#asian american history

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Re: ethnic cleansing, sincere question, would the US government Japanese internment policy count as ethnic cleansing? I know they were still within US borders, but they were forcibly removed from their property and relocated with no legal recourse. Since death isn't the main goal of cleansing, sounds to me like this could count.

I’m a bit out my depth with regard to this particular subject, so I reached out to my girl Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, who has published extensively on the topic, and has another book on it set to be released by the University of Kansas Press in 2026.

Here's what she said:

“I would not categorize it as ethnic cleansing, no; particularly not in comparison to US indigenous policies, which are considered ethnic cleansing in many cases. (And Japanese Americans did actually have legal recourse, eventually; it’s how they could appeal to the Supreme Court. They didn’t as far as the rights of other internees to appear before loyalty review boards but if they didn’t have legal recourse you wouldn’t have had the big court cases). For comparison to what could be considered ethnic cleansing, see: all the state-condoned attacks on Chinese migrant communities in the 19th century in the West.”

She adds:

"I am in no way saying that the internment of Japanese Americans wasn't bad; just that it's not an example of US ethnic cleansing policy."

[arkipelagic]

While the "chino/a" label formally racialized diverse ethnolinguistic Asian communities as an undifferentiated monolith, Asian people also learned to deploy the category at times to their own benefit. For example, a man named Juan Alonso appeared before the royal court in Mexico City in 1591 and argued successfully that restrictions against "indios" riding horseback should not apply to him, since he was a "chino." In other cases, "chinos" found new commonalities through their mutual displacement and frequently formed intimate bonds with other "chinos," even those belonging to different ethnolinguistic groups. They also founded confraternities that offered mutual assistance and selected each other as godparents for their children. In specific circumstances, then, being "chino/a" served as a "strategic essentialism," an expedient form of identity making in which established stereotypes are manipulated for the sake of both situational gain and broad solidarity among multiple groups. "Chino/a" was a fluid category, one that indicated both foreignness and new articulations of identity and subjecthood.

Yet as Dana Murillo has observed, "social change or acculturation does not equal cultural annihilation." The extant documentation suggests that the first Asians in the Americas often retained a distinct sense of their identities, even as they received baptism, married across ethnolinguistic lines, conversed in Spanish and Nahuatl, and acculturated into existing communities of other castes.

Excerpt from The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (2024) by Diego Javier Luis

[maxellminidisc]

Still wild to me that despite being in the state of Texas, and originally based in Fort Worth (aka "where the west begins"), the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum (formerly known as the Cowboys of Color Museum) cannot find steady funding or support. Tons of money gets poured into the Stockyards of Fort Worth for tourist trapping, but god forbid the one foundation trying to shed light and focus on providing a fuller picture with inclusion of the lives of Black, Native, Asian, and Latines in the US during the founding of "the American West" get any help. They've had to keep moving locations cause they can't make rent, and they JUST moved again this January to a location in Arlington. It cut cost on rent, but their display space is also now cut.

I hope if you're ever in the DFW, you pay the museum a visit and contribute with your ticket sale. And if you know of anyone who's able to afford it and willing to contribute to their ongoing 100 for $1000 campaign due to relocation and new preservation needs, send them this graphic or this link.

[wikipediapictures]

Corky Lee

“This is a video still from a full portrait AR 4k video of the unveiling of the street sign for Corky Lee Way in New York City.” - via Wikimedia Commons

[todaysdocument]

At the beginning of WWII, Naval Intelligence officers concluded that there were around 10,000 Japanese Americans who could pose a threat to the U.S.

Army General DeWitt used his authority to incarcerate 120,000. 

U.S. v Korematsu, Exhibit Q, April 30, 1943. 

Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United States

Series: Criminal Case Files

File Unit: United States v. Korematsu

Transcription: 

Edward J. Ennis

Director

Exhibit Q

Department of Justice

Alien Enemy Control Unit

Washington

April 30, 1943

[stamp] DEPARTMENT OF [illegible]

SEP 1[illegible] 1951

DIVISION OF [illegible]

ATTORNEY GENERAL [end stamp]

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SOLICITOR GENERAL

RE: Japanese Brief

Last week with our draft of the [underlined] Hirabayeshi [end underlined] brief I transmitted to Mr. Raum somematerial which I thought he would find helpful in obtaining a background view of the context of this case. In particular, I sent him a copy of Harpers Magazine for October 1942, which contains an article entitled [underlined] The Japanese in America, The Problem and the Solution, [end underline] which is said to be by "An Intelligence Officer". without attempting to summarize this article, it stated among other things that:

1. The number of Japanese aliens and citizens who would act as saboteurs and enemy agents was less than 3,500 throughout the entire United States.

