Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Tracing the forgotten history of a Japanese farm settlement in the Sacramento River delta.
Before wartime removal and incarceration, most West Coast Japanese Americans, including immigrant Issei and US-born Nisei generations, resided in rural agricultural areas. Existing histories of Japanese America have often overlooked this farming aspect of their experience, focusing instead on urban narratives. Centered on the town of Walnut Grove, the "downriver" (kawashimo) settlement was home to Issei farmers, merchants, and laborers who lived alongside their Nisei children in a society characterized by strict racial segregation and landlessness. In the delta basin, a small group of white landowning settlers and corporate interests held power and wealth, shaping social relations and economic opportunities for mostly Asian immigrant settlers and fieldhands.
Combining theories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and immigrant transnationalism with the techniques of microhistory, Eiichiro Azuma reveals the intricate dynamics of paternalistic interdependency between white landlords and Japanese tenants, as well as the complex interethnic relations among marginalized immigrant groups in the local segregated society and agricultural economy. Through his careful analysis of heretofore overlooked immigrant vernacular sources and oral histories, Azuma sheds important light on a lesser-known aspect of rural Asian American history through the lens of multiracial entanglements on the ground.
"Settling the California Deltais a landmark contribution to rural history and Asian American studies. Through a deeply researched examination of the Japanese American community of Walnut Grove, California in the early twentieth century, Eiichiro Azuma deploys an original and incisive framework—the mutually reinforcing dynamics of white segregationist settler colonialism and Asian immigrant settler colonialism—to illuminate how race, land, and labor shaped rural California. Integrating theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism rarely applied in the field, and centering interethnic relations among Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino residents with particular effectiveness, Azuma transforms a community history into a powerful case study with implications beyond the Delta. The result is an exemplary work of regional and environmental history and a significant intervention in the study of race and capitalism in the American West."—Shelley Lee, Brown University