Migration history seminar series 2022/23 Transpacific Crossings Research and knowledge exchange

This paper elaborates 'Transpacific crossings' as an analytical and methodological framework to grapple with racism as a structural, palimpsestic and relational system beyond prevailing North Atlantic understandings of race. This framework is used to discuss how racism operates in the Euro-Amerindian 'mixed-race' racial system of 'mestizaje' that dominates Latin American societies by engaging with the experiences of Mexican Japanese ethno-racial minoritarian groups. While this discussion foregrounds racism as a modern global system rooted in European colonisation of the rest of the world, it is equally concerned with addressing the complex relations of confrontation, solidarity and differences that emerge among non-white minoritarian groups across the Pacific Ocean in response to it.