2. Of the Japanese aliens, "the large majority are at least passively loyal to the United States".

3. "The Americanization of Nisei (American-born Japanese) is far advanced."

4. With the exception of a few identified persons who were prominent in pro-Japanese organization the only important group of dangerous Japanese were the Kibei (American-born Japanese predominantly educated in Japan).

5. "The identity of Kibei can be readily ascertained from United States Government records."

6. "Had this war not come along at this time, in another ten or fifteen years there would have been no Japanese problem, for the Issei would have passed on, and the Nisei taken their place naturally in American communities and national life."

This article concludes: "To sum up: The  'Japanese Problem' has been magnified out of its true proportion largely because of the physical characteristics of the Japanese people. It should not be handled on the basis of the [underlined: individual], regardless of citizenship and [underlined: not] on a racial basis." (Emphasis in original.)

I thought this article interesting even though it was substantially anonymous. I now attach much more significance to it because a memorandum prepared by Lt. Con. X. D. Ringle, who has until very recently been Assis-

[handwritten in bottom right corner] #8 [end handwritten]

[page 2]

tant District Intelligence Officer, 1th Naval District, in charge of naval intelligence in that district (which includes Los Angeles), and who was formerly Assistant District Intelligence Officer in Hawaii, has come to my attention. A comparison of this memorandum with the article leaves no doubt that the author of the Harpers article is Lt. Com. K. D. Ringle. There are many long passages in the first person relating to personal experiences which are identical in the two writings.

  In addition I am informed entirely unofficially by the persons in the Office of Naval Intelligence that Lt. Com. Ringle in fact was lent to War Relocation Authority to prepare a manual on the background of the Japanese who were being evacuated from an Intelligence or security viewpoint, for the use of the WRA personnel. After this memorandum was prepared permission was obtained to abstract it and publish it anonymously in Harpers. Thus the Harpers article, which clearly indicates that the method of evacuation was wrong and that it would have been sufficient to evacuate not more than 10,000 know Japanese and that it would now be sage to release all but not more than 10,000 presently identified Japanese, was written by a Naval Intelligence officer who was on duty from 1940 until very recently in the Los Angeles area, from which approximately one-third of the evacuation came.

  I have furthermore been most informally, but altogether reliably, advised that both the article and the WRA memorandum prepared by Lt. Com. Ringle represent the views, if not of the Navy, at least of those Naval Intelligence officers in charge of Japanese counter-intelligence work. It has been suggested to me quite clearly that it is the view of these officers that the whole evacuation scheme was carried out badly and that it would have been sufficient to evacuate the following three groups:

1. The Kibei.

2. The parents of Kibei.

3. A known group of aliens and citizens who were active members of pro-Japanese societies such as the Japanese Navy League, the Military Virtue Society, etc.

Since the naval officers believe that it was necessary to evacuate only about 10,000 people they could have identified by name, they did not feel that it was necessary to evacuate all of the Japanese. Presumably, they did not make this view known fourteen months ago for the reasons that Secretary Knox was at that time greatly exercised about the Japanese Fifth Column and that, since it was the Army's problem, it was safer to keep quiet than to brave the political storm then raging.

In retrospect it appears that this Department made a mistake fourteen months ago in not bringing the Office of Naval Intelligence into the

[page 3]

controversy. I suppose that the reason that it did not occur to any of us to do this was the extreme position then taken by the Secretary of the Navy.

   To have done so would have been wholly reasonable, since by the terms of the so-called delimitation agreement it was agreed that Naval Intelligence should specialize on the Japanese, while Army Intelligence occupied other fields. I have not seen the document, but I have repeatedly been told that Army, before the war, agreed in writing to permit the Navy to conduct its Japanese intelligence work for it. I think it follows, therefore, that to a very considerable extent the Army, in acting upon the opinion of Intelligence officers, is bound by the opinion of the Naval officers in Japanese matters. Thus, had we known that the Navy thought that 90% of the evacuation was unnecessary, we could strongly have urged upon Gen. DeWitt that he could not base a military judgment to the contrary upon Intelligence reports, as he now claims to do.

