Indigenous Identity In Latin America

How do we identify ourselves? As a woman or a man? As rich or poor? As young or old? As black or white or maybe something in between? As Korean or Korean-American? The identities we hold ourselves to are determined by the societal statuses we ascribe to, such as gender, socio-economic status, age, race or culture. Throughout the Pacific Basin, race and culture have become two of the most critical components of identity. Despite the importance of race and culture in developing one’s identity, both Latin America and the United States of America have historically suppressed the identities of immigrants and indigenous peoples through a strong desire to whiten their respective societies.

Immigrant and Indigenous Identity in Latin America

Latin

In The Buddha in Attic, a fictional novel by Julie Otsuka, readers are invited into the daily lives of Japanese picture brides who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s by marrying American men they had never met. In her novel, Otsuka describes her perspective of these immigrants’ lives as start their new

Forced by their husbands into hard-working jobs, such as farm laborers or as maids for American families, the Japanese women quickly noticed how different they were from their American counterparts. “We loved them. We hated them. We wanted to be them… And we regretted that we could not be more like them” (Otsuka, 2011, p. 39). Although the picture brides desired to be like their American counterparts, they were still ashamed to work for them as it was looked down upon in their culture. They felt as though couldn’t “mention them [their American bosses] in our letters to our mothers. [They] did not mention them in our letters to our sisters or friends. Because in Japan the lowliest job a woman could have was that of a maid” (Otsuka, 2011, p. 45). Working for these American women pushed the picture brides towards a desire to assimilate and whiten themselves. In doing so, the Japanese willingly chose to suppress their cultural identities. Some hid their Japanese culture from sight by “fold[ing] up [their] kimonos and put[ting] them away in [their] trunks and did not take them out again for years” (Otsuka, 2001, p. 54), or by ‘putting their Buddha statues in the attic’, as the title of the novel suggests.

Of course, not all Japanese picture brides wanted to assimilate and held on strongly to their Japanese culture in little ways. Many women found comfort in J-Towns which