Dialogues at a Distance: Advances in Research on the Japanese Community in the Northwestern Region of Buenos Aires Province (2015-2025)

Abstract

This research progress report brings together aspects that emerged within the framework of our three PITTS-PAID projects conducted in collaboration with the Sarmiento Japanese Association, founded in 1937. The collaboration dates back eight years, to the moment when we devoted a specific chapter to Asian migrations in the region (Castiglione, 2019). Based on forty in-depth interviews carried out to date, participant observation at numerous events, and extensive fieldwork, two thematic lines have emerged more distinctly, encompassing nearly all aspects of community life: work—particularly in nurseries focused on floriculture—and dialogue with Japan. Both dimensions intersect and evolve over time, shaping the processes of identity reproduction, such as language acquisition, potential returns, and associative organization, which are further strengthened through sports and festive activities.

Our current project, entitled “Objects, Practices, and Images: Social Representations and Histories of the Japanese Community and Their Descendants in José C. Paz,” seeks to revalue personal archives and collective memory while deepening Shinji Hirai’s (2015) ethnographic approach to objects as storytellers—an element that recurrently surfaces in the interviews conducted within domestic spaces. Accordingly, the relationship with objects linked to migratory trajectories, and their tracing throughout family histories, constitute a sort of personal museum within each household. These museums display items brought during the initial arrival and subsequent journeys, gifts, and objects acquired in the host society (awards, certificates, newspaper appearances, etc.), all of which provide a meaningful lens through which to challenge conventional narratives of “success” and social mobility that often dominate this type of retrospective account.