“What’s cooking, good looking? How art thou?”

Lillian Igasaki greeted her friend Mollie Wilson in a letter dated March 31, 1944. At the time, Wilson was a student at UCLA. Igasaki was incarcerated at Manzanar, one of ten Japanese concentration camps located in the western interior of the United States. Lillian was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 mandating the forcible removal of all residents of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.

Mollie Wilson, an African American teenager, and Lillian Igasaki grew up together in Boyle Heights, a multiracial, working-class Los Angeles neighborhood consisting of African American, Mexican American, Jewish, and Japanese American families. Unlike most American cities, residents of Boyle Heights interacted regularly with one another at local businesses, schools, and parks. When Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, Boyle Heights was transformed, and Mollie and Lillian’s world was forever altered.1 The changes wrought by the war differed greatly across racial lines. While the Japanese were forced into incarceration camps, their Black, Mexican, and Jewish neighbors experienced an increase in labor opportunities. Despite these differences, Mollie and Lillian stayed in touch.

Most of the letters between Mollie and her incarcerated friends describe the life of an ordinary American teenager during World War II. They wrote about school, dating, movies, and food. Seemingly mundane, these letters illustrate the importance of interracial friendship during wartime incarceration. For the incarcerated, maintaining contact with friends was a means of survival, a lifeline to the outside world. For those on the outside, maintaining friendship with the incarcerated was a show of solidarity and a condemnation of the injustice the Japanese were forced to endure.

Their letters never explicitly address the wartime racial regime in which they lived. But their silence was likely intentional. Letters coming in and out of the camps were examined by an incarcerated worker, and the WRA had full authority to examine any incoming or outgoing mail deemed suspect. Mollie and Lillian’s silence could be read as an expression of opposition. As scholar Catherine Ramírez explains, “Silence, too, can express opposition, especially when it comes from someone whose speech is overdetermined by the fact that she has already been spoken for and about.”2 Lillian was one of the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had already been spoken for and about when Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

Sandie Saito, another of Mollie’s friends, was more vocal. She complained about coerced labor:

“They have a big project here in camp making camouflage nets for the army. Kids that are sixteen and over (including me) are being drafted to work in the kitchen or as a camouflage worker. Man! They could go somewhere if they think I’m going to work in that hot sun and break my back. What do they think we are anyway?”

She also described the humiliation of visitations monitored by armed soldiers:

“When someone comes to visit you at the gate you have to talk real loud because they don’t let you get close to them. The soldiers walk right in between you too. You say a couple of words and then a soldier walked by.”

Sandie closed her letter with a stick figure illustration showing the two friends attempting a visit under the watchful eyes of three armed guards, a seemingly playful gesture that captures the deep violation young Japanese American women felt during incarceration.

Mollie and Lillian’s friendship counters the assumption that political solidarity exists only in formal organizing and coalition-building. As their correspondence shows, solidarity also exists in private relationships. In the context of World War II, with heightened racial hysteria sweeping the country, aligning with America’s so-called “enemy alien” was an inherently political act for Mollie. For Japanese Americans who were told in explicit and implicit ways to assimilate into white — not Black — American society, maintaining friendships across racial lines was itself an act of defiance. Mollie and Lillian’s friendship refused the racial order on both sides of the barbed wire.

On International Women’s Day, I share Mollie and Lillian’s story as a reminder that feminist solidarity is not only built in movements and marches. It is built in the bonds we make with others, bonds that are forged across difference, not despite it.

This post draws on my chapter “Interracial Friendship Across Barbed Wire: Mollie Wilson and Lillian Igasaki,” published in Black Transnationalism and Japan, and is part of my current book project. The letters are held in the Mollie Wilson Murphy Collection at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles.

Midori Kawamura stands on the steps of what was likely her assigned barrack. Her smile is warm, and her posture is composed yet relaxed. Her button-down blouse neatly tucked into her high-waisted slacks suggests a deliberate effort to look put together. Her clothes and jewelry were most likely a gift from her boyfriend, Emil. Her appearance belies her confinement in a remote part of the Utah desert. At twenty-two, her face still has a youthful roundness, though she has already given birth three times. The inscription on the photo reads, “To my darling husband Emil,” but in truth, she was married to another man. The image was taken at Topaz, one of the ten incarceration camps that contained Japanese Americans during World War II.

