Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawaii

University of Hawai’i Press
March 2018
288 pages
1 b&w illustration
Cloth ISBN: 9780824869885

Edited by:

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and American Studies
University of Virginia

Rudy P. Guevarra, Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and African American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Written by scholars of various disciplines, the essays in this volume dig beneath the veneer of Hawai‘i’s myth as a melting pot paradise to uncover historical and complicated cross-racial dynamics. Race is not the primary paradigm through which Hawai‘i is understood. Instead, ethnic difference is celebrated as a sign of multicultural globalism that designates Hawai‘i as the crossroads of the Pacific. Racial inequality is disruptive to the tourist image of the islands. It ruptures the image of tolerance, diversity, and happiness upon which tourism, business, and so many other vested transnational interests in the islands are based. The contributors of this interdisciplinary volume reconsider Hawai‘i as a model of ethnic and multiracial harmony through the lens of race in their analysis of historical events, group relations and individual experiences, and humor, for instance. Beyond Ethnicity examines the dynamics between race, ethnicity, and indigeneity to challenge the primacy of ethnicity and cultural practices for examining difference in the islands while recognizing the significant role of settler colonialism in the islands. This original and thought-provoking volume reveals what a racial analysis illuminates about the current political configuration of the islands and in so doing, challenges how we conceptualize race on the continent.

Recognizing the ways that Native Hawaiians or Kānaka Maoli are impacted by shifting, violent, and hierarchical colonial structures that include racial inequalities, the editors and contributors explore questions of personhood and citizenship through language, land, labor, and embodiment. By admitting to these tensions and ambivalences, the editors set the pace and tempo of powerfully argued essays that engage with the various ways that Kānaka Maoli and the influx of differentially racialized settlers continue to shift the social, political, and cultural terrains of the Hawaiian Islands over time.

Unlike the continental United States, Hawaii has no group that is the racial majority, and people can identify with multiple races and ethnicities over several generations. This is the norm, rather than an anomaly.

Early social scientists, the tourist industry, and visitors credit this long history of mixing to the “aloha spirit,” or culture of tolerance and inclusivity, that is the hallmark of living in Hawaii. True, Hawaii is a place where a mixed-race person like myself can blend in, and where people of color are not seen as a curiosity. And yes, people generally get along here.

But even the aloha spirit has its limits. We must be mindful that the present multicultural society grew from the collapse of the Native Hawaiian population and the dispossession of their land.

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., “Is Hawaii a Racial Paradise?,” Zócalo Public Square, September 15, 2015. http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/09/15/is-hawaii-a-racial-paradise/ideas/up-for-discussion/.

Is Hawaii a Racial Paradise?

Zócalo Public Square
2015-09-15

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Associate Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

Nitasha Sharma, Associate Professor of African-American Studies and Asian-American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

David A. Swanson, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Riverside

Lee A. Tonouchi (“Da Pidgin Guerilla”)
Hawaii

Roderick Labrador, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of Hawaii, Mānoa (also Director of the UCLA Hawaii Travel Study Program)

Maile Arvin, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside

Races, Ethnicities, and Cultures Mix More Freely Than Elsewhere in the U.S., But There Are Limits to the Aloha Spirit

Early in the 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segal, playing a guy who travels to Hawaii to get over a breakup, drunkenly pours out his feelings to two people in his hotel, a newlywed man and a bartender. The new husband encourages Segal to think there’s still hope for the relationship, but the bartender, Dwayne, has no sympathy for Segal’s sadness.

“You’ve gotta move on,” Dwayne says. “It’s that easy, I promise you it is. I lived in South Central. South Central. And I hated it. So I moved to Oahu. Now I can name you over 200 different kinds of fish!” He starts naming them.

The scene is hilarious, but it also hints at one of America’s fundamental Gordian knots—race—and the various ways we’ve tried to untie it. The story uses Los Angeles’ “South Central” neighborhood as a code word for a place where gangs are divided along color lines, racial tensions can erupt in violence, and residents feel stuck in the cycle. The implication is that Dwayne, who’s black, escaped all that by coming to Hawaii. He puts forth Hawaii as a paradise—a place where the only thing he has to worry about is learning how to pronounce Humuhumunukunukuapua`a.

Hawaii is one of America’s most diverse and happiest states. Some would contend people get along better here than almost anywhere else. But tossing different groups together also means there are frictions—ones that perhaps are too often are obscured by the sunshine and ukuleles in tourist guides.

So what’s the actual nature of racial relations in Hawaii? And what can the rest of us learn from it? In advance of the “What It Means to Be American” event “What Can Hawaii Teach America About Race?,” we asked a variety of experts on and off the islands that same question…

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Chicks Chat with Professor Rudy Guevarra

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Episode: #261: Rudy Guevarra
When: Wednesday, 2012-06-20, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

[This is the final episode of Mixed Chicks Chat.]

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Filipinos in San Diego: Images of America Series, and coeditor of Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific and Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide.

His new book, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century California and the Pacific West Coast. Through racially restrictive covenants, both groups were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves and their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

Listen to the episode (00:33:22) here. Download the episode here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [FitzGerald Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (2013)
pages 1285-1286
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas672

David FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. xiv, 239 pp.)

I recently bought a house in San Diego whose records included a 1945 racial covenant stating that houses in the neighborhood would never be sold or occupied to “persons not of the white or Caucasian race.” The original owners would have been distressed to learn that the house was sold to me by a Jewish and Vietnamese American couple and that one of the Mexican kids on the block boasts of learning Amharic from his Ethiopian classmates. Rudy P. Guevarra Jr.’s book helped me understand the historical changes on my own street and draw broader lessons about U.S. immigration and ethnicity.

Guevarra, a fourth-generation Mexipino from San Diego, makes major contributions to scholarship on the history of immigration to California and the history of San Diego as he tells the forgotten story of ethnic mixing of thousands at Filipinos and Mexicans. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and public records, he explains how a hostile racial atmosphere anchored in discriminatory law and hiring practices brought these two marginalized populations together. After the U.S. colonization…

Read or purchase the review here.

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

University of Washington Press
January 2013
304 pages
63 illustrations, 44 in color, maps
7 x 10 in.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99225-9

Edited by

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Cover art by Mequitta Ahuja

War Baby/Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.

Visit the website here.

The Transpacific Shift in Mixed-Race Studies: Sawyer Seminar II

University of Southern California, Univeristy Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library (DML)
East Asian Seminar Room (110C)
Friday, 2013-02-08, 10:00-16:00 PST (Local Time)

Presented by the Center for Japanese Religions and Culture’s “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars Series at the University of Southern California.

Conference Convenors:

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion
University of Southern California

Brian C. Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Southern California

Velina Hasu Houston, Associate Dean for Faculty Recognition and Development, Director of Dramatic Writing and Professor
University of Southern California

PRESENTERS – MORNING SESSION (10:00 AM)

“Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico”
Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies
Arizona State University

“Unruly Identities in the Hispanic Pacific”
Jason Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

Respondent: Robert Chao Romero, Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

PRESENTERS – AFTERNOON SESSION (1:30 PM)

“Erasing Race and Sex: Adoption of Stateless GI babies in Early Cold War America”
Bongsoo Park, Independent scholar; Ph.D. U-Minnesota
University of Minnesota

“Seeing Race: Korean ‘GI Babies’ and Legacies of U.S. Neocolonial Care”
Susie Woo, ACLS New Faculty Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Respondent: Lily Anne Welty, IAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies Center
University of California, Los Angeles

For more information, click here.

Review: Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Southern California Quarterly
Volume 94, Number 4 (Winter 2012)
pages 492-494
DOI: 10.1525/scq.2012.94.4.492

Alex Jacoby

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in Sun Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 256 pp.)

In the last decade there lias been an increased recognition of the need for multiethnic studies to letter understand the processes of racialization and community formation beyond a simplistic binary. Important works by Peggy Pascoe, Moon-Kie Jung, Scott Kurashige, Laura Pulido, Mark Wild, and others have contributed innovative research, methodological approaches, and theoretical ideas to facilitate this comparative analysis. Joining this wealth of new scholarship is Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego, a social history of the interplay and imbrication of Mexican and Filipino communities in San Diego during the first half of the twentieth century. The author, Rudy Guevarra Jr., is an assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at Arizona State University, and this monograph is an extension of his dissertation project. He argues that, as a reaction to being marginalized and facing segregation, both ethnic groups…

Read or purchase the review here.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 2012 Recap

2012-11-13

Camilla Fojas, (CMRS 2012 organizer) Associate Professor and Chair
Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Laura Kina, (Mixed Roots Midwest 2012 co-organizer) Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Despite being sandwiched between Halloween, Superstorm Sandy, and the presidential elections, over 400 people attended the 2^nd biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies conference, “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?,” and Mixed Roots Midwest at DePaul University in Chicago November 1-4, 2012. Attendees came from across the United State from Hawaii to New York as well as internationally from Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and Ukraine and included senior and junior scholars and cultural producers, graduate students, undergraduates, community members, and representatives from community organizations.
 
We would like to thank all of the attendees, participants, organizers, and volunteers for making CMRS 2012 an engaging and memorable conference. A special thanks to the invaluable conference support from DePaul’s Latin American and Latino Studies and our 2012 programming committee: Greg Carter, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., and Rainier Spencer. Thank you to our DePaul University co-sponsors: Center for Latino Research (CLR), Center for Intercultural Programs, Global Asian Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies Program (LALSP), Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Office, Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity (OIDE), Women and Gender Studies Program, and African American and Black Diaspora Studies.

Click here to view the 2012 CMRS Conference Schedule.
 
Enjoy photos from CMRS 2012
 
Like our new organizational page on Facebook

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies Call For Papers
“What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?”

Papers that were presented at the 2012 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference “What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?” are invited for revision and submission for the second issue of JCMRS. We also welcome papers that speak to specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. JCMRS encourages both established and emerging scholars, including graduate students and faculty, to submit articles throughout the year. Articles will be considered for publication on the basis of their contributions to important and current discussions in mixed race studies, and their scholarly competence and originality.
Visit JCMRS to download the CFP

What’s Next?

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies will be published in Jan-Feb 2013. We are in the process of building a dedicated CMRS website, gearing up for the next conference in 2014 (or sooner), and continuing a creative partnership with Mixed Roots Stories (launching in December 2012), and planning to form a CMRS association. Please keep the conversations going through the CMRS Facebook group page and through the CMRS caucus grouops: Latina/os of Mixed Ancestry, the National Association of Mixed Student Organizations, and the newly proposed Queer Caucus. For more information or to get involved contact us at cmrs@depaul.edu.