University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 6-1-2015 Community Identity in "The Granada Pioneer" Jessica P. S. Gebhard University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Linguistic Anthropology Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Gebhard, Jessica P. S., "Community Identity in "The Granada Pioneer"" (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 234. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/234 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. COMMUNITY IDENTITY IN “THE GRANADA PIONEER” __________ A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver __________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts __________ by Jessica P. S. Gebhard June 2015 Advisor: Richard Clemmer-Smith Author: Jessica P. S. Gebhard Title: COMMUNITY IDENTITY IN “THE GRANADA PIONEER” Advisor: Richard Clemmer-Smith Degree Date: June 2015 ABSTRACT My research examines how the writers of the Granada Pioneer, a newspaper published in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, used the editorial column of that publication to shape the community identity of that camp. The newspaper was published by Japanese America internees living in that camp, but their readership was composed of Japanese American internees and also non-interned non- Japanese Americans. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I found that the internee writers were using the editorial column to shape a community habitus within the internment camp while at the same time attempting to reshape the imagined community of “America” within the minds of all their readers. In addition, I found that though the internee writers were subject to administrative censorship, they were able to circumvent that censorship by reprinting editorial columns from mainstream newspapers and thus express sentiments that they themselves were not permitted to publish. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincerest thanks to my advisor, Dr. Richard Clemmer-Smith and the members of my committee, Dr. Bonnie J. Clark and Dr. Christof Demont-Heinrich. Also to the Japanese American community in Denver, whose continued support made this thesis possible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction ...................................................................................................1 Key Terms and Concepts………………………………………………………….3 Chapter Two: Background ...................................................................................................6 Historical Background............................................................................................ 6 Amache................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter Three: Theory .......................................................................................................36 Identity and Performance...................................................................................... 36 Language............................................................................................................... 44 Analysis................................................................................................................. 52 Chapter Four: Methods ......................................................................................................62 Materials .............................................................................................................. 62 Organizations ....................................................................................................... 63 Preliminary Research ............................................................................................64 Secondary Research.............................................................................................. 65 Chapter Five: Results .........................................................................................................79 The Editorial Column........................................................................................... 79 The Granada Pioneer ........................................................................................ 101 Chapter Six: Analysis ......................................................................................................107 Amache .............................................................................................................. 107 America .............................................................................................................. 112 Two Readerships ................................................................................................ 117 Chapter Seven: Discussion ..............................................................................................118 Technological Stumbling Blocks ....................................................................... 118 Significant Results ............................................................................................. 119 Self-Censorship .................................................................................................. 120 Researcher .......................................................................................................... 121 References to Previous Research ....................................................................... 123 Avenues for Further Research ............................................................................ 124 Chapter Eight: Conclusion ...............................................................................................126 References........................................................................................................................130 Primary Sources...................................................................................................130 Secondary Sources...............................................................................................131 Appendices ..................................................................................................................... 140 iv LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 Internees (Pioneer Staff?) playing cards ....................................................................27 2.2 Pioneer Staff collating an issue of the Pioneer .........................................................30 3.1 Martin’s Stratified Systems of Realization ................................................................46 3.2 Eggins and Martin’s Metafunctions and Registers of Language ...............................47 3.3 Fairclough’s Three Stages of Discourse ....................................................................58 5.1 Emotional Intensity of the Pioneer’s Editorials.......................................................100 v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION February 19, 2015 marked the 73rd anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, the document that led directly to the internment of over 120,000 people, most of them American citizens, all of them Japanese or of Japanese ancestry. The crime they shared was being the object of xenophobic paranoia. They were removed from their homes and sent to internment camps scattered throughout the United States; one of these, Amache, was in Colorado. During their time in camp some Amacheans wrote for the official camp newspaper, which was distributed both within the camp and to non- internees around the state. My research looks at how those writers manipulated and curated the contents of the editorial column to shape the camp's community identity, both for the benefit of the internee readers and the non-internee readers, all whilst evading the censorial eye of the administrators that oversaw the publication. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, high-ranking officials in the American government decided that the Japanese American population on the West Coast posed a security risk to Federal installations there. In early 1942, with the authority of Executive Order 9066 behind them, the newly formed War Relocation Authority (WRA), a United States government agency systematically removed all individuals of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and interned them in camps built for that purpose. One of these camps was established outside of the small town of Granada, Colorado, and 1 though it took its official name from that town, it was colloquially known as Amache. Amache, like all of the other camps, maintained a camp newspaper; Amache's was the Granada Pioneer. Though the Pioneer was ostensibly established to disseminate local news to the internees, in reality it was closely supervised by the camp administration. My work draws primarily from anthropological and sociological theory, including the work of Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Pierre Bourdieu and Rogers Brubaker. Each of these theorists has a slightly different concept of how communities and community identities form, and each provided a different model of the ways in which community identity might have been fostered. Because there are a number of different ways in which community identity might manifest, and a number of different groups among whom it might have been fostered, I wanted to explore a number