Mexicans who had spent their lives in barrios found communicating in English essential for the better-paying jobs that opened more rapidly than Anglos could fill them. Black women who left white kitchens for assembly lines gained economic autonomy and faced new patterns of racial slights. Takaki shows how the combination of military service and war work simultaneously opened horizons and raised consciousness. Japanese-Americans get a full chapter to themselves, concluding with an analysis of Hiroshima as a manifestation of racism. It shows as well the wartime responses of a variety of ethnic and cultural communities-Mexicans, African-Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Jews and Italians.
This is by now a conventional argument that Takaki's anecdotal narrative does more to illustrate than to develop, though the book does demonstrate more clearly than ever the degree to which America in the 1940s was a white man's country, as opposed to a melting pot. A significant number of Americans fought WWII on two fronts, according to Berkeley ethicist Takaki (A Larger Memory A Different Mirror etc.): the Axis powers were one enemy the other was racism on the home front.
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