The politics of Hello Kitty
Hello Kitty has no mouth, and yet she has a great deal to say. That is the argument Karen Aiko Rivera has spent the better part of a year making in her Chicano/Latino studies honors thesis, which examines why the Japanese icon has found such a devoted following among Latinas at Southern California swap meets. Rivera focuses on swap meets as informal marketplaces where the character's image appears on everything from keychains to clothing, at prices that make them accessible to working-class shoppers. For Rivera, the research was never purely academic.
As someone who is both Mexican and Japanese, Rivera had always felt a pull toward Hello Kitty, particularly at swap meets, which in Southern California are among the most distinctly Latinx spaces around. The character seemed to belong there, even though she was invented in Japan in 1974 by the company Sanrio. What Rivera came to understand, through research that draