farmers (Molina 2006, 47–51). While many whites viewed Mexicans
during that time as ‘‘redeemable immigrants’’ because of their presumed docility
and ability to be assimilated, the Japanese remained ‘‘unredeemable aliens.’’ As a
result of this negative characterization, it was assumed they did not merit social
programs focused on improving their quality of life, expanding educational access,
or ensuring health care choices, all of which their Mexican counterparts could
more readily obtain (Molina 2006, 57–58). Overall, one could argue that, as
permitted by circumstances, racialized minorities in the area have long displayed
awareness of their interdependence vis-à-vis their shared vulnerability. One might
recall that ‘‘El Plan de San Diego,’’ the 1915 armed insurrection on the Texas-
Mexico border led by Aniceto Pizaña, which envisioned a ‘‘Republic of the
Southwest’’ free from Anglo rule, was conceived as a program of multiracial
liberation against white supremacy, hence the limit of its membership to people of
‘‘the Latin, the Negro or the Japanese race’’ (cited in Sandos 1972, 8).

Everyday Creativity across Difference

In a Latino USA podcast that aired in October 2014, titled ‘‘Hyphen-Americans,’’

host Maria Hinojosa broached the subject of cross-cultural connections with

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 Kang and Torres-Saillant

Figure 1: A Vancouver, British Columbia restaurant proves Korean-Hispanic culinary fusion happens
north of the border also. (Photo credit Nancy Kang).

such guests as Hyphen Magazine editor-in-chief Abigail Licad and University of

Connecticut historian Jason Oliver Chang. The episode featured discussions on
such topics as a history of shared mobilizations around labor issues as well as
immigration reform, especially for undocumented populations. Marriages
between Punjabi men and Mexican women in California’s Imperial Valley
during the early twentieth century – spousal unions that helped them circumvent
discriminatory land laws as we mentioned above – formed part the program. The
landmark Méndez v. Westminster school segregation case, which catalyzed
coalition-building between such organizations as the Japanese American
Citizenship League (JACL) and the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), also entered the conversation. Because Asian
Americans and Latino/as ostensibly comprise a ‘‘racial middle’’ between black
and white, their liminality requires a serious appraisal of internal dynamics,
including group rivalries (Hinojosa et al. 2014). During her tie-in editorial for
Hyphen Magazine, Licad points out a number of the most compelling
similarities: (1) both groups are often impugned for using ancestral languages
as well as mocked and stereotyped for supposed deficiencies in the English
language; (2) fidelity to customs from ancestral homelands remains both a
blessing and a liability in US life; and (3) both groups have a strong and ongoing
investment in the discourse of the American dream, despite being on the receiving
end of a long history of racism and discrimination that school textbooks all too
often omit (Licad 2014). For his part, Jason Oliver Chang cautions against an
‘‘overexcitement’’ about the cultural fusion typified, for instance, by Korean taco
trucks. He urges listeners to focus more on ‘‘material, political, and human
consequences’’ and less on aesthetics and faddishness that tend to drive popular
examinations of social relations (Hinojosa et al. 2014) (Figure 1).
Chang’s call for grand-scale policy-oriented goals is vital and timely, but the
impact of artistic collaborations also has its place, especially when these
contributions occur at the most quotidian, practical, and grassroots levels. For
instance, Puerto Rican writer and actor Miguel Piñero (1946–1988) had as his
lover and sometime collaborator the Chinese American painter, sculptor,
and ceramicist Martin Wong (1946–1999). Wong’s closeness with black and

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Latino/a artists of the Lower East Side in the late 1970s and early 1980s has
rendered him a notable – albeit underexamined – part of the Nuyorican Arts
Movement (Cassell 2016). Likewise, as Sojin Kim (2011) reports in Smithsonian
Folkways Magazine, Asian American protest music germinated from intergroup
dialogue and rigorous cross-pollination with Latino/a artists. Chris Kando Iijima,
Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto, and William ‘‘Charlie’’ Chin recorded their first song
with the Puerto Rico–based studio Discos Coquı́. In 1973, the trio released A
Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle of Asians in America, the first album of
Asian American music. Their publisher was Paredon Records, a company
founded in 1969 to facilitate the production and dissemination of socially
committed, activist-minded music with global reach. Focused on liberation and
resistance movements worldwide, Paredon ushered forth such titles as Canción
Protesta: Protest Songs of Latin America (1970), Tengo Puerto Rico en Mi
Corazón (1971), Cuba Va! Songs of the New Generation of Revolutionary Cuba
(1971), and Dominican Republic: La Hora Esta Llegando! (1974).
Iijima, Miyamoto, and Chin also worked closely with the Puerto Rican group
Flora y Pepe. One of the songs in A Grain of Sand was titled ‘‘Somos Asiáticos,’’
a fitting tribute to the hybrid genealogy of the composition. Reflecting on the
cohort of fellow activists and creators that congregated at an Upper West Side
café called The Dot, Miyamoto remarks, ‘‘We were all there – artists and poets –
listening to and influencing each other. We had a whole set, five songs, that we
did in Spanish. One year, I think it was 1973–1974, we did more gigs for Latino
groups than for Asian groups.’’ The trio was even invited to perform for Puerto
Rican Liberation Day at Madison Square Garden (Kim 2011). Perhaps these
types of crossings have paved the way for comparable ones at the international
level, such as the Japanese salsa band Orquesta de la Luz, whose success since it
began recording in 1990 has reached enthusiastic audiences throughout Latin
America and the Caribbean. Nor can we forget to mention the Chinese ancestry
of prolific singer-songwriter Marı́a Guadalupe Araújo, the famous native of
Sinaloa, Mexico. A devout Catholic and Grammy Award nominee, she is better
known to the pop world as Ana Gabriel.
Chang’s mildly dismissive comment about Korean taco trucks alludes to the
rise of Southern California–based chef Roy Choi and his successful street food
venture Kogi, named after the Korean word for ‘‘meat.’’ The mobile taquerı́a
menu offers such fusion fare as kimchi quesadillas, marinated short-rib burritos,
and tofu tacos. It also features contemporary American staples like sliders and
hot dogs alongside mulitas and tres leches cake. Signature barbequed meats
accented with soy sauce, red chili paste, brown sugar, scallions, garlic, ginger,
and other typically Asian seasoning combinations are fused with different salsas
(azul, verde, naranja), mole, jalapeños, cilantro, lime, various cheeses, and other
Mexican and Latin American flavor profiles (Kogi BBQ 2016). Nicknamed
‘‘Papi,’’ Choi became a sensation on the national culinary and local foodie scenes
for helping to ignite the gourmet food truck revolution (Laporte 2014). His

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urban cuisine paradigmatically illustrates how Asian Americans and Latino/as

have often coexisted – not necessarily by choice – in congested ethnic enclaves
such as Koreatowns and Chinatowns thanks to a history of discriminatory
housing practices directed at immigrants of color and other socioeconomically
vulnerable populations. The fusion of Korean and Mexican influences here joins
other Asian-Latino culinary hybrids, including the Chinese Cuban dishes
brought to New York City by an influx of immigrants after the Cuban
Revolution. Many Dominican patrons of Cuban Chinese restaurants in
Washington Heights relish such dishes as chicken with broccoli, fried rice,
and tostones; Chinese five-spice lechón (pork); or rabo encendido (oxtail stew)
with a side of lo mein noodles.

A Li t e ra r y a n d Fi l m i c Re c o rd o f C r o s s i n g

Other collaborations in the areas of aesthetic and cultural production merit

special attention, notably literature and film because they enable Latino/a and
Asian American creators to tackle themes of shared significance in an engaging
and accessible way. Among those that stand out are the persistence and strength
of familial ties, the importance of sexualities and gender roles, and the personal
and collective costs of military invasion, as well as the ongoing need to negotiate
citizenship and belonging. These concerns resonate to some degree with both
groups, especially in our era of enforced borders, threatened walls, and escalating
deportations. In her novel A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), fiction writer
Sigrid Nuñez limns a family saga set in mid-twentieth-century Brooklyn. The
narrative meditates on the struggle for equanimity of a mixed-race dancer who, as
the daughter of immigrants, seeks to reconcile the memories of her emotionally
reticent Chinese Panamanian father and her demanding German-born mother. As
scholar Ana Patrı́cia Rodrı́guez points out, transnational comparative models tend
to work with literary texts within rather than across the broader categories of
‘‘Asian’’ or ‘‘Latino/a’’ (Rodrı́guez 2016). The novel Monkey Hunting (2003), a
multigenerational family saga by Cuban American author Cristina Garcı́a, tells
the story of Chen Pan, a man who left the port city of Amoy, China, in 1857,
bound for Cuba as an indentured plantation hand. Working side by side with
black slaves on the island, he embraces the Caribbean sun, marries the black slave
Lucrecia, and becomes the progenitor of a Chinese-descended Afro-Cuban family.
Generations later, Domingo Chen, a member of his progeny, would travel back to
Asia as part of the US military forces deployed to Vietnam.
The 2005 novel Let It Rain Coffee by Dominican-American fiction writer
Angie Cruz also features a Chinese progenitor of a Caribbean family of mixed
ancestry whose members end up settling in the United States. We meet the
Chinese-born Don Chan when he is already the father of Dominican offspring,
and when the novel flashes back to earlier stages of his life, the moments evoked

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involve his taking stances against oppressive regimes in twentieth-century

Dominican history and invariably siding with revolutionary or progressive
causes. Since the novel covers a shorter chronology than that of Garcı́a’s text, we
see Don Chan coming to New York, dragged by the push-and-pull forces that
have continued to drive Dominicans from the homeland without abatement
since the 1960s. Preceding the novels by Garcı́a and by Cruz, Isabel Allende’s
Daughter of Fortune (Hija de la Fortuna 1999) features Tao Chi’en, a zhong yi
‘‘trained in traditional Chinese medicine by the finest master in Canton,’’ who
ends up in Valparaiso, Chile, following the new routes of commerce forced open
by the British conquest of China in the wake of the First Opium War (Allende
1999, 191). In Valparaiso, Tao comes into close proximity to the Sommers, a
family of English expatriates whose daughter, Eliza, becomes his friend despite
their being generations apart. Eliza falls in love with Joaquı́n Andieta, the son of
Mama Fresia, an aging Mapuche Indian woman who has long served the
Sommers household as a maid. Joaquı́n goes to California, lured by the newly
discovered gold there, hoping to secure some wealth with which to do right by
his mother. After he ventures overseas, Eliza decides to go after him; this is a
journey for which she relies on the complicity, company, guidance, and
protection of Tao, who eventually becomes the anchor of her life in San
Francisco for the many years she invests in searching for her elusive first love.
These texts attest to the way Latino literature has imaginatively captured the
long history of Asian-Hispanic interaction not only as it emerges in the public
sphere in politics, labor struggles, and economic opportunities but also in the
private realms of affection that have led to the formation of families with mixed
Asian and Hispanic ancestries. The literary record also evokes moments of
rapport marked by ambiguity, as in the case of ‘‘Seventeen Syllables,’’ the short
fiction piece by Yamamoto (2001) discussed above. The less congenial facet of
Asian-Hispanic contact appears, for example, in The Life and Adventures of
Joaquı́n Murieta (1854), an imaginative biography of the legendary hero who in
time would become an icon of Mexican–American resistance. Written by the
Anglo-Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird), The Life and Adven-
tures serves as an intertext to Daughter of Fortune in that by calling her character
Joaquı́n Andieta, Allende is toying with a tradition that attributes a Chilean
nationality to the legendary hero while refraining from the open claim laid on the
character by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his 1967 dramatic poem Fulgor y
muerte de Joaquı́n Murieta, whose subtitle calls him ‘‘bandido chileno.’’ Both
Ridge and Allende evoke the Chinese presence in California, especially in San
Francisco, where Eliza’s loyal friend Tao reconnects with people of his ancestry.
The Life and Adventures, however, presents us with a tale of Chinese woe, in that
while the narrative traces Joaquı́n’s route as he seeks to vindicate the abuses
perpetrated by Anglos against Mexicans, its pages are sprinkled throughout with
scenes of theft and the cruelest violence against the Chinese. A subordinate of
Joaquı́n named Reis reports on having killed 150 ‘‘Chinamen,’’ and the narrator

