Latino/a in (Con)text : Latin-a magazine and the making of a Latino community in Japan.

Abstract

Latin American immigrants in Japan are diverse in regards to their national origin, ethnicity, cultural affiliation, and socio-economic status. Nonetheless, they possess some seemingly unifying characteristics and experiences which in the context of Japanese society can be utilized to argue for the existence of a Latino community and/or advocate for its creation. Community and ethnic minority media production provide a useful lens by which to study the articulation of Latino community and identity projects in Japan. Yet English-language scholarly accounts on Latin American immigrants in Japan have not concentrated on media production or its implications for community formation. This research project addresses the gap in the literature by focusing on the imagining of a Latina/o community in Revista Latin-a, a free Spanish-language community magazine published by a Latin American immigrant self-help group in Kobe, Japan. In order to understand how community is constructed in and through the magazine, this study makes use of the concept of ‘textual community’ (Eichhorn, 2001) as the basis for an ethnographic approach to textual analysis. Textual analysis is employed in: (a) the study of Latin-a as a media text and (b) the analysis of face-to-face and online interviews with several of the magazine’s writers. The resulting interpretation of these ‘texts’ suggests that Latin-a functions as a textual space in which Latinidad is (con)textualized and community is both realized and pursued. Thus, the aim of this study is to expand understanding of the imaginative and textual aspects of community making and Latinidad, while recognizing the distinctiveness of both in the Japanese context.