This research guide aims to help students interested in researching the history and legacy of Asian Pacific Americans in the Rio Grande Valley. The guide links to resources held by UTRGV Special Collections and Archives in our physical and digital repositories. Primary source materials are limited to newspapers. Secondary sources are represented chiefly by books and resources in our library catalog. Links to external resources, such as collections at other libraries and institutions, websites, and organizations, are also included to supplement research.
Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month is observed annually in the U.S. during May to recognize the achievements and influence of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Americans, or Asian Pacific Americans, in the history, culture, and achievements of our country. The legacy of the AAPI community dates back to the earliest arrival of Asian immigrants to North America and the contributions of families and individuals continue to shape the history and culture of the lower Rio Grande Valley.
Newspapers provide early documented accounts of Asian people in the lower Rio Grande Valley also reflecting anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment and activity. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant law to restrict immigration to the U.S. The law established a 10-year ban on Chinese immigration, denied naturalization to existing residents, and limited Chinese immigrants from traveling abroad. In South Texas, rumors spread that Chinese immigrants were crossing the US-Mexico border illegally.
Decades before Chinese exclusion, alien land laws were adopted to restrict immigrants (as early as 1859 in Oregon), especially people of Asian descent, from acquiring and colonizing lands of the western frontier. In a well-documented episode in January 1921, the American Legion prevented Japanese men arriving in Harlingen from California from claiming their recent land acquisitions--within a year stricter alien land laws were adopted by Texas and other states.
The Immigration Act of 1924 further restricted U.S. immigration, limiting the number of U.S. immigrants to 2% of the total number of individuals from each nationality and capping the total immigrant quota at 150,000/year. Recognizing the correlation between tighter restrictions and increased human trafficking along the border, the Immigration Act of 1924 also formalized the U.S. Border Patrol as a new branch of the Department of Immigration & Naturalization Services. Its jurisdiction was extended from land patrol to coastal patrol in 1925.
Asian Pacific families continued to arrive and settle in the Valley between 1907 and 1933, including many farmers of Japanese descent. Heishoro Miyamoto and Shin Fujimoto purchased 1200 acres of land near Mission to establish a citrus grove and nursery. Seiichi Noguchi, Tanjiro Kawamura, H. Hatanaka, Nabuaro Kitayaa, Thomas Tomazo Kato, Frank Etsuyi Izumikawa, and Minoru Kawahata purchased 403 acres and established the Yamato Colony and the Valley's first truck-farm in San Benito. J. Minoru "Jimmy" and Toku Kawahata came to the Valley in 1917. Uichi "Hugh" Shimotsu purchased land in San Juan in 1916 but resettled in Bluetown near Brownsville. Kumazo and Asao Tanamachi settled in the Valley in 1933 and weathered an intense hurricane just months after their arrival.
Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, resulted in the forced removal and incarceration of nearly 122,000 Japanese-American men, women, and children. Families were assembled and sent to internment camps throughout the US, including five locations in Texas.
Fearing domestic spies and foreign agitation at home, the U.S. government implemented additional restrictions on Japanese, German, and Italian nationals, including the surrender of their firearms and ammunition, cameras, radios, and more. Yet, families not only complied with these orders their children also enlisted in military service to prove their loyalty and patriotism to their chosen homeland, including many Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans.
Nisei men from the Valley, including Haruo "Harry" Shimotsu, Matsuo Kawamura, Edward Sasaki, George Oyama, Henry Hanawa, and four Tanamachi brothers Willie, Saburo, Goro, and Walter. A few of these men served with distinction in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, U.S. Army Signal Corps, rescuing their own lives to save the Texas National Guard's "Lost Battalion," which was surrounded behind enemy lines. Their heroism was immortalized in the 1951 film "Go for Broke" which was the first positive cinematic depiction of Japanese Americans.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 upheld the immigration quotas from the Immigration Act of 1924 but reduced restrictions against Asian immigration and allowed a path to citizenship U.S. citizenship. In 1956, WWII veteran Walter Tanamachi spoke at a dinner in Brownsville honoring the first 33 Japanese to become Americans in the Valley, which included his own family, "We have come a long way and we are going farther...for you have finally been accepted as American citizens."
