I appreciated Drewski’s appraisal of Identities Matter. He raises a few important critiques, particularly of the qualitative interview analysis in the fourth chapter, “Leveraging Identities in Brazil.” These critiques are well taken, but they also reflect some of the difficulties of carrying out interviews with rank-and-file respondents who are not accustomed to answering, or oftentimes even thinking about, questions related to their ethnic heritages, racial identities, or political attitudes and behaviors. Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and the devastating impact that the pandemic had on Brazil, it was also not possible to follow through with initial plans to return to Brazil for additional fieldwork to attempt to get more elaborate answers before completion of the writing of the book manuscript. This additional fieldwork would have perhaps allowed for a fuller discussion of how the difference in the social identity category that Japanese Brazilians and Jewish Brazilians emphasize and mobilize politically matters.

The decision to organize the open-ended qualitative responses into categories was intended to provide a visual overview of the responses for the reader, particularly those who are more accustomed to reading quantitative scholarship in political science, rather than to quantify the responses in an analytical manner. However, due to the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph, the full qualitative answers that were available did not always provide enough substance that could be subjectively interpreted at a very deep level. Thus, in these instances, these quantitative summaries were still able to provide some insight into the experiences and beliefs of the interviewees. Despite these difficulties with qualitative fieldwork, I believe that this fourth chapter provides an important component to understanding the leveraging of the identities of Japanese Brazilians and Jewish Brazilians. This chapter methodologically balances the one it follows that engages statistical analysis of government survey data to evaluate how Jewish Brazilians and Japanese Brazilians identify racially and the determinants of racial identity. Locationally, it complements the chapter it precedes that analyzes how ethnic community-based organizations link the political interests of both Brazil and the associated heritage countries to the social interests of the Japanese Brazilian and Jewish Brazilian communities.

In sum, I thank Daniel Drewski for his thoughtful analysis of Identities Matter’s merits. Laying out the historical context provided about the formation of ethnoracial hierarchies in Brazil and the relevant theoretical underpinnings of the study involved extensive research using Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and English primary and secondary sources from Brazilian, other Latin American, North American, and European scholars. Both Identities Matter and Framing Refugees provide important cases that enhance understandings of the experiences of migrants, refugees, and their descendants outside of the developed world. I feel honored to have been able to contribute to the growing body of literature on the political incorporation of immigrant communities within the Global South.