Lt. Com. Ringle's full memorandum is somewhat more complete than the version published in Harpers and I think you will be interested in reading it. In the past year I have looked at  great numbers of reports, memoranda, and articles on the Japanese, and it is my opinion that this is the most reasonable and objective discussion of the security problem presented by the presence of the Japanese minority. In view of the inherent reasonableness of this memorandum and in view of the fact that we now know that it represents the view of the Intelligence agency having the most direct responsibility for investigating the Japanese from the security viewpoint, I feel that we should be extremely careful in taking any position on the facts more hostile to the Japanese than the position of Lt. Com. Ringle. I attach the Department's only copy of this memorandum.

  Furthermore, in view of the fact that the Department of Justice is now representing the Army in the Supreme Court of the United States and is arguing that a partial, selective evacuation was impracticable, we must consider most carefully what our obligation to the Court is in view of the fact that the responsible Intelligence agency regarded a selective evacuation as not only sufficient but preferable. It is my opinion that certainly one of the most difficult questions in the whole case is raised by the fact that the Army did not evacuate people after any hearing or on any individual determination of dangerousness, but evacuated the entire racial group. The briefs filed by appellants in the Ninth Circuit particularly pressed the point that no individual consideration was given, and I regard it as certain that this point will be stressed even more, assuming that competent counsel represent appellants, in the Supreme Court. Thus, in one of the crucial points of the case the Government is forced to argue that individual, selective evacuation would have been impractical and insufficient when we have positive knowledge that the only Intelligence agency responsible for advising Gen. DeWitt gave him advice directly to the contrary.

[page 4[

In view of this fact, I think we should consider very carefully whether we do not have a duty to advise the Court of the existence of the Ringle memorandum and of the fact that this represents the view of the Office of Naval Intelligence. It occurs to me that any other course of conduct might approximate the suppression of evidence.

  As I have said, my information that the Ringle memorandum represents the view of the Office of Naval Intelligence has come to me informally. I feel, therefore, that we have an obligation to verify my informal information. I believer that we should address an inquiry to the Secretary of the Navy, making reference to the Ringle memorandum, and stating that we have been advised that this represents the Navy's view and asking the Secretary if in fact the views of ONI, at the time of the evacuation, coincided with Com. Ringle's.

 The Ringle memorandum originally came into my possession from WRA and we noticed the parallel between the memorandum and the article in this office. Attorneys for WRA furthermore are among the persons who have advised us that the Ringle memorandum represents the official Navy view. In view of the fact that any other information which I have obtained is highly confidential, I would prefer to refer in a letter to Secretary Knox only to WRA.

  I have prepared for your consideration a draft of a letter which you might wish to send to Mr. Knox.

Edward J. Ennis

Director, Alien Enemy Control Unit

Attachment

[notreallyimportant]

Sounds just about white right. I mean, why would you want people to know about the many fucked up aspects of a country’s history? Especially if the government played a very heavy hand in it.

[newhistorybooks]

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind’s era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India’s British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so.

[kemetic-dreams]

When and why yellow was first applied to people of East Asian descent is rather murky.

The process occurred over hundreds of years. As some scholars have noted, it's not as if there were people with yellow skin. The whole "yellow equals Asian" thing had to be invented. And in fact, there was a time when there was no such thing as "Asian" — even that had to be invented.

Enter Carl Linnaeus, an influential Swedish physician and botanist now known as the "father of modern taxonomy." In 1735, Linnaeus separated humans into four groups, including Homo Asiaticus — Asian Man. The other three categories, European, African and American, already had established — albeit arbitrary — colors: white, black and red. Linnaeus, searching for a distinguishing color for his Asian Man, eventually declared Asians the color "luridus," meaning "lurid," "sallow," or "pale yellow."

I get this bit of history from Michael Keevak, a professor at National Taiwan University, who writes in his book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinkingthat "Luridus also appeared in several of Linnaeus's botanical publications to characterize unhealthy and toxic plants."