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explains the convenience of such a move by saying how ‘‘politic’’ a stroke it was
‘‘for Reis to kill Chinamen in preference to Americans, for no one cared for so
alien a class, and they were left to shift for themselves’’ (Ridge 1977, 97). At
another point, when Joaquı́n saves a ‘‘Chinaman’’ from the murderous hand of the
lieutenant Three-Fingered Jack, we hear Jack explain that he simply ‘‘can’t help
it,’’ as he finds killing the Chinese ‘‘such easy work’’; he even prefaces this
confession by confessing, ‘‘I love to smell the blood of a Chinaman’’ (64). Finally,
one might mention an article on the massacre of Chinese laborers by white miners
at Rock Springs, Wyoming, published by the great Cuban patriot and man of
letters José Martı́ in La Nación of Buenos Aires, on 23 October 1885. The piece
leaves much to be desired in that before getting to the actual crime, Martı́ spends
too much time framing it on the basis of the challenges that white workers face
with the Chinese, who accept lower wages because they live ‘‘on pittance,’’ dress
‘‘cheaply,’’ work ‘‘hard,’’ ‘‘rarely’’ defend themselves, ‘‘never’’ attack, are ‘‘crafty,’’
and possess ‘‘sobriety and sharpness,’’ which enable them to win in contests of
ability ‘‘over the European workman’’ (Martı́ 1975, 231). His offering this
catalogue of pathologies, in addition to finding the Chinese man ‘‘not endearing’’
because he ‘‘has no wife,’’ prior to narrating the massacre, leaves one with the
sense that Martı́ has prepared us to ‘‘understand’’ why the white miners would feel
justified in commiting their crime (232). The literary record, in short, tells a
complex and disturbing story.
In terms of film, it is worth mentioning two instances wherein personal lives
and political concerns intersect. The filmmakers happen to be Asian Americans,
and the themes they broach focus on contemporary Latino/a lives. Renée
Tajima-Peña is an LA-based documentarian and Academy Award nominee
whose works have recorded broad as well as personalized interventions into
Chicano/a history. Calavera Highway (2008), for example, details the journey of
her husband, Armando Peña, and his brother Carlos to South Texas to scatter
the ashes of their mother Rosa. The family drama excavates memories of a large
and divided family, interrogating not only long-held notions about masculinity
(especially fatherhood), but also highlighting such haunting historical legacies as
the Operation Wetback mass deportations of 1954. Tajima-Peña’s more recent
public health–themed documentary No Más Bebés (2015) was screened on PBS
for Independent Lens as well as at the 2016 Latino Studies Association (LSA)
Conference in Pasadena, California. The documentary examines the quest for
truth, justice, and restitution over coerced sterilizations of Mexican immigrant
women at the LA County–USC Medical Center during the late 1960s and early
1970s. Given the current atmosphere of racialized suspicion around so-called
anchor babies, especially when the mothers originate from China, Mexico, or
the developing world, it is evident that the sexuality of women of color
continues to prompt both anxiety and fascination among the US mainstream.
Institutions like hospitals and the local government that are supposed to serve all
communities may feel justified in policing Latina and Asian women’s

