Acceso usuarios
Shigeko Mato
El peón y empresario Nikumatsu Okada y la comunidad japonesa del valle de Chancay (1900-1950), authored by Peruvian anthropologist Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, can be read, seemingly, as a biographical memory text that linearly traces the rise and fall of Nikumatsu Okada, one of the first Japanese immigrants who arrived in Peru in 1899 and settled in the Chancay Valley. However, one cannot help but notice deviations and dissonances that disrupt the normalized, linear presentation of Japanese immigrants and their descendants’ experiences which always entail the developmental stages of suffering, overcoming, and triumphing. By bringing together the concept of the Plantationocene discussed by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing and that of “travelling memory” articulated by Astrid Erll, I explore 1) how the memory of Japanese immigration in the Chancay Valley comes into contact with the histories of valley’s other inhabitants and the land itself and 2) how these encounters create entanglements, transforming the narrative of Japanese immigration from a simple biographical account of immigrant’s struggles and contributions into a more complex, relational history within a given region. This approach leads us to situate the memory of Japanese immigration always in relation to the memories of other inhabitants, Indigenous peoples, enslaved African people, semi-enslaved Chinese laborers, migrants from the Andes, colonial settlers, landlords, the descendants of all these groups, and other livings and non-livings who have also inhabited and shaped the land. This situated relationality allows us to observe how the memory of Japanese immigration moves, mingles, and collides with other memory trajectories: those of colonialism, slavery, Japanese imperial settler colonialism, racism, and the exploitation of both humans and the natural world.