Keevak argues that these early European anthropologists used "yellow" to refer to Asian people because "Asia was seductive, mysterious, full of pleasures and spices and perfumes and fantastic wealth." Yellow had multiple connotations, which included both "serene" and "happy," as well as "toxic" and "impure."

He tells me that there was "something dangerous, exotic and threatening about Asia that 'yellow' ... helped reinforce."

Which might explain why the fear that East Asian countries would take over the West became known as yellow peril.

In 1956, Marvel's short-lived Yellow Claw comic featured a villain of the title's name. He was drawn with a bald head, long scraggly beard, slanted eyes and, yes, fingers that resembled claws. True to the name, his skin had a distinct yellow hue.

That was all make-believe. The real-life consequence of vilifying a race included things like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States until 1943; the violence against hundreds of Filipino farmworkers in Exeter and Watsonville, Calif., who were mobbed and driven out of their homes by white Americans in 1929 and 1930; and the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

For as long as Asians have lived in the United States, white people have been trying to label us: who we are, what we look like and how we should be described. It was also white people who defined our terminology — for many decades, "Orientals" was the moniker of choice. (And when people hurled slurs at us, we've been called Chinamen, Japs, gooks, Asiatics, Mongols and Chinks.)

That started to shift in the 1960s.

That's when the term "Asian American" was born. At the time, it was linked to political advocacy. Yuji Ichioka, then a graduate student and activist at the University of California, Berkeley, who would later become a leading historian and scholar, is widely credited with coining the term.

This period, often referred to as the Yellow Power Movement, was one of the first times these disparate people — Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indian Americans, Laotian Americans, Cambodian Americans, to name only some — grouped themselves under one pan-ethnic identity.

There was power in numbers, which Ichioka knew as founder of the Asian American Political Alliance. In a letter and questionnaire to new members, AAPA made clear that its organization was not just advocating for the creation of Asian American studies courses, but for broader social causes. That included adopting socialist policies and supporting the Black Liberation Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, and anti-Vietnam and anti-imperialist efforts.

Spurred in part by the activism of the times, the term "Asian American" rose to popularity. It also helped that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, allowing an influx of Asian immigrants to the U.S.

But over the years, the term Asian American revealed itself to be a complicated solution to the problem of identity.

For one thing, most people who technically fit into the "Asian American" category refer to themselves based on their ethnic group or country of origin, according to the National Asian American Survey (NAAS).

Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the leader of NAAS, says he and his colleagues found that most Americans think of "Asian Americans" as East Asians.

Karen Ishizuka, who wrote Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, says that "Asian American" is still an important identifier because of the political power it has carried for decades. But it's crucial for people to be educated about what it once meant, she says, because the term has become "more like an adjective now, rather than a political identity."

Ramakrishnan and Ishizuka seem to reinforce why I've been searching for a term like yellow. In all my conversations about this issue, I've found myself remarking how the question of "What about yellow?" feels so hair-pullingly existential. Maybe it's because Asian American seems like it has been watered down from activism to adjective. I find myself wanting a label that cuts a little deeper.

In 1969, a Japanese American activist named Larry Kubota wrote a manifesto called "Yellow Power!" that was published in Gidra, a radical magazinecreated by Asian American activists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His words were a rallying cry. "Yellow power is a call for all Asian Americans to end the silence that has condemned us to suffer in this racist society and to unite with our black, brown and red brothers of the Third World for survival, self-determination and the creation of a more humanistic society," he wrote.

Kubota wasn't the only one using yellow in a new and different way.

Ishizuka tells me about a bunch of different groups in the 1960s and 1970s: Yellow Seeds was a radical organization in Philadelphia that published a bilingual English-Chinese newspaper of the same name. The Yellow Identity Symposium was a conference at Berkeley that helped ignite the Third World Liberation strikes. The Yellow Brotherhood was an Asian group made up mostly of former gang members in Los Angeles that tried to disband gangs and curb drug addiction. Yellow Pearl, a play on "yellow peril," was a music project started by an activist group in New York's Chinatown.

I call up Russell Leong. He is a professor emeritus at UCLA and was the longtime editor of the radical Amerasia journal. As a kid, he used to make Yellow Power posters in San Francisco's Chinatown.

"Do you call yourself yellow?" I ask him.

