Labor and the Japanese Diaspora: The Archaeology of Issei Workers in Peru's Coastal Haciendas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Between 1899 and 1923, more than 15,000 Japanese men travelled across the Pacific to work in agricultural estates (or "haciendas") along the Peruvian coast. Lack of land and opportunities in large regions of rural Japan pushed people to look for other options abroad, while Peruvian companies required a sizable workforce to sustain the coastal "agricultural revolution" at the beginning of the 20th century. The haciendas constituted the first locus of interaction between the issei workers arriving to the country and the local communities; however, an archaeological approach to these facilities and their surrounding landscapes has been so far neglected. This paper presents preliminary survey and surface collection results from one of these coastal haciendas. Results show that a focus on the materiality of labor in the context of the Japanese immigration to Peru has the potential to connect daily life at the haciendas and the larger social and economic processes, as well as to enrich the study of cultural encounters in the context of the Japanese diaspora.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25376