Japanese Mexican immigrants and their descendants suffered the consequences of World War II in concentration camps or their families destroyed by the selective detention of hundreds of men and the forced sale of their property, and deportation.
On December 7, 1941, a suicide squadron that had left Japan weeks earlier attacked Pearl Harbor. After this event, the U.S. military campaign against Japan and other Axis countries reached hundreds of Mexican citizens. There were even ivilian deaths.
This “collateral damage” took place slowly and systematically in the Mexican Republic. Japanese immigrants and their descendants suffered the consequences of World War II in various ways: some families were sent to concentration camps or designated areas in Mexico City and Guadalajara, while others were destroyed by the selective detention of hundreds of men in Perote Prison, the forced sale of their property, and deportation. This book gives a partial account of the history of the Japanese-Mexican community during World War II. However, it makes no attempt to be a historically accurate source of information. The task of narrating this story is so complex that it is necessary to incorporate interviews, legal documents, police reports, memoirs, poems, and short stories without specifying the genre, the degree of veracity, or the exact origin of the texts. All names have been changed, and while some situations are fictional, others are told in the first person by those affected to give the reader an opportunity to measure the dimensions of the human heart.
The documents that served as the basis for this book can be found at the General Archives of the Nation of Mexico and the National Archives of the United States. However, oral histories are the cornerstone of this 
text. I must inform my reader, therefore, that this story is also the work of Fidelia Takaki de Noriega, Eva Watanabe Matsuo, Rodolfo Nakamura Ortiz, the Tanaka Otsuka family, Raúl Hiromoto Yoshino, María Fujigaki Lechuga, and Susana Kobashi Sánchez, as well as the officials of various government departments who wrote the reports, memos, and certificates that appear in this volume.
Selfa A. Chew holds an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in borderlands history from the University of Texas at El Paso. She is an editor for Border Senses Literary Review. She teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso and New Mexico State University.
A moving story inserted with primary documents that
challenges the official discourse through a chorus of voices that interweave in
the life and death of the Japanese-Mexican community, especially its women.
Images, poetry, and words disseminate a unique story—Lourdes Vázquez, author of
Not Myself Without You.
Ïn Silent Herons, Selfa Chew offers us a beautiful, polyphonic testimony, and strikes a balance,
thanks to her art, among her own invention, documents, and oral histories.
Based on true events, but it doesn’t allow to be overwhelmed by them, nor does I
seem to be a mere reconstruction of the past. Materials have been placed in
their places: they are seamlessly intertwined.” —Daniel Orizaga, author
of Minuta: Ensayos sobre literatura.
Selfa Chew discover and disseminates the history of the
Japanese Mexican community that has been erased from national historiography in
order to fill the empty spaces of our history and reveal the hegemonic discourse
and artifices.”—Guadalupe Pérez-Anzaldo, University of Missouri.
This smart, spunky narrator does not walk between two worlds but creates her own path rich in imagination, familial warmth, Mexican tradition, and American popular culture.
The author introduces the reader to Pinky García, her younger self who grows up in the border city of El Paso, Texas during the early 1960s. She creates The Club Oasis, a magical world in her upstairs porch, a space in which her imagination soars with the love, encouragement and tenderness of her grandmother, mother and, particularly her father who shares Pinky’s adventures with enthusiasm, a sense of humor, playfulness and endearing enchantment. Pinky develops from a playful nine year old far beyond her years in maturity into a blossoming adolescent displaying compassion, pride in her Mexican heritage, an unwavering commitment to her family and the values they instilled in her: respect and love for family, particularly her father, a fierce independence and belief in the power of education and the confidence to believe in herself while always maintaining a spirit of adventure and a sense of humor.