When I first heard Midori’s story, I was immediately intrigued. She had resisted the evacuation order by running away with her boyfriend. Six months later, she was caught and sent to Topaz. She was pregnant for the third time in her young life. She relinquished custody of the baby and disappeared.

Midori lived a life of secrets and subversion. We can learn a lot from her, and yet I have struggled to tell her story. I can’t find a rhythm, or even a place to start.

How do I tell Midori’s story?

Her story involves many people whose lives overlap yet are distinct, each with their own story, and each needs to be cared for in their own way. She had four sons, the first died in infancy, and the others didn’t know about each other until well into old age.

How do I tell Midori’s story when it’s not my story to tell?

Though I find myself a part of it, I’m an outsider. Warmly welcomed by her children and grandchildren, but still an outsider.

How do I tell Midori’s story, when what little we know about her suggests she never wanted her story to be told?

Her family, especially her youngest son, Dale, needs answers.

Do I honor the wishes of the living, and betray the wishes of the dead?

Dale assures me that Midori would’ve eventually wanted her story to be told.

On a rainy Friday evening in February 2025, I came across an Instagram post promoting a talk at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose about the history of Japantown to be held the following day. Though I study and teach Japanese American history and live in San Jose, I didn’t know much about the local Nikkei community at the time. I decided to go.

On the panel were local historians Curt Fukuda and Robert Ragsac, who discussed the experiences of the local Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities. Like similar enclaves across the US, the history of San Jose’s Japantown was characterized by violence, ethnic succession, and perseverance.

Towards the end of the discussion, they shared the story of their dear friend, “Pinky.”

Pinky was born Eugene Reintar in Topaz in February 1943, to a Japanese American mother, Midori, and a Filipino father named Emil Reintar. Eugene never knew his mother. Midori relinquished custody to Emil when Eugene was an infant. At the time of Eugene’s birth, Midori was married to John Murokita and had a young son, Richard. Eugene grew up in San Jose’s Japantown, raised by a single father and a community of family, friends, and neighbors.

When Midori arrived at Topaz in August 1942, she was pregnant with Eugene. Six months earlier, FDR had issued an executive order that ordered all people of Japanese descent on the West Coast to be “relocated” to camps in the western interior. Instead of obeying the order, Midori ran away with Emil, her lover.

Fukuda and Ragsac explained that they had spent years trying to find out what happened to Midori. Records showed she was released from Topaz in 1943 and relocated to Ottumwa, Iowa. They scoured the internet and inquired into Ottumwa city archives, but Midori seemed to vanish after the war.

Intrigued, I introduced myself and offered to help. My first thought was to check with the Japanese American Service Committee (JASC) in Chicago, where many Japanese Americans had passed through after the war. But before contacting them, I decided to search online for Midori’s Obituary. Within minutes, I found it. Midori Tateiwa, born Kawamura, died in December 1969. She was survived by her husband, Ed, and son, Dale.

Who were Ed and Dale Tateiwa?

I asked Fukuda and Ragsac about Ed and Dale–they had never heard of them. Days later, I spoke to Eugene on the phone. He was warm, friendly, and an instant kindred spirit. I shared my findings, and he was grateful but stunned. Eugene had spent his life wondering about his mother, and now he had an answer, though many questions remained and new ones sprang up. He also had two brothers, one of whom he never knew existed.

Next, I searched for Dale Tateiwa. After dead-end calls and emails (including one to a confused man named Daisuke Tateiwa), I turned to Midori’s other son, Richard Murokita, born in 1940. I found a few phone numbers in the white pages and decided to give them a try. The first number I dialed was his.

After spending a few minutes walking him through how I got involved in this matter, he exclaimed, “You found Eugene? You need to talk to my brother, Dale. He has been searching for Eugene for years.”

—

“For 65 years, I thought I was an only child,” Dale told me during our first conversation in early spring, 2025. It was a chilly evening when we finally connected over the phone. We had been playing phone tag all day, caught in the sixteen-hour time difference between Japan and California. Sitting at my dining room table while my family prepared for bedtime, the house at its quietest, Dale began to tell me his story.

