Transpacific Rhizomatic Migration in Kyoung H. Park’s Mina: Settler Desire and Identity Formation in Korean-Latin American Literature in the U.S.

The Korean diaspora to the United States is a phenomenon that has long been analyzed for its sociocultural, political, and economic implications. However, generally ignored by scholarship of frameworks such as the transpacific is Korean-Latin American remigration to the United States. Korean migration to Latin America and this group’s subsequent migration to the US was motivated largely by economic factors such as the availability of Latin American agricultural labor in the mid-1960s and the growth of Korean-American professional communities during the 1980s. Situating this migration in a transpacific framework improves our understanding of settler colonial desire and identity formation. I analyze the short play Mina by Kyoung H. Park, a work that draws upon the author’s personal experience, as a cultural/literary documentation of this phenomenon. Using textual evidence, I argue that settler colonial desires are rooted deep within the overlapping effects of imperialism in this complex migration pattern.