Dr Jessica Fernández de Lara Harada advances research on Japanese communities in Mexico
Photo credit: Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada
Dr Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Latin American Centre, OSGA and Faculty of History, has undertaken a series of international research activities and collaborations in Mexico and Japan, advancing her work on the histories of Japanese communities in Mexico.
Jessica's research explores the experiences of people of Japanese origin in Mexico, with a particular focus on racism, state violence, dispossession and historical memory during the Second World War.
She has recently been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City. As part of the fellowship, she coordinated a workshop exploring official archives, family histories and fragmented narratives of war, disappearance and forgetting, held at the National Archaeological Archive within Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology.
Jessica was also invited to present her research at El Colegio de México, delivering a lecture examining Mexico’s state of exception, coalitional warfare, and the treatment of people of Japanese origin in Mexico during the Second World War. Organised by the Centre for Asian and African Studies, the event brought together students and academics for discussion of her work.
Her activities in Mexico follow an extensive period of research in Japan, including archival investigations in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kyoto, alongside family and local history research in Fukuoka. She also held a Visiting Researcher position with the Institute of Political Economy at Waseda University, and was invited to give a presentation on her research titled 'Things forgotten and things remembered: The Japanese in Mexico during the Second World War'.
These activities contribute to Jessica's wider research on the transpacific histories of Mexico and Japan, including her forthcoming monograph on the war concentration system, racism and dispossession in relation to the experiences of Mexican Japanese communities.