"That's an interesting question," Leong says. "If I'm with a group of yellow people like my close friends, I'll call myself a Chink, a Chinaman, a yellow. But in public, I'm not gonna call anyone else that .... it depends what I'm comfortable with. It's the same with my English or Chinese name. Sometimes I'll use my American name. Sometimes I'll use my Chinese name."

Whatever the word, he adds, "I think it's better that we have more words to describe ourselves."

I get it. Despite the incompleteness of any one term, together they can become a powerful tool.

Still, if there were no term like "Asian American" — if it didn't exist, if we gave up on it entirely — then what could we have to anchor ourselves? After all, it's not just about a word; it's about an entire identity.

Ellen Wu, the historian from Indiana, digs into that point: "To circle back to this question of, do we use something like yellow or brown? ... Why do we even feel like we have to?"

Wu acknowledges that we're always craving words that might come closer to encapsulating who we are.

"I think that invisibility — that feeling that we don't matter, that worse, we're statistically insignificant — in some ways really fuels that desire to have a really concise and meaningful way of talking about ourselves," she says.

I pose all of this to Jenn Fang, an activist and writer who runs the appropriately-named blog Reappropriate.

She's not so convinced that yellow would resolve the issues that plague Asian American. It might be a useful identifier if yellow was used very intentionally and people knew its history, she says. But it could also fall into the same traps as Asian American. With ubiquity, it could eventually lose its power.

Fang also thinks that if people were to identify as yellow, there would be more people staying in their own lanes, so to speak — that, say, East Asians who call themselves yellow might not advocate on behalf of Asians who call themselves brown.

"Are you reclaiming the slur, or reclaiming our history?" Fang asks me. "The thing I'm concerned about is — is [yellow] a truly reflective way of talking about the East Asian American experience? Is yellow more nuancing? ... Or more flattening?"

In the pinnacle of the civil rights era, activists used yellow as a term of empowerment — a term they chose for themselves. In some ways, I'm still seeing that today.

When the director of Crazy Rich Asians, Jon Chu, wanted to include a Mandarin version of Coldplay's song "Yellow" in a pivotal scene of his movie, some people were concerned that including it might not fly in such a high-profile movie about Asians. But that was exactly Chu's point. He wrote a letter to the band pleading his case — he wanted to attach something gorgeous to the word.

"If we're going to be called yellow," Chu wrote, "we're going to make it beautiful."

I can't help but think back to a group of people I spoke to late last year.

The Yellow Jackets Collective is an activist group, the name an echo of the 1960s. They're four people in New York City who identify themselves with a wide swath of terms, in addition to yellow: she/her, womxn, brown, Asian American, femme, child of Chinese immigrants, Korean American, 1st gen., first gen. diasporic and "collaborating towards futures that center marginalized bodies."

I send them an e-mail. "Why yellow?"

They point out that they don't just walk around the world calling every East Asian person they meet "yellow."

"Identity ideally is about you and how you feel and what you believe has shaped you," Michelle Ling responds.

I let Ling's words percolate. I don't know if I'll walk around in the world calling myself yellow — maybe to people who have similar experiences to mine; certainly not around people who've flung slurs at me.

Even so, having different words to choose from is itself a comfort. Having yellow in my arsenal makes me feel like my identity doesn't hinge on just one thing — one phrase, one history or one experience.

After a back-and-forth with the group, something they've written stops me in my metaphorical tracks. It's from the Yellow Jackets mantra; a snapback comment that I can't help but appreciate:

"We say Yellow again because at our most powerful we are a YELLOW PERIL and those who oppress us should be afraid. We are watching you. We are making moves."

In “The Travels of Marco Polo,” the people of China are described as “white.” Records left by eighteenth century missionaries also report the skin color of Japanese and other East Asian people as clearly white. Yet in the nineteenth century, this perception quietly gave way to descriptions as “yellow.” In travel books, scientific discourse, and works of art, portrayals of East Asians began presenting them as having yellow skin. What happened in between?

In his 2011 book “Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking,” National Taiwan University professor Michael Keevak delves deeply into the origins and history of how and why East Asians went from being seen as “white” to being classified as “yellow.”

The first suspect implicated in applying the “yellow” label to East Asian faces is the famed Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). At first, Linnaeus used the Latin adjective “fuscus,” meaning “dark,” to describe the skin color of Asians. But in the tenth edition of his 1758-9 “Systema Naturae,” he specified it with the term “luridus,” meaning “light yellow” or “pale.”

It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) who went beyond the coloring ascribed by Linnaeus to apply the completely different label of “Mongolianness.” Regarded as a founder of comparative anatomy, the German zoologist did more than just use the Latin word “gilvus,” meaning “light yellow,” to describe East Asian skin color: he also implicated the Mongols, a name with troubling and threatening connotations for Europeans with their memories of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Timur.

While the references remained anomalous at first, travelers to East Asia gradually began describing locals there more and more as “yellow.” By the nineteenth century, Keevak argued, the “yellow race” become a key part of anthropology.

But the yellow label came associated with discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Just as no one in the world is purely white or black, neither does anyone actually have skin that is deep yellow. By “creating” a skin color and investing traits such as “Mongolian eyes,” the Mongolian birthmark, and mongolism (the old name for Down syndrome), Westerners made the perceived yellow race synonymous with abnormality. They also responded to the arrival of immigrants from Asia by sounding the alarm over the “yellow peril” - a term with a whole range of negative associations from overpopulation to heathenism, economic competition, and political and social regression. The hidden agenda of this racial color-coding becomes apparent when one considers who benefits from a hierarchy that places “yellow” and “black” beneath “white.”

[americangodstalk]

American Gods’ incomplete bibliography (3)

If you want to have access to the full, original bibliography as prepared by Neil Gaiman (it has a lot more info I do not put in my posts - my posts are just summaries and recaps of the original bibliography) you just need to go check Neil Gaiman’s website right here: https://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/American+Gods/in/183/?type=Books&work=American+Gods

7) First Nations myths

God is Red: A Native View of Religion

Neil Gaiman considers it a “very readable book about religion from a Native American standpoint” - though he was a bit puzzled by how the middle of the book “wander into Velikovsky”. 

The Religions of the American Indians

American Indian Myths and Legends

The mythology of North America

8) Background books

On the Rez

A book about the Oglala Sioux on Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the porrest places in America (at least at the time Neil Gaiman put together his bibliography), and about SuAnne Big Crow, a basketball player. 

Confederates in the Attic: Despatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Neil Gaiman bought and tried to read it in preparation for American Gods, but couldn’t get into it... It took him two whole years to get into it again, as he was writing American Gods, and he devoured it. 

The Forbidden Zone

Neil Gaiman first read a chapter of this book while doing online research about slaughterhouses. Despite the book being out of print, he managed to obtain a copy from a New Mexico bookstore - and this book ended up shaping and informing American Gods in many ways, both direct and indirect. Neil Gaiman is really sad that it is out of print ; and he points out that he has been a fan of the author, Michael Lesy, ever since another one of his books, “Wisconsin Death Trip”, about painting a darker and disturbing picture of the Wisconsin in frontier times. Wisconsin Death Trip is in fact another one of the books that influenced American Gods: some anecdotes and attitudes from this book ended up being present in the Lakeside parts of the novel. 

The Day of the Dead and other reflections

(Of its actual title, The Day of the Dead and other mortal reflections)

Neil Gaiman considers the author one of his favorite essayist alongside David Quammen - and it is from this book that Neil Gaiman “got” Coatlicue. 

Stranger from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian Americans 

Neil Gaiman used this book to research a lot of stuff that “never worked its way into American Gods”, but that will maybe appear in another book. At least, this is what he writes in the bibliography, but since we are all American Gods fan of modern days, we now know what he referred to in the bibliography: the “Somewhere in America” deleted section about a kitsune ending up in a Japanese internment camp of WWII America. 

9) African heritage

As Neil Gaiman says, these are the books he used concerning Mr. Nancy, and “the tale of the twins” (Wututu and Agasu).

A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore + A Treasury of African Folklore, by Harold Courlander

The African Slave Trade, by Basil Davidson

The Slave Trade: The Story of African Slave Trade, 1440-1870

(Of its actual name, “The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade)

Neil Gaiman precises that he took a lot from this book, written by Hugh Thomas, alongside Bullwhip Days (see below) - but he also admitted that he had to downplay what actually happened historically when writing “American Gods” because he didn’t want to turn his scenes into an “atricity exhibition”.

Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember - An Oral History

In Neil Gaiman’s words, “Urgent, human narratives and utterly heartbreaking”, as this book is a collection of the testimonies of the last surviving Americans who had been slave, collected in the mid-1930s.

Voodoo in New Orleans

Neil Gaiman explains that this book does not manage to convey the actual feel of the New Orlenas Voodoo, but it is an excellent book when it comes to the history of the “various Maries Laveau or Marie Laveaux”. However, if someone wants a better book by Robert Tallant, they should check Gumbo Yaya (see below)

Gumbo Yaya

Neil Gaiman was offered this book as a gift by Nancy Collins, and he realized he did need it a lot. It is an excellent book covering the folk beliefs, magic and folklore of New Orleans and Louisiana. 

Voodoo in Haiti

A “fairly useful and interesting book”, according to Neil Gaiman. He does say that there is a lot of better books about the topic of Haitian voodoo, but he included it in the list because it was the book he used to check stuff when writing American Gods.

[theleftpeople]

May is Asian and Pacific American Heritage month so I wanted to make something about it since I haven’t seen many people posting about it.

Specifically I wanted to talk about my job and the significance of the place I work at.

I work for the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. We’re dedicated to helping preserve the memory and history of Angel Island.

If you aren’t from California you probably don’t know what or where Angel Island is. Angel Island is an island located in the San Francisco Bay. From 1910-1940 it served as the “Guardian of the Western Gate” working to exclude and deport Chinese immigrants but later expanding to practically anyone from Asia.

During its time of operation around 500,000 people from 80 countries were held here. They were subjected to invasive medical exams and intensive interviews to prove they were who they said they were.

(Note this image and all other images we have of the medical exams are staged. We know they're all staged because standard procedure was to have immigrants strip completely naked.)

The reason Angel Island exists was because of the 1882 Chinese exclusion act. Immigration officials needed a place to house immigrants who were potentially barred from entering the county.

The Chinese exclusion act barred those who were laborers or “likely public charges,” people who immigration officials assumed would be taking resources from the government.

If you were a student, a merchant, or were directly related to a citizen you could enter the country.

These exemptions lead to a number of Chinese immigrants selling their papers or buying identities. Becoming someone’s so called paper child. Most often it was sons but there are paper daughters and other paper relatives.

Becoming a paper child involves memorizing new names, birthdays, streets, villages and anything immigration officials could use to potentially deport someone.

Here’s a list of real questions immigrants were asked while being detained.

What direction did your doorway face?

How many steps are there to your front door

Who lived in the third house in the second row of houses in your village?

It wasn’t enough for just you to answer though. Your family or whoever was vouching for you to enter the country also had to answer the same questions. If either you or your witnesses answered in a way that was incorrect or simply rubbed officials the wrong way you could be subject for further questioning and deportation.

While immigrants were detained many of them graffitied the walls with their thoughts feelings and assertions. A physical form of their feelings and resistance to their imprisonment. Immigration officials obviously hated this and would paint over and fill in any graffiti they found but ironically because of their efforts to erase this part of the immigration experience it preserved it.

You can visit Angel Island today and still see the poetry that these people carved into the walls today. Here’s a photo I took of one of the easiest to see poems since it had the wood putty taken out of it.

This is the English translation.

Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days, It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law which implicates me. It’s a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess. I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu’s whip.

From now on, I am departing far from this building All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me. Don’t say that everything within is Western styled. Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage.

I'd also like to highlight one of the many people who came through Angel Island.

This is Karl Yoneda. He was Kibei, an American citizen by Birth but educated in Japan. When he returned to the US he was detained on Angel Island. While he was detained he wrote a diary detailing his frustrations as well as his own poetry.

When he was finally released he moved to LA where he became involved in labor politics changing his name to Karl (he was inspired by Marx).

During WW2, Karl and his son were sent to the Manzanar concentration camp. His wife, Elaine, a white woman joined him out of solidarity refusing to be separated from her family.

Karl strongly opposed the Japanese Imperial Government and volunteered to join the US Military Intelligence Service.

After the war, Karl continued to organize and agitate. He helped organize the first pilgrimage to Manzanar as well as pushed for reparations to Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in the camps.

If you want to learn more about Karl or Angel Island in general, I suggest reading through our exhibit Angel Island Mosaic. It has a bunch of other people on there as well whose stories are just as interesting as Karl's.

[chemicalarospec]

It makes me so mad how Filipinos have been surgically removed from the history of the Delano Grape Strike. They started it!!! The Mexicans were originally scabs! Cesar Chavez was the face of the movement because he was the most charismatic leader, but it was Larry Itliong, the Filipino leader, who approached Chavez to join their strike. It started with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, it started with the Filipinos!

[hartshorn-and-isinglass]

My Closet Is A Mess And Musings On A Union Samurai

I usually skip this episode on my rewatches because the sheer density of the chaos makes it too distracting to have on in the background, but I'm running out of Ghoul Boys content to keep me company through The Horrors of Cleaning, so rock n' roll buckaroo!

On a pedantic historical note, I should mention that there were quite a few more Asian Americans involved in the Civil War than Ryan assumes, both Union and Confederate. And not just Chinese, but Japanese, Indonesian, Filipino, and Thai immigrants. As ever, the anglicization of a lot of men's names obscures their nationalities unless it's explicitly mentioned in the same documents. Good luck figuring out that surnames like "Pierce", "Dardelle", or "Marshall" belong to Chinese dudes if no one bothers to mention it...

To boot, 'Asian' as a race didn't really exist back then, and a lot of East Asians, South-East Asians, and Pacific Islanders were awkwardly shoved into the boxes of "black", "white", or "mulatto" depending on how they were perceived in a given part of the U.S. If you're curious about how that played out, check out the paper "'Mulatto, Indian, Or What': The Racialization Of Chinese Soldiers And The American Civil War" by Angela He.

In other words, an Asian dude rolling up to a bunch of Confederates going "konichiwa motherfuckers, you murdered my family, now you're gonna die" is not as historically far-fetched as it seems. Even better, there's documentation of one probable samurai joining the 1st New York Cavalry so feel free to add Ryan on a horse with a sword to that scenario.

[arkipelagic]

In truth, Spanish presence was minimal outside of a handful of urban settlements. Spain's outlandish claim to the entirety of the Pacific was actualized almost solely through the passage of a couple of ships sailing in either direction each year. Strictly speaking, the Spanish presence in the Pacific during most of the colonial period existed within a narrow navigational corridor, a transpacific space "as shallow as the amount of seawater displaced by the weight of Iberian sailing vessels." In the words of [Christina H. Lee] and [Ricardo Padrón], "Spanish Pacific studies begins by recognizing that Spain's presence in the Pacific was always slim, tenuous, and contested."

Despite the extremely limited scope of the Spanish encounter with the Pacific, it sufficed to facilitate "an unprecedented global mestizaje [intermingling and intermixture]" in the movement of thousands of free and enslaved Asians to the Americas for the first time. During their 250 years of operation, the Manila galleons confronted the most challenging seafaring conditions of their era to ferry merchandise and people between Cavite in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico. The survivors of this arduous journey were forever marked by it.

The people disembarking in Mexico's torrid Pacific port had come from Gujarat to the southwest, Nagasaki to the northeast, and everywhere in between. Most sailors and free migrants were born on Luzon in the Philippines, while captives had often been ensnared throughout the Philippines or ... by Portuguese enslaving operations in the Indian Ocean World. Smaller concentrations came from elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Japan, or China.

Excerpt from The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History (2024) by Diego Javier Luis

[relaybeacon]

How A Supreme Court Case Redefined Whiteness by PBS Origins

[wikipediapictures]

Corky Lee

“Corky Lee on 42nd Street (Credit: Jennifer Takaki)” - via Wikimedia Commons

[todaysdocument]

Mary Oki registers two U.S.-born incarcerees of Granada Relocation Center on 2/12/1943. 

This registration form is probably the one which asked incarcerees if they would a) be willing to serve in the U.S. armed forces and b) renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Those who answered “No” to both could be segregated as “disloyal.” 

Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation Authority

Series: Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority

Image description: Three young women of Japanese descent sit at a roughly-made table. One of the women is filling out a form; the other two women are each leaning their head on their hand and do not look very excited.