Yellow, White and Chinese. Speeches and practices of racialization and xenophobia about population of Japanese descent in Peru

Abstract

In this article I analyze the political use of the main racializing discourses on population of Japanese descent in Peru, and I will focus on three moments. As a starting point, I discuss the development of speeches about the Japanese yellowness and whiteness, as well as the narratives about the yellow danger in connection with the implementation and regulation of immigration policies that encouraged, regulated and outlawed the displacement and permanence of this population in Peru between the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century; these discourses and narratives represented ideations and biopolitics replicated in the hemisphere in different nation-states in the Americas. Similarly, I review some of the most extreme manifestations of this phenomenon: on the one hand, the denationalization policies of Peruvians of Japanese descent and, on the other, those that legalized their concentration in the United States in the context of prelude and development of the Second World War. Finally, I revisit these racializing discourses in the light of some contemporary examples (late 20 th century, early 21 st century), centered on the figure of Alberto Fujimori. In this regard, I will stop only in the affective use that this candidate employed of a racializing (Chinese) category, under which he called himself before his voters; as well as his statement in some of the public demonstrations of support and opposition to his candidacy and mandate.