2:00 - 4:00
Join Dr. Sonia C. Gomez, an assistant professor at Santa Clara University, who published a book titled Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (2024), to learn about the history of immigration and women. Dr. Gomez discusses her book with Dr. Curtiss Takada Rooks.
About the Author:
Dr. Sonia C. Gomez is an Assistant Professor of History whose research focuses on race and ethnic relations, migration and diaspora, and gender and sexuality. Her first book, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America (NYU Press, 2024), won the Organization of American Historians’ Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History. The book examines how marriage served as a vehicle for inclusion for Japanese women during an era of racial exclusion. Her next project, Dear Mollie, explores interracial female friendship, girlhood, and letter writing during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.
About the Discussant:
Curtiss Takada Rooks, Ph.D. Born at Camp Zama, Japan to a Native Japanese mother and an African American father, his work as an engaged and public education scholar explores the intersections of race, culture and ethnicity. A critical race and ethnic studies scholar in Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University, he teaches courses in multiracial identity and contemporary issues in APIA communities. His research examines multiracial identity, along with engaged scholarship addressing civic engagement and BIPOC community health and wellness. Dr. Rooks has spoken extensively in the U.S. and Japan on mixed-roots identity, Japanese American experiences & identity, and US Japan relations. Additionally, he serves on the boards of the US Japan Council, US Japan Bridging Foundation, Japan American Society of Southern California, and as an advisor and facilitator of the Japan – Black LA Initiative that works to enhance the relationship between Japan and the LA African American community.
Dr. Rooks holds a doctorate in Comparative Culture: cultural anthropology emphasis from the University of California, Irvine, a M.A. in Public Policy from Trinity College and an A.B. in Economics/A.B. in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. Currently, he is the First Rate, Inc. Academic Fellow. He is one of the compliers of the book titled Prism Lives/Emerging Voices of Multiracial Asians: A Selective, Partially Annotated Bibliography.
About the Book:
Picture Bride, War Bride examines how the institution of marriage created pockets of legal and social inclusion for Japanese women during the period of Japanese exclusion. Sonia C. Gomez begins with the first wave of Japanese women's migration in the early twentieth century (picture brides), and ends with the second mass migration of Japanese women after World War II (war brides), to illustrate how popular and political discourse drew on overlapping and conflicting logics to either racially exclude the Japanese or facilitate their inclusion via immigration legislation privileging wives and mothers. Picture Bride, War Bride retells the history of Japanese migration and exclusion by centering women, gender, and sexuality, and in so doing, troubles the inclusion versus exclusion binary. While the Japanese were racially excluded between 1908 and 1952, Japanese wives and mothers were permitted entry because their inclusion served American interests in the Pacific. However, the very rationale enabling their inclusion simultaneously restricted and defined the parameters of their lives within the US.
Connect:
Dr. Sonia C. Gomez - Web Site | Picture Bride, War Bride - Publisher's Site
Japanese Interest
Connect to engaging discussions and performances related to the Japanese community and culture.
BIPOC Interest
Attend programming, lectures and workshops intended for the BIPOC community.