Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis concentrates on how nativism, through a series of discriminatory policies over the span of fifty years, influenced the creation of the Japanese American internment camps during the Second World War. By using the experiences of the first—and second—generations of Japanese immigrants, my thesis explores how nativism supported the creation of laws meant to preserve racial homogeneity, cultural superiority, economic segregation, and national security from the Japanese immigrants living in California during the end of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century

Esta pesquisa analisou uma rede de pessoas de uma mesma família de descendentes de imigrantes originada de um encontro entre descendentes de japoneses e italianos, sendo que o objetivo da pesquisa foi estudar, sob a perspectiva da memória coletiva e das identidades culturais, os processos de construção de identidades dos sujeitos inseridos nesta rede, identidades essas examinadas em termos de sua origem migratória. Optou-se pelo método da história oral para analisar os conflitos e as negociações identitárias pelas quais passou cada membro da família, revelados através da análise das narrativas de vida de dezenove pessoas entrevistadas, que compõem três gerações da família fruto da união entre Concetta Campopiano, uma neta de imigrantes italianos, e Mituioce Sumida, um filho de imigrantes japoneses, os dois nascidos no Estado de São Paulo na década de 1920. Somou-se o fato do pesquisador ser também um membro da família, neto do casal que gerou o grupo estudado, o que acrescentou um desafio teórico-metodológico à pesquisa / This research analyzes a network of people from the same family of descendants of immigrants originated from a meeting between Italian and Japanese descendants, and the purpose of the study is to analyze, from the perspective of collective memory and cultural identity, the processes of building the identities of the subjects inserted in this group, being these identities examined in terms of their migratory origin. It was opted for the oral history method to analyze the conflicts and identity negotiations lived by each family member, revealed by the analysis of life narratives of nineteen people interviewed, who make up three generations of the studied family, as a result of the union between Concetta Campopiano, a granddaughter of Italian immigrants, and Mituioce Sumida, a son of Japanese immigrants, both born in São Paulo in the 1920s. It was added the fact that the researcher is also a family member, grandson of the couple who generated the study group, a fact that adds a theoretical - methodological research challenge