The Philippines play a major role in expanding the international Filipino community through its promotion of international labor migration-Filipinos can currently be found in over 130 countries throughout the world. As the first major work to conceive of Filipino immigration as a diaspora, this study analyses the diasporic nature of Filipino relations, identities, and communities and shows how these transnational phenomena are socially constructed by the everyday actions and activities of Filipino Americans. Instead of focusing on an ethnic minority and its relation to its host society, a diasporic perspective places emphasis on the transnational relations created and maintained among that minority, its homeland, and other diasporic communities. Transnational ties are evident in the movement of people, money, consumer goods, information, and ideas.
Diaspora represents a new and fluid conceptual image quite apart from the usual coordinates based on physical location, territory, and distance. Transnational relations and practices will continue to be an increasingly important dimension of the Filipino American community because of the ongoing family-based immigration from the Philippines, further technological advances in communication and transportation, the expansion of transnational capital, and continuing racism and discrimination, all of which have made it necessary for Filipinos in the United States, the Philippines, and throughout the world to create and maintain diasporic lives and culture.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikiki. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within three weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questions about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed attorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials "raced" Fukunaga to death-first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colorblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for revenge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that undergirded Hawai'ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunaga case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a racial paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.

This is the first book in more than thirty years to discuss critically both the historical and contemporary experiences of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans. Given that race was the foremost organizing principle of social relations in Hawai‘i and was followed by ethnicity beginning in the 1970s, the book interprets these experiences from racial and ethnic perspectives. The transition from race to ethnicity is cogently demonstrated in the transformation of Japanese Americans from a highly racialized minority of immigrant laborers to one of the most politically and socioeconomically powerful ethnic groups in the islands. To illuminate this process, the author has produced a racial history of Japanese Americans from their early struggles against oppressive working and living conditions on the sugar plantations to labor organizing and the rise to power of the Democratic Party following World War II. He goes on to analyze how Japanese Americans have maintained their political power into the twenty-first century and discusses the recent advocacy and activism of individual yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) working on behalf of ethnic communities other than their own. From Race to Ethnicity resonates with scholars currently debating the relative analytical significance of race and ethnicity. Its novel analysis convincingly elucidates the differential functioning of race and ethnicity over time insofar as race worked against Japanese Americans and other non-Haoles (Whites) by restricting them from full and equal participation in society, but by the 1970s ethnicity would work fully in their favor as they gained greater political and economic power. The author reminds readers, however, that ethnicity has continued to work against Native Hawaiians, Filipino Americans, and other minorities—although not to the same extent as race previously—and thus is responsible for maintaining ethnic inequality in Hawai‘i.

Challenges the misconception of Hawai'i as a racial paradise by analyzing how ethnic inequality is maintained among its constituent groups

This collection of articles critically addresses current issues in Hawai'i's Japanese American community such as the decline of plantation communities, Uchinanchu identity and culture, changing definitions of being Japanese American, the significance of the Cherry Blossom Queen pageant, and Yonsei identity.

This is the first book in more than thirty years to discuss critically both the historical and contemporary experiences of Hawai'i's Japanese Americans. Given that race was the foremost organizing principle of social relations in Hawai'i and was followed by ethnicity beginning in the 1970s, the book interprets these experiences from racial and ethnic perspectives. The transition from race to ethnicity is cogently demonstrated in the transformation of Japanese Americans from a highly racialized minority of immigrant laborers to one of the most politically and socio-economically powerful ethnic groups in the islands. To illuminate this process, the author has produced a racial history of Japanese Americans from their early struggles against oppressive working and living conditions on sugar plantations_to their labor organizing and active role in the Democratic Party's rise to power following World War II. He goes on to analyze how Japanese Americans have maintained their political power into the twenty-first century and discusses the recent advocacy and activism of individual yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) working on behalf of ethnic communities other than their own. From Race to Ethnicity resonates with scholars currently de- bating the relative analytical significance of race and ethnicity. Its novel analysis convincingly elucidates the differential functioning of race and ethnicity over time insofar as race worked against Japanese Americans and other non-Haoles (whites) by restricting them from full and equal participation in society, but by the 1970s ethnicity would work fully in their favor as they gained greater political and economic power. The author reminds readers, however, that ethnicity has continued to work against Native Hawaiians, Filipino Americans, and other minorities-although not to the same extent as race previously-and thus is responsible for maintaining ethnic inequality in Hawai'i.