Last time I went to visit my family in Mexico, I found a photograph of my father that I had no idea existed. In the image he is an eleven-year-old boy wearing an apron and a hat outside a shop. When I asked him about it, he shared that it was from his job. My grandma came by that evening, she is in her nineties and still has a sharp memory. I showed her the photograph. She remembered the day she found out my dad had asked for a job at the hardware store which belonged to a Japanese man, Mr. Hioki, a neighbor. This was in a popular working-class neighborhood in Mexico City called Héores de Churubusco during the early 1960s.

Japanese immigration to Mexico happened in different weaves. There were, for example, many Japanese workers that went to the north and south of Mexico to work in mines, and plantations, others helped build the train tracks along the country during the early 1900s. These were intense, often exploitative jobs with little regard for people’s lives and well-being. This is why it is not surprising that Japanese workers also joined in the revolution of the beginning of the 20th century that ended the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Some of these revolutionaries were: Captain of the Constitucionalista Army Antonio Yamane, Kingo Nonaka who fought with Pancho villa, and José Tanaka who fought with Álvaro Obregón. 

During WWII, Mexico was pressured by the US to persecute Japanese citizens and placed them in camps. The Mexican government relocated Japanese people into big cities like Mexico City. After the war, many of these immigrants remained in the cities building community, opening shops like the hardware store where my dad worked. Their children attended public universities and were able to have a profession. In the 50s another weave of Japanese immigration arrived searching for opportunities that the postwar in their country made difficult to find. 

People migrate for many reasons in search for a better life and the countries where they arrive often benefit from this. Histories become entangled even if “official history” in schools fail to acknowledge this fact. I never learned anything about Japanese immigration in the context of Mexico in school, but I learned about it through conversations sparked from family archives like the photograph of my father, and later by actively seeking the information. This is how a bigger story, that of immigration of a group of people from a faraway country becomes a personal family story. 

The narrative of the Mexican government has been consistent and dismissive of reality. For the state we are “a mestizo nation” meaning that indigenous and European got mixed though colonization and that is what most people are, a mix. But this narrative obscures the fact that there are millions of indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, and other groups whose cultural influences can be found in the food we eat, artistic legacies, or the words we use when we speak. The dominant narrative has been a way to homogenize and erase the pluralities that exist in Mexico and the stories that are part of our own histories. This is why personal stories matter, and complete a picture that may or may not fit the one we have been told. 

References
Hernández Galindo, Sergio, 2022. “A 125 años de la primera inmigración japonesa a México: el alma de las relaciones entre México y Japón”. Descubra a los Nikkei, emigrantes japoneses y sus descendientes. Accessed 21st January, 2024 from: https://discovernikkei.org/es/journal/2022/10/6/125-anos-inmigracion-japonesa-a-mexico-2/