Some research materials portray racism and violence against Asian Pacific Americans and contain harmful and offensive language and imagery. This content may be emotionally challenging and triggering. While UTRGV University Library Special Collections & Archives does not endorse these depictions, we hope the evidentiary value of the materials provides evidence and context for understanding and examining the historical racism and xenophobia, exclusion, intolerance, and discrimination against people of Asian Pacific ancestry in the United States.
The Brownsville Herald 04 Jul 1892, Mon ·Page 1
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas • Page 3
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas • Page 2
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas • Page 4
New York Times (1857-1922) New York, NY 08 Jan 1921 Page 3
New York Times (1857-1922), Jan 9, 1921 Page 3
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas • Page 4
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas • Page 4
The Brownsville Herald, Brownsville, Texas · Wednesday, July 13, 1932 Page 9
Valley Morning Star, Harlingen, TX 10 Jan 1936, Fri ·Page 16
The research guides compiled by UTRGV staff and students are intended to assist patrons who are embarking upon new research endeavors. Our goal is to expand their knowledge of the types of resources available on a given topic, including books, archival materials, and websites. In so doing, our compilers have taken care to include collections, digital items, and resources that may be accessed not only through UTRGV but also via other institutions, repositories, and websites.
We wholeheartedly respect the research interests of others. Therefore, please contact us if you wish to submit a resource for consideration, or if you have a question about or an issue with a specific cited resource.
The Asian Texans by
In The Asian Texans, author Marilyn Brady introduces readers to the languages, religions, and cultures of those who immigrated to the Lone Star State from Asia. Organized by region, the book discusses the lives and contributions of Chinese, Japanese, East Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Laotian, and Cambodian Texans. Special features include * 61 illustrations * boxed biographical sketches * an Asian timeline * newspaper excerpts The Asian Texans is part of a five-volume set from the Institute of Texan Cultures. The entire set, entitled Texans All, explores the social and cultural contributions made by five distinctive cultural groups that already existed in Texas prior to its statehood or that came to Texas in the early twentieth century: The Indian Texans, The Mexican Texans, The European Texans, The African Texans, and The Asian Texans.
Asian Texans : our histories and our lives by
This landmark work in Asian American history and Texas history features chapters on the fascinating histories of every Asian ethnic group in Texas. The book features 75 rare photos and images. In 1845, Francisco Flores witnessed the annexation of the Republic of Texas into the United States of America. Flores was a Filipino Texan fisherman who first arrived in Texas as a cabin boy on a Spanish galleon, likely a slave ship. Francisco Flores was the first Asian Texan. Every Asian ethnic group, every region of Texas, and every decade of Texas s exciting history is featured in this volume. After the Civil War, Southerners sought to replace black laborers with Chinese workers. Some plantation owners even spoke of the Chinese being used as labor as of old. Approximately 250 Chinese Americans migrated to Texas to build the Houston & Texas Central Railroad through cotton country. Far from servile, though, these early Chinese Texans had their own ideas about what they would do in Texas. In the late 1800s, stringent laws aimed at stopping Asian immigration turned El Paso into the Asian mecca of Texas and the Southwest. Asians of many nationalities traveled an underground railroad from Mexico into or through El Paso. Those Asians who settled in El Paso often lived the Wild West lifestyles typical of the city known as Six Shooter Capital. At the turn of the 20th century, Japanese Texans established huge rice plantations in East Texas even as the anti-Asian violence of the Mexican Revolution sent Asian Mexicans into the Lone Star State. Some five hundred Chinese Mexicans who aided the legendary General John J. Pershing in his hunt for Pancho Villa followed the U.S. army back to San Antonio and established a new community. World War II saw the building of Japanese internment camps in Texas, as well as the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team s rescue of Texas s lost battalion from Nazi siege. During the military period of Asian Texan history, most Asian immigration to Texas consisted of Japanese, Korean, and Filipina war brides ; Asian veterans and soldiers; and war refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After the 1965 immigration reform, Indian and Pakistani immigrants worked hard to integrate into a Christian Texan society; Vietnamese refugees fought bloody battles with the KKK on the Texas coast; Korean Texans struggled with the tumultuous aftermath of the LA Riots; Filipino, Korean, and Indian nurses and doctors established new communities; the fortunes of Asian Texans rose and fell according to the booms and busts of oil and high tech industries; and new Chinatowns, Koreatowns, and Little Saigons flourished in Texas cities. . This book is highly relevant to those interested in Asian American history, Texas history, American history, Latin American Studies, immigration, border studies, and ethnic studies. It utilizes historical, sociological, and demographic methods and perspectives. Asian Texans draws from interviews, archives, articles, and rare photographs, the top experts of Asian Texan history tell the stories of Asian Texan individuals and communities. Unusual topics featured in this book include the invention of the Border Patrol to combat the Asian Underground Railroad; the early Asian-black and Asian-Mexican families; and the violent battles between Asian Texans and the KKK and other racists.- Amazon
Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados by
A classic account of life on the Texas-Mexico border, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados offers the fullest portrait currently available of the people of the South Texas/Northern Mexico borderlands. First published in 1999, the book is now extensively revised and updated throughout to cover developments since 2000, including undocumented immigration, the drug wars, race relations, growing social inequality, and the socioeconomic gap between Latinos and the rest of American society--issues of vital and continuing national importance. An outgrowth of the Borderlife Research Project conducted at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados uses the voices of several hundred Valley residents, collected by embedded student researchers and backed by the findings of sociological surveys, to describe the lives of migrant farmworkers, colonia residents, undocumented domestic servants, maquiladora workers, and Mexican street children. Likewise, it explores social, racial, and ethnic relations in South Texas among groups such as Latinos, Mexican immigrants, wealthy Mexican visitors, Anglo residents or tourists, and Asian and African American residents of South Texas. With this firsthand material and an explanatory focus that utilizes and applies social-science theoretical concepts, the book thoroughly addresses the future composition and integration of Latinos into the society and culture of the United States.
The community of the Japanese Americans in the Rio Grande Valley [thesis] by 
Foo, a Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun by
During his time as a POW, Frank "Foo" Fujita kept a diary of daily happenings, embellished with drawings of life in the camp. He secreted the diary in the walls of his barracks, as the practice was forbidden. That diary forms the basis of these memoirs. Fujita's memoirs are also unique in that he was one of the fewer than nine hundred Americans taken prisoner on the island of Java. The bulk of American POWs in Japanese hands surrendered in the Philippines, and most of the published POW memoirs reflect their experience. Fujita's account of the defense of Java and of the fate of the "Lost Battalion" of Texas artillerymen serves to distinguish this memoir from others. At one point while a POW in Japan, Fujita was forced to be part of the Japanese radio group broadcasting propaganda. After the war, he testified at some of the war crime trials in San Francisco, and the diary on which this book is based was used as evidence in those trials.
The Future Is Mestizo by
Twelve years after it was first published, The Future is Mestizo is now updated and revised with a new foreword, introduction, and epilogue. This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.
The Japanese Texans by 
Lone Star Muslims by
Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as "terrorist" on the one hand, and "model minority" on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection.
Uprooting Community by
Joining the U.S.' war effort in 1942, Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho ordered the dislocation of Japanese Mexican communities and approved the creation of internment camps and zones of confinement. Under this relocation program, a new pro-American nationalism developed in Mexico that scripted Japanese Mexicans as an internal racial enemy. In spite of the broad resistance presented by the communities wherein they were valued members, Japanese Mexicans lost their freedom, property, and lives. In Uprooting Community, Selfa A. Chew examines the lived experience of Japanese Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during World War II. Studying the collaboration of Latin American nation-states with the U.S. government, Chew illuminates the efforts to detain, deport, and confine Japanese residents and Japanese-descent citizens of Latin American countries during World War II. These narratives challenge the notion that Japanese Mexicans enjoyed the protection of the Mexican government during the war and refute the mistaken idea that Japanese immigrants and their descendants were not subjected to internment in Mexico during this period. Through her research, Chew provides evidence that, despite the principles of racial democracy espoused by the Mexican elite, Japanese Mexicans were in fact victims of racial prejudice bolstered by the political alliances between the United States and Mexico. The treatment of the ethnic Japanese in Mexico was even harsher than what Japanese immigrants and their children in the United States endured during the war, according to Chew. She argues that the number of persons affected during World War II extended beyond the first-generation Japanese immigrants "handled" by the Mexican government during this period, noting instead that the entire multiethnic social fabric of the borderlands was reconfigured by the absence of Japanese Mexicans.
Who Are the Chinese Texans? by
Part of the Institute of Texan Cultures' Stories for young readers series featuring questions and answers survey the history and way of life of Chinese Americans who live in Texas.
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