Summary:

Conference Convenors: Duncan Williams, Brian C. Bernards, and Velina Hasu Houston, USC

Description:

Has the recent interest in transpacific migration studies reconfigured the dominant paradigm of critical ethnic and race studies in North and Latin America, which is largely derived from histories of transatlantic migration? How does the history of Filipino and Chinese migration to Mexico, or Korean migration to the U.S. and Canada, along with the emergence of mixed-race identities and affiliations in those countries from intermarriage with local indigenous or settler populations, influence perceptions of race and mixed race heritage?

PRESENTERS - MORNING SESSION (10:00 AM)

“Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico”
Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. (Arizona State University)
Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies; author of Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (Rutgers University Press, 2012)

“Unruly Identities in the Hispanic Pacific”
Jason Chang (University of Connecticut)
Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies; author of forthcoming book, Asians and the Making of the Mexican Mestizo

Respondent: Robert Chao Romero (UCLA)
Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies; author of The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (University of Arizona Press, 2010) and “El Destierro de los Chinos”: Popular Perspectives of Chinese-Mexican Interracial Marriage in the Early Twentieth Century,” In The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlan, 1970-2010)

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, Intimate Encounters, Racial Frontiers: The Stateless GI Babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965 (2010)

“Seeing Race: Korean 'GI Babies' and Legacies of U.S. Neocolonial Care”
Susie Woo (USC)
ACLS New Faculty Fellow in American Studies and Ethnicity; Ph.D. Yale University, A New American Comes Home”: Race, Nation, and the Immigration of Korean War Adoptees, “GI Babies,” and Brides (2010)

Respondent: Lily Anne Yumi Welty (UCLA)
IAC Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies Center; Ph.D. UCSB, Advantage Not Crisis: Multiracial American Japanese in Post-World War II Japan and U.S. 1945-1972 (2012)

**Please e-mail Kana Yoshida at cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu to preregister, and if you would like to receive advanced copies of presenter papers for this seminar (highly encouraged!).

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.