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reproductive rights and futures, making such instances of systemic abuse pivotal
case studies for feminist and legal historians and public health scholars, as well
as the general public.
Hapa (Japanese/Swedish) filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga, whose father was
born in a California internment camp and whose parents both remarried Spanish
speakers, writes and directs critically acclaimed films and television series. HBO’s
True Detective Season 1 earned him a 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Best
Directing for a Drama Series, a triumphant follow-up to his first full-length
feature film, a joint US-Mexican venture titled Sin Nombre (2009). Sin Nombre
earned Fukunaga top directing and cinematography awards at the Sundance Film
Festival that year. His graduate thesis project during film school at New York
University, Victoria para Chino (2004), was inspired by a New York Times article
about ninety undocumented immigrants (Mexicans, Central Americans, and
South Americans) who were secreted in an unventilated milk trailer journeying
from South Texas to Houston. Nineteen travelers perished from suffocation in the
unbearable heat, including a five-year-old boy, a direct result of the driver’s
callous disregard for their audible suffering (Blumenthal 2006). The vehicle was
eventually abandoned at a truck stop near Victoria, Texas, hence the bitterly
ironic title of the award-winning short piece. Motivated by this successful effort,
Fukunaga, who speaks Spanish fluently, undertook extensive participatory field
research on the perilous train journeys north of Central American and Mexican
migrants while writing Sin Nombre. The Spanish-language narrative traces the
quest of a Honduran teen to reach the United States amid such imminent dangers
as robbery, attempted rape, and capture by immigration officers. The Mara
Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang features prominently, but more as a means of
conveying the effects of strictures posed by families and communities than as a
homogeneous source of evil or spectacle. The auteur describes his initial attitude
toward these Latino/a migration stories as being one of familiarity without true
connection: ‘‘Although I was from California, had a Mexican–American stepdad
(who often threatened to send me to work in the peach orchards if I misbehaved)
and was well accustomed to hearing about illegal immigration, I had never before
invested myself in the topic’’ (Fukunaga 2009). The importance of showcasing the
vulnerability and inexorable humanity of these migrants is a commitment that he
revisited in the epic drama about child soldiers in West Africa, Beasts of No
Nation (2015), based on the eponymous novel by Nigerian-born American writer
Uzodinma Iweala.
Tajima-Peña and Fukunaga’s successful artistic engagements with what are
ostensibly ‘‘other people’s stories’’ convey the willingness and ability of the
artists (and audiences) to democratize and broaden knowledge about what it
means to represent a full(er) spectrum of minority lives in the United States.
Crossing the gulf between self and nonself through art entails approaching those
experiences with intelligence, respect, and shared participation. This type of
work entails some political challenges and could possibly invite varying levels of

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 Kang and Torres-Saillant

pushback, especially from individuals and groups who believe, for instance, that
only Asians are qualified to write about Asians, Latino/as about Latino/as, and
so on, ad infinitum. However, a truly pluralistic picture of US racial experience
cannot emerge from privileging essentialist notions of authenticity and special
insight based on phenotype, biology, or experience alone. Nor can overdeter-
mined concepts like ‘‘diversity’’ signal the need for inclusion of just one group
(for instance, African Americans) and not others when it comes to creating a
more just and nuanced understanding of our changing society while advancing a
vision of lasting social transformation.

