Download e-book for kindle: Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World by Christine R. Yano

In 1955 Pan American international airlines begun recruiting eastern American girls to paintings as stewardesses on its Tokyo-bound flights and finally its round-the-world flights besides. established in Honolulu, those girls have been informally often called Pan Am’s “Nisei”—second-generation eastern Americans—even notwithstanding now not them all have been eastern American or second-generation. They have been ostensibly employed for his or her Japanese-language abilities, yet few spoke jap fluently. This soaking up account of Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardess application means that the japanese American (and later different Asian and Asian American) stewardesses have been intended to augment the airline’s photo of unique cosmopolitanism and worldliness. As its company documents show, Pan Am advertised itself as an iconic American corporation pioneering new frontiers of race, language, and tradition. Christine R. Yano juxtaposes the airline’s concepts and practices with the reminiscences of former “Nisei” flight attendants. In interviews with the writer, those ladies proudly keep in mind their studies as younger ladies who left domestic to shuttle the globe with Pan American international airlines, forging their very own cosmopolitan identities within the strategy. Airborne Dreams is the tale of an strange body of workers application carried out by means of an American company purpose on increasing and dominating the nascent marketplace for foreign air shuttle. That application mirrored the Jet Age goals of worldwide mobility that excited postwar americans, in addition to the inequalities of gender, category, race, and ethnicity that restricted a lot of them.