Tomoko Tokunaga Livres

Focusing on the experiences of Asian American high school girls, this book explores their roles as cultural mediators and community builders amid challenges of displacement. Through two years of ethnographic research, it highlights their struggles and aspirations in a globalized world. The work sheds light on immigrant youth as active agents who navigate identity and belonging across various contexts. It offers valuable insights for creating supportive educational environments where immigrant girls can flourish and thrive.

Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.