Predecessors Pointing to the Future

The late Japanese-American historian Ronald Tataki chose to do his doctoral

dissertation on African American slavery because he felt that such a project
would help shed light on the experiences that brought his own family to the
United States. He famously taught the first African American history course at
UCLA, and thereafter spent much of his time tracing the interconnectedness of
structures of oppression that diminished the lives of all racialized minority
groups in the country, not just people who looked like him. He joined a cadre of
other intrepid intellectuals and activists of color, including Yuri Kochiyama, a
Japanese-American civil rights legend who was a close friend and ally of
Malcolm X, and Chinese-American feminist writer, philosopher, and commu-
nity leader Grace Lee Boggs, who centered her lifelong activism on improving
minority (especially African American) lives in Detroit. The venerable Puerto
Rican thinker Frank Bonilla, one of the pioneering founders of Latino studies as
an academic discipline, invariably supported the cause of social justice
irrespective of how close or distant the people involved were from his ancestry.
In light of the example set by these compelling predecessors, all of whom have
died within the last decade, it seems fitting that in recent years we should witness
an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to exploring instances of ethnoracial
crossings. Apart from those cited above, scholars currently engaged in
examining Asian-Hispanic connections include Lok Siu (Memories of a Future
Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama 2005), Nicholas De Genova
(Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States 2006),
Grace Peña Delgado (Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration,
Exclusion, and Localism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands 2012), Julia Marı́a
Schiavone Camacho (Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search
for a Homeland, 1910–1960, 2012) and Kathleen López (Chinese Cubans: A
Transnational History 2013). Anthony Christian Ocampo’s The Latinos of Asia:
How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race (2016) has also earned
considerable acclaim in the wake of its recent publication (Figure 2).

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 ‘‘Somos Asiáticos’’

Figure 2: Writings in various disciplines now increasingly highlight Asian-Hispanic crossings. (Photo
credit Terri Zollo).

From this limited sample, it is not difficult to see that the discursive emphasis
leans heavily toward the Chinese and Chinese-American experience on the Asian
side, and the Mexican and Mexican–American experience on the Latino/a side.
This pattern has already been mentioned earlier in this discussion. In his edited
collection Racial Transformations, Nicholas De Genova has forcefully affirmed
the need for establishing common ground in comparative ethnic studies: more
specifically, what fundamentally connects Asian Americans and Latino/as is
‘‘imperialist warfare, conquest, and colonization,’’ legacies that collectively
allowed the US nation-state to ‘‘dominate the ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’ ‘alien’
races that it confronted on its ever-expansive and increasingly virtual frontiers’’
(2006, 7). He argues that Native American identity is also central to the
definition of both groups’ history of racialization. In People v. Hall (1854), for
instance, Asians were classified as Indians, and, in the wake of the Sleepy
Lagoon trial and subsequent riots (1942–1943), Mexican–Americans were

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depicted by the Edward Duran Ayres Report as innately Indian in temperament

and thus ‘‘Oriental’’ in their general lack of regard for human life (De Genova
2006, 7–11). Racial Transformations features essays on a number of national
groups with origins other than Chinese and Mexican. Gary Okihiro, for
instance, juxtaposes the colonial experiences of Puerto Rico and the Philippines,
stating that the US domestic agenda of white male nationalism galvanized the
‘‘invisible racialization’’ of Puerto Ricans and the ‘‘very visible racialization (and
gendering and sexualizing) of Filipinas/os’’ (Okihiro 2006, 37). Similarly,
Crystal Parikh’s interdisciplinary study, An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of
Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture (2009), sets forth
compelling Asian/Asian American and Latino/a case studies such as the sagas
of Elián González (subject of a transnational custody battle) and scientist Wen
Ho Lee (subject of a national espionage scandal), as well as figures in literary
works by Frank Chin, Gish Jen, Richard Rodriguez, Eric Liu, Américo Paredes,
and Chang-Rae Lee. Parikh establishes robust premises for an ‘‘ethico-political
project’’ uniting Asians and Latinos premised on the shared figures of the spy,
the alien, the diasporic Other, and the minority intellectual (2009, 6).
Solidarity between people of color, of course, does have limits. Historians Greg
Robinson and Toni Robinson (2006) use the Westminster case to point out that
while post–World War II Japanese Americans were eager participants in various
intergroup alliances, Mexican-American organizations were less enthusiastic. The
latter largely avoided wading into collective legal struggles over restrictive housing
and were loath to join forces with the Japanese American Citizenship League
(JACL) or the NAACP on educational segregation. From the 1930s to the 1950s,
‘‘Mexican Americans, who expressed pride in their particular ethnic and cultural
legacy, were inclined to conceive of themselves as white and refused interracial
solidarity’’ (Robinson and Robinson 2006, 101). In his book After Camp:
Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (2012), Greg
Robinson expands on that impasse by pointing out the uneven legacy of Japanese-
American and Mexican-American relations on the West Coast. While they often
worked alongside one another in the local agricultural industry, generalizations
about unity and fellow-feeling are indeed difficult to make in light of such events
as the El Monte Berry Strike of 1933, which pitted Mexican pickers against
Japanese growers and white landowners (Robinson 2012, 109).
During the internment years (1942–1946), attitudes between these commu-
nities were ‘‘shifting and discordant,’’ as typified by the responses of two
Spanish-language US dailies: Texas-based La Prensa and Los Angeles–based La
Opinión. La Prensa voiced sympathy for the plight of the approximately
120,000 incarcerated Japanese, and insisted on the internees’ loyalty to the US.
This fraternal attitude was a stark contrast to the ambivalence, occasional
incoherence, and general inability – or refusal – of La Opinión to differentiate
between the Japanese of Japan and Japanese Americans, who comprised the
majority of the imprisoned population (Robinson 2012, 111–112; 121–122).

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Mexican Americans did not reap much material benefit from the evacuated
lands or businesses, and even found themselves becoming replacement scape-
goats for white West Coast racism and xenophobia. That said, Ralph Lazo
(1924–1992), who was of partial Mexican and Irish ancestry, memorably self-
incarcerated alongside his Japanese-American friends and neighbors in the
inhospitable camp barracks of Manzanar. After serving in the US Army, Lazo
devoted the rest of his life to social justice causes that benefited Latino/as as well
as Asian Americans, including the push for post-internment reparations and
educational advocacy for youth of all backgrounds. Lazo’s selfless example
suggests that a future of solidarity and mutual striving across differences would
not appear as daunting if we cared enough to look closely at the chiaroscuro of
the past as prologue to the future, acknowledging, thus, the simultaneous
importance of the light, the dark, and the spectrum of shades in between.

About the Authors

Nancy Kang is Assistant Professor of Multicultural and Diaspora Literatures at

the University of Baltimore. Previously a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in the
Humanities at Syracuse University (2007–2011), her publications include work
in Canadian Literature, Women’s Studies, African American Review, Callaloo,
Essays on Canadian Writing, MELUS Journal, and Ploughshares. She co-edited
The Culture and Philosophy of Ridley Scott and co-authored, with Silvio Torres-
Saillant, the monograph The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of
Rhina P. Espaillat (forthcoming). She received the University System of
Maryland Women’s Forum Faculty Research Award and the University of
Baltimore Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching
Award in 2016. (E-mail: nkang@ubalt.edu)

Silvio Torres-Saillant is Professor of English and Dean’s Professor of the

Humanities at Syracuse University. Former Director of the Latino-Latin
American Studies Program, he has served as William P. Tolley Distinguished
Teaching Professor in the Humanities and was the 2015 recipient of the Frank
Bonilla Public Intellectual Award from the Latin American Studies Association
(LASA). In addition to co-authored and co-edited works, his publications
include Caribbean Poetics (1997; 2013), El tigueraje intelectual (2002; 2011),
Introduction to Dominican Blackness (1999; 2010), An Intellectual History of
the Caribbean (2006), Diasporic Disquisitions: Dominicanists, Transnational-
ism, and the Community (2000), and El retorno de las yolas: Ensayos sobre
diaspora, democracia y dominicanidad (1999).

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reproduction prohibited without permission.