Professor and author Araceli Tinajero will present on her book, A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan (Palgrave, 2021), followed by a conversation with Koichi Hagimoto (Associate Professor of Spanish, Wellesley College). This talk will be moderated by Zelideth María Rivas (Professor of Japanese, Marshall University).
Beginning in 1990, thousands of Spanish speakers emigrated to Japan. A Cultural History of Spanish Speakers in Japan focuses on the intellectuals, literature, translations, festivals, cultural associations, music (bolero, tropical music, and pop, including reggaeton), dance (flamenco, tango and salsa), radio, newspapers, magazines, libraries, and blogs produced in Spanish, in Japan, by Latin Americans and Spaniards who have lived in that country over the last three decades. Based on in-depth research in archives throughout the country as well as field work including several interviews, Japanese-speaking Mexican scholar Araceli Tinajero uncovers a transnational, contemporary cultural history that is not only important for today but for future generations.
Araceli Tinajero is professor of Hispanic literatures at The City College of New York/CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. Before joining CUNY, Araceli taught Japanese at The University of Wales in Great Britain and Spanish at Yale. She is the co-founder of the Mexico Studies Group at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and the founder of the Colección Mexicana/The Mexican Collection at the CCNY Libraries. Tinajero is the author of Orientalismo en el Modernismo hispanoamericano, Kokoro, una mexicana en Japón (Eng. Kokoro: A Mexican Woman in Japan), and El lector de tabaquería (Eng. El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader).
Koichi Hagimoto is Associate Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College. His research interests are centered on Transpacific Studies, through which he explores diverse aspects of the unexplored relationship between Asia and Latin America. He is the author of Between Empires: Martí, Rizal and the Intercolonial Alliance (2013). In addition, he has edited a volume, Trans-Pacific Encounters: Asia and the Hispanic World (2016) and has co-edited (with Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger and Kim Beauchesne) a special number for Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana (2018) on the influence of Asia in Latin American literature. He is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled Samurai in the Land of the Gaucho: Representations of Japan in Argentinean Literature and Film.
Zelideth María Rivas is a Professor of Japanese at Marshall University. Her research focuses on the conception of race through literature written by Asian immigrants in the Americas, as well as the representation of race in Japan in post-World War II literature and film. Her work has appeared in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Journal of Asian American Studies, and Verge. She is the co-editor of Imagining Asia in the Americas (Rutgers University Press, 2016). She is currently completing a book manuscript on Japanese Brazilian cultural productions titled Migrant Circuits: Japanese in Brazil, Brazilians in Japan.