Dale Masami Tateiwa was born in San Francisco in 1952 to Midori and Ed Tateiwa. He had always believed he was his parents’ only child. Until 2017, when his maternal cousin discovered a postcard Midori had written to her younger sister, Mitsui, from Topaz. The postcard revealed a past Dale never knew about. He knew his mother had been incarcerated during World War II, but he thought she was detained at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, where her parents and siblings had been imprisoned. He was puzzled. So Dale and his cousin began digging into Midori’s past. What they uncovered upended the world as he knew it. They learned she had been married to a man named John Murokita and had given birth to a son, Richard, in 1940. Moreover, they learned that Midori had given birth to a baby boy named Eugene in 1943 while imprisoned at Topaz, but John, her husband, was not the father of baby Eugene.

Not only was Dale not an only child, but his mother had been married before his father. The news blew him away. Midori passed away in 1969, and his father, Ed, died years later, leaving Dale with no one to answer the questions that now haunted him day and night. With the help of his cousins, Dale pieced together more of the story. Midori, born in Los Angeles in 1921, married John Murokita in 1940 and gave birth to a baby named Richard. In 1942, she entered Topaz and gave birth to another son, Eugene, in 1943. Soon after learning about his older brother, Richard, Dale flew to Los Angeles to meet him. The two brothers—in their 70s and 80s—have grown incredibly close. They email daily and have weekly Zoom calls on Sunday. Dale, who lives in Japan with his wife, Shoko, visits Richard in Los Angeles at least once a year.

Yet one mystery remained: Where was Eugene, the baby born in Topaz?

They searched tirelessly, even placing a newspaper ad seeking “Eugene Murokita,” but they were looking for the wrong person—Eugene wasn’t a Murokita. He was a Reintar.

Days later, Richard, Eugene, and Dale connected by telephone. They shared stories, memories, and bits of information about their mother that they had uncovered over the years. Midori is a mystery to her sons. They immediately made plans to meet in Los Angeles the next month. They asked me to be there, but I had plans to go camping with my family that weekend. Besides, this is a private moment, and it would be better if I were not there. That weekend, I had no cell phone service while camping. When I arrive back at home, my phone pings with messages from Eugene, Dale, and Eugene’s daughter Allyson, with whom I have also friended. She sends me a photo of all three brothers. They are united—finally whole.

When she died in 1991, my grandmother left me an oak desk, but I wouldn’t know this until decades later. Her demise came swiftly, and so did the unraveling of our family. I watched my mom and her sisters fall apart. Their wails frightened me, as did their fighting. Moments after she took her last breath, I heard one sister say, “What am I going to do without her?” as she collapsed into another’s arm. I was eleven and didn’t yet have the language to describe what I felt, but today I’d call it foreboding. Perhaps it was the upheaval that came after that that has shaped my memory. My mom and her four sisters bickered over everything. Soon after my grandmother passed, the oldest daughter, or maybe it was the fourth daughter, it depends on who you talk to, dashed to her apartment and took many of her belongings, including the oak desk my grandmother had saved for me.

Our family seemed to fall apart when my grandmother died. In some strange way, my work as a historian has tried to put it back together by making sense of our lives.

My maternal grandmother, Michiko Ikeda, was born in the fall of 1932 in Amagasaki City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan– an industrial port city next to Osaka. In December 1941, when she was nine years old, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, then a U.S. territory, and shortly after, the U.S. entered World War II. Between February and August of 1945, the U.S. carried out an intense bombing campaign in Osaka, the second-largest city in Japan after Tokyo. Michiko was a few months shy of her 13th birthday during the airstrikes. My mother remembers her telling the story of how she had been walking home from school when the bombs began to fall. The kids, frightened, all scattered, running for safety. My grandmother didn’t describe what came next, or what she saw. Maybe she couldn’t, or didn’t remember, or maybe she didn’t want her children to carry the weight of it. Though the trauma would live on regardless of if it was spoken of or not. Michiko survived, while more than 100,000 Japanese civilians perished. Later that same year, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender in September 1945.

With the war’s end came the Allied Occupation. Thousands of U.S. military troops and civilian personnel flooded Japan. In 1948, when she was 17 years old, Michiko left her parents’ home in Amagasaki City. Against her father’s wishes, she headed to the city of Nara to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. What else was she to do? If she stayed, she’d spend her days working in her parents' small Okonomiyaki stall, serving the same dish to the same locals daily. It was routine–likely welcomed by many after the chaos of the war. But Michiko didn’t want routine. She wanted to sing. As the eldest daughter, she had a duty to her parents and younger siblings, but she also felt the pull of Nara. She wanted to sing, and in Nara, there were plenty of opportunities for her to do just that. In Nara, there were American men with money to spend. They loved to dance, and she loved to sing.

In Nara, she sang in a club that catered to American GIs. She was fond of Futaba Akiko, a famous Japanese songstress of the war years. Although my grandmother’s raspy voice smoothed when she sang, she likely couldn't hit the high notes Akiko was known for. It was in Nara where she met my grandfather, Louis Olivares, a Mexican American GI from Texas. Louis was born the same year as Michiko, in San Angelo, Texas — a small town in West Texas. Shortly after they met, they married and had one daughter. In 1954, they left Japan for the United States, where Michiko gave birth to four more daughters -– my mother is the youngest. By 1963, they settled in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, hoping to land on their feet after a rough patch in Texas. Los Angeles was “ the global meeting place located at the historical intersection of Asia, and Latin America,” as historian Yu Tokunaga explains, making it an ideal place to raise their Mexican and Japanese daughters.

But their hopes were dashed when my grandfather died in 1965 in a tragic workplace accident, making Michiko a thirty-two-year-old widow with five daughters. My grandmother worked two, sometimes three, jobs – mostly at Japanese restaurants in the San Fernando Valley. Her tribe of fatherless girls was left to fend for themselves and they were always getting into some kind of trouble. When my grandmother got sick, she was living in an apartment complex in Canoga Park located in the San Fernando Valley, which she also managed. The residents were mostly Latinos from Mexico and Central America, and though my grandmother was Japanese, she felt at home among them. As the wife of a Mexican American, she had spent much of her life in the U.S. living in Latino communities.

Michiko was one of thousands of Japanese war brides who married American GIs after WWII and immigrated to the U.S. These women began arriving in 1947, just two years after the war's end. At the time, Japanese nationals were barred from entering the U.S. under the 1924 National Origins Act, which excluded Asian immigrants. The 1945 GI Brides Act allowed foreign wives of U.S. servicemen to immigrate—but initially excluded Japanese women. Only later did Congress pass the Alien Brides Act, which allowed a limited number of Japanese women to enter.

By the time Michiko met Louis, immigration restrictions were slowly lifting. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, easing some barriers for Asian migrants. When Michiko and her oldest daughter arrived, their admission was remarkably easy compared to those who came a few years before. While U.S. officials claimed these changes stemmed from American liberalism, they were also driven by the demands of military empire. My grandmother and the thousands of women like her are the subject of my first book.

My grandmother was a fierce presence in my life. Her small frame–no more than five feet tall –and thick accent belied her fiery spirit, and as my mom likes to say, “she didn’t take sh*t from anyone.” She was also incredibly intuitive, a gift I like to think she passed down to me. This summer, as I began to work on my second book in earnest, I marvel at how far I’ve come. Growing up I never imagined that one day I would write a book (let alone a second), but it seems my grandmother did. She recognized my potential long before I did. Though I never received the oak desk she intended for me, she gave me something else: a reason to write.

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Before Luigi Mangione, there was Giuseppe Zangara.

In 1933, Zangara, an Italian immigrant, attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Driven by a lifetime of pain and a deep resentment of capitalism, Zangara was sentenced to death for his actions. Nearly a century later, Luigi Mangione, a third-generation Italian American, is on trial for the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Though separated by time and circumstance, their actions are connected by a history of Italian American resistance to capitalist exploitation—a history that is almost all but forgotten.

Aside from their Italian origins, Zangara and Mangione share many qualities. While one is a convicted assassin; the other is a suspected assassin. Both hold political views that seem to baffle their contemporaries. Both publicly expressed an anti-capitalist position. Both lived with debilitating pain. While almost a century separates these two men, the America that Zangara lived in resembles America today: The gap between rich and poor is wide and growing. Corporations reap ungodly profits while many Americans are scrambling to get by. Stark inequality drove Zangara to violence and it is, allegedly, what drove Mangione as well.

At the height of the Great Depression, Zangara attempted to assassinate President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt but missed and instead struck five others including Anton Cermak, mayor of Chicago, who died weeks later from his injuries. The attempted assassination took place as the country was eagerly awaiting the arrival of a new administration. In 1932, the year FDR was elected, unemployment reached 24%, and millions lived in poverty. Today wage stagnation and the rising cost of living have created a “silent depression” for many working-class Americans. The top 1% now control more wealth than the bottom 90%, mirroring the disparities of Zangara’s time.

The similarities between Zangara and Mangione grew as folks speculated that Mangione might have been radicalized by back pain caused by a surfing accident. Zangara was also radicalized by pain. During his trial, Zangara testified that for years he had experienced intense abdomen pain after being sent to work on his father’s farm at the age of six. The pain “tormented him like fire for the rest of his life,” described The New Yorker in a 1954 profile of Zangara titled, “The Long Stomach Ache.”^[1] His chronic pain forced him to live an austere life devoid of pleasure. He didn’t smoke, drink alcohol, or spend money foolishly.

Giuseppe Zangara, known as Joe, was born in Italy in 1900, and immigrated to the United States in 1923. He settled in Paterson, New Jersey, “an anarchist haven,” as historian Marcella Bencivenni has described, near an uncle and worked as a bricklayer.^[2] Investigators believed that Zangara was not politically motivated because he was a registered Republican, not a socialist or anarchist, they concluded. The media portrayed him as a deranged “little Italian immigrant,” “swarthy,” and “pop-eyed” reflecting the anti-Italian sentiment of the time.^[3] Though Zangara may not have been a formal member of a political organization his views mirrored the Italian American Left of Paterson of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Yet, Zangara was anti-capitalist. During his trial, He lamented:

“The Capitalist…keep the money from my father…and my father send me to work, and I have no school, and I have trouble with my stomach…since my stomach hurt, I get even with the capitalist by killing the president.”^[4]

Italian American radicalism began with the mass migration of Italians at the end of the 19^th century. Among the millions who entered the US seeking economic opportunities were a significant number of anarchists escaping political repression laying the foundation for a vibrant, loosely connected, network of radical groups. Though many Italian immigrants arrived in the United States with political convictions shaped in the old country, many became radicalized by the poor working and living conditions they encountered in the US.^[5] They turned to circolis, radical circles that formed in Italian immigrant communities in New Jersey and New York. According to historian Jennifer Guglielmo, these groups circulated reading material, published newspapers in Italian, provided mutual aid, organized dances, festivals, and lectures. Most of these circles were small but in Paterson participation was in the thousands. Woman also played a significant role in the circles and organized auxiliary groups that were critical of capitalism, the church, and the patriarchal family structure.^[6]Many members of the radical circles identified as anarchists, anarchist-communist, revolutionary socialist, and anarchist-syndicalists. Some, like Luigi Galleani who ran the Cronaca Sovversiva—An Italian American anarchist periodical—endorsed political violence as a form of resistance to power.^[7] Galleani, however, was not alone in his embrace of violence. In 1900, Gaetano Bresci, an Italian man who had spent time in Paterson before returning to Italy, assassinated King Umberto of Italy. The murder of Umberto was one of many high-profile assassinations committed by Italian radicals at the turn of the 20^th century and although most of the perpetrators acted alone, they were rooted in a broader movement of militant Italian American radicals.^[8]

By the early 20^th century, Italian Americans had become deeply involved in labor union organizing, playing key roles in significant strikes in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Minnesota. Italian American labor organizing was particularly prominent in Paterson, where groups such as Il Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza (The Right to Existence Group), committed to anarchist and syndicalist ideologies, actively opposed capitalist exploitation. The group was affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and actively participated in the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike.^[9] Italian American radicalism was a political disposition, but it was also cultural. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940, Bencivenni shows how their politics were shaped by ethnic identity, the immigrant experience, a commitment to working class revolution, and an internationalist worldview.^[10] However, World War I and the subsequent Red Scare brought intense state repression of radical movements. The 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—followers of Luigi Galleani—delivered a fatal blow to the movement.^[11] Despite this, Italian American radicalism remained influential until World War II. By the time Zangara arrived in Paterson, radical organizing was beginning to wane but was still a significant part of the lives of poor and working-class Italian American communities. In the 1930s and 40s, a new generation of radicals joined the Communist Party.^[12] Much of this rich history of revolutionary activism in the Italian American community has been lost or forgotten over the years.

Ninety-one years after Zangara attempted to assassinate FDR, during another crisis of capitalism, while Americans anxiously awaited the transition to a second Trump term, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered in broad daylight on a NYC street. But while Americans were eager for FDR to take office, hoping he would pull the country out of the Depression, many Americans were bracing for the worst when Thompson was killed. Thompson was no FDR, to be sure. But he symbolized the wanton greed of the corporate class. UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, is the largest health carrier in the US. In 2022, UnitedHealth Group made over $20 billion in profit, the most of any healthcare insurer. In his manifesto, Mangione decried that corporations are “too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit,” echoing Giuseppe Zangara’s frustration with capitalist greed almost a century earlier.

Though Zangara chose FDR as his victim out of convenience, he had hoped that by assassinating FDR, he would bring about a new system of governance free from capitalist rule, where all are born truly equal. After being sent to work on his father’s farm as a small child, Zangara never returned to school. He resented being deprived of an education until his dying day. In Zangara’s perfect world “the children of the capitalist make no difference,” education would be for all, he explained. Zangara’s political beliefs reflected the anarchist-communist ideology popular in Italian American radical circles that advocated for an end to capitalism and the creation of an egalitarian society free from state rule.^[13]

Zangara was also “chronically resentful of authority,” apparently a disposition he inherited from his father, the New Yorker noted.^[14]

Zangara’s abdomen pain was debilitating. He was in too much pain to be physically intimate and preferred to live alone. Reportedly, Mangione’s pain also prevented him from being intimate. Though pain was enough to cause both men to forgo intimacy, that alone does not explain Zangara’s actions and Mangione’s alleged actions. Besides time, there is much that sets Zangara and Mangione apart. The two men come from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds–one poor and uneducated, the other highly educated and wealthy. One was an Italian immigrant, the other a third generation Italian American. Both men primarily operated outside of formal political organizations. Instead, they were radicalized by their personal struggles with physical pain and contempt for capitalism in a world of immense inequality and growing political divisions. Zangara and Mangione’s—alleged—actions were not necessarily part of the “propaganda of the deed,” as the evidence available doesn’t suggest they sought to spark a revolution, though they each had hoped to call attention to the failings of capitalism.

While Zangara denied direct political influence, his actions echoed the ethos of Italian American anarchists who saw violence as a legitimate response to oppression. Mangione, though removed from this history by generations, seems to have inherited a similar political worldview.

In both cases, authorities emphasized that they acted alone failing to see how such actions were part of a longer history of Italian American radicalism and widespread criticism of capitalism. When Giuseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate FDR, he was acting upon this history in which political violence was a necessary means to an end. Was Luigi Mangione doing the same?

Zangara, a poor immigrant with little education, and Mangione, a wealthy third-generation Italian American, came from vastly different worlds. Yet both were driven by a shared belief that capitalism had failed them and others. Zangara was sentenced to death for the murder of Cermak and attempted murder of Roosevelt. Though he was encouraged to plead insanity, he refused. Before his execution he reportedly shouted, “I no scared of electric chair…All capitalist lousy bunch of crooks!” After he was executed, Zangara’s brain was studied by a psychologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who found it “perfectly normal.” However, his gall bladder was covered in lesions which was likely the cause of his pain. Authorities concluded, stomach pain was Zangara’s motive.^[15]

Zangara and Mangione’s—alleged—use of violence raises difficult questions about political resistance. Can violence ever be a legitimate response to economic oppression? As we grapple with today’s vast economic inequalities, we must come to terms with the fact the acts of violence like those of Zangara and—allegedly–Mangione, are evidence that capitalism is an economic and moral failure.

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^[1] Robert J. Donovan, “Annals of Crime: The Long Stomach Ache,” The New Yorker, Nov 27, 1954: 108.

^[2] Marcella Bencivenni, “Fired by Ideal: Italian Anarchists in New York City, 18802-1920s,” in Tom Goyens (ed.), Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street (Oxford University Press, 2017), 55.

^[3] The Ada Weekly News, March 13, 1933; The Indianapolis Star, February 17, 1933.

^[4] Donovan, “The Long Stomach Ache,” 108.

^[5] Bencivenni, “Fired by Ideal,” 57-58.

^[6] Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945(University of North Carolina Press 2010) 142.

^[7] Bencivenni, “Fired by Ideal,” 62.

^[8] Bencivenni, “Fired by Ideal,” 68.

^[9] Salvatore Salerno, “No God, No Master: Italian Anarchists and the Industrial Workers of the World,” In The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, Phillip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer, eds (Praeger Publishers, 2003), 172-181.

^[10] Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (New York University Press, 2011), 3.

^[11] Michael Miller Topp. Those Without Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 263.

^[12] Topp, Those Without Country, 264.

^[13] Bencivenni, “Fired by Ideal,” 61.

^[14] Donovan, “The Long Stomach Ache,” 110.

^[15] The Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1934.

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Back in 1942, we disappeared.

Empty chairs in the classroom,

empty homes, shops, and farms.

America turned their backs on us.

No one marched, no one protested,

there were no petitions, there was no outrage.

- Ina Satsuki

On February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the forced removal and incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. Eighty-three years later, we are confronted with similar anti-immigrant policies, unless we raise our voices and our fists in opposition, we risk repeating a dark period in American history.

Mary Murakami was an ordinary American teenager. On Thursday, February 19, 1942, she woke up, dressed, and headed to school. But on that fateful day, President Roosevelt issued the order that would transform Mary’s life forever. Mary, her parents, and four younger siblings were uprooted from their homes and imprisoned in desolate camps for the remainder of World War II.

In the months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hysteria swept the nation and the West Coast specifically. In Los Angeles, where Mary lived, Mayor Fletcher Bowron proclaimed that Los Angeles was “sitting on top of a volcano.” “Both alien and American-born Japanese must go,” he decried. Bowron suggested, as the Los Angeles Times, and many politicians and community leaders did at the time, that the Japanese be removed and relocated “several hundred miles inland … so they can do no harm.”

Today, similar rhetoric is directed at immigrants from Latin America. They are portrayed as threats to national security. But just as the perceived threat from Japanese Americans was rooted in racism rather than reality, so too are the claims against today’s immigrant communities. Data consistently shows that immigration does not lead to increased crime.

Within a few months of the order, Mary and her family were confined into a two-room barrack at the Poston incarceration camp located on the Colorado River Indian Reservation near Yuma, Arizona. Poston was one of the ten incarceration camps. It was also the largest detaining 18,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and one of two on American Indian Reservations.

Life in Poston was harsh and dehumanizing. Mary wrote to a friend that the camp was hot, dusty, and cramped. The latrines and showers had no privacy, there was no hot water, and the water they did have wreaked and made everyone sick. Meals were served three times a day, and hungry families would start forming a line an hour and a half before each meal. “Everything is muddy. My hair is even muddy…And my face is all sunburned,” Mary lamented.

“Just the same, there's no place like home.” She wrote.

For Mary and thousands of other young Japanese Americans, incarceration disrupted their lives, high school dreams, and hopes for the future. Though camp life was degrading for all, for young people on the cusp of adulthood incarceration was a special kind of suffering, as they were forced to come of age under the constant surveillance of armed guards.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was the legal basis of incarceration. The law grants the president sweeping powers to detain and deport citizens and non-citizens alike during times of war. Weaponized against Japanese Americans in the 20th century, the law remains a threat today.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States that the incarceration of Japanese Americans constituted “the legalization of racism.” Five years later, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which formally apologized for incarceration, provided reparations to survivors, and established an education fund to ensure that this history would not be forgotten. Yet, despite this reckoning, the Alien Enemies Act remains on the books, and its potential for abuse is as dangerous as ever.

Last month, President Donald Trump announced his intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport immigrants en masse. This marks a dangerous escalation in anti-immigrant policies. If invoked it could target individuals based on race, ethnicity, and national origin. Such actions not only violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but also threaten to normalize the same discriminatory practices that led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

But rather than concede to the president's anti-immigrant agenda–or worse, support it, as Mayor Bowren once did, we must vigorously oppose such policies. Let’s not turn our backs, as so many Americans did in 1942, on the vulnerable.

Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) have introduced the Neighbors Not Enemies Act which calls for the full repeal of the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act. To ensure we don’t repeat this dark history, contact your elected representatives and express your support for the Neighbors Not Enemies Act.

Let us fight for the Mary Murakamis whose story is yet to be written.

For my next book, Dear Mollie, I am writing about Mollie, Sandie, and their many friends who maintained girlhood bonds despite being separated by thousands of miles and barbed wire. Their story reminds us that even in the darkest times, friendship can be a lifeline of hope, love, and solidarity.

On this day of love, let us celebrate the friendships that bring meaning to our lives, because as Mollie and Sandie show us, friendship is a testament to the power of solidarity in challenging times.

In his first public address as Vice President, J.D. Vance stood before a national pro-life rally and declared his desire to see “more babies born in the United States of America.”1 Just days earlier, President Trump signed an executive order denying citizenship to babies born to mothers in the U.S. unlawfully or temporarily. The order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” applies to children born after February 19, 2025—effectively targeting the unborn and newborns alike. The following day, the administration announced that federal immigration officers would now be allowed to enter schools, churches, and hospitals—spaces once considered sanctuaries. Trump’s policies aim to punish immigrant reproduction whereas Vance’s policies aim to reward white reproduction.

These policies are a modern iteration of a century-old effort to preserve white dominance in America. In 1920, California State Senator James Phelan, the son of Irish immigrants, ran a campaign ad that read: “Save Our State from Oriental Aggression…Keep California White.”2 Phelan and his allies weaponized Japanese birth rates, accusing Japanese women of threatening the white majority. Academics, politicians, and Catholic clergy echoed these fears, warning of “white race suicide” and blaming declining white birthrates on women’s growing independence. Cornell University economist Walter Francis Wilcox even predicted that white babies would disappear by 2015. While Wilcox’s prediction was laughably wrong, the myth of white decline continues to fuel anti-immigrant and pro-life policies today.

Today, the targets have shifted from Japanese immigrants to Latinos. To be sure, Trump and his allies have vilified immigrants from across the globe, but they are especially obsessed with curbing immigration from Latin America—particularly Mexico and Venezuela. By restricting abortion access and encouraging Americans to make more babies, they seek to control the reproductive choices of some women. By denying citizenship to children of immigrants and targeting schools for ICE raids, they aim to erase the future of Latino families. These policies are not isolated but part of a broader strategy to “Make America White Again.”

But Vance’s pro-natalist position is complicated by the fact that he is married to Usha Vance, an Indian American woman, and his children are, therefore, both Indian and white. In his worldview, then, the children born to white fathers and Asian American women fall into the category of Americans he wishes to see more of. Again, such logic harkens back to the treatment of Japanese Americans.

In 1942, when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in makeshift camps, authorities drafted a policy that allowed the children of white fathers and Japanese mothers to leave camp and return to their homes on the West Coast. These children were believed to be white because it was presumed that white fathers raised their children in white environments. “By contrast,” historian Paul Spickard explains, “mixed children who had white mothers and Japanese fathers could leave the camps, but they could not go home.” These families would have to relocate away from the West Coast because, according to authorities, they posed a threat to national security if allowed in the West. Under this policy, racial belonging was inherited from the father. This construction of whiteness is based on a particular race and gender pairing that resonates with the likes of Vance.

As a woman of Mexican and Japanese heritage these policies feel personal. As a historian, I am haunted by the echoes from the past. We must resist and fight for a future where every child—regardless of race, ethnicity, or birthplace—is valued. The fight for reproductive justice, immigrant rights, and racial equality is one and the same. It is a fight for the future of this nation.

This Substack will feature periodic short think pieces that offer provocative takes on history while drawing connections to the present. The need to understand how the past shapes our contemporary world has never felt more urgent, and History Hot Takes is my contribution to the broader public discourse about the world we all live in.

In addition to historical hot takes, I’ll share reflections on my research journey as I work on my second book.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know if I can sustain a Substack long-term. My Gemini tendencies will likely lead me to new projects, but, until then…

Please read, subscribe, and share—and see where this goes.

What historical parallels have you been thinking about lately? Let me know in the comments!

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