Japanese Internment inflicted a grave injustice on Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens. At the same time, it resulted in the sudden loss of ethnic Japanese farmers, triggering a serious labor shortage in California, where vegetable production was an integral part of wartime food security. This article examines the economic impact of Japanese Internment on California agriculture as well as political debates over food security versus military necessity. Using state and federal government documents, records of congressional hearings, and the Japanese immigrant press in Los Angeles, this article demonstrates that Japanese Internment prompted voices sympathetic to ethnic Japanese farmers to question the necessity of the full-scale implementation of mass evacuation and also led to a growing demand for Mexican farmworkers who would come through the Bracero Program. Consideration of these processes helps us to better understand the Japanese Internment as not solely about race but about economics in wartime, multiethnic California.
Launched by Mexican farmworkers against Japanese farmers in Los Angeles, the 1933 El Monte Berry Strike became one of California’s largest labor conflicts. The strike evolved from a local conflict into an international problem in which anti-Japanese sentiment travelled across the U.S.-Mexico border, merged with Mexican nationalism, and forced Japanese residents in Mexico to issue an unexpected pro-strike statement against their co-ethnics in Los Angeles. Using Japanese diplomatic documents and local ethnic newspapers, this article details the process by which Mexican nationalism trumped ethnic solidarity among Japanese immigrants in the transpacific borderlands, where local and international concerns of Japan, Mexico, and the United States intersected. The exacerbating situation in Mexico, rather than in California, played a decisive role in the settlement of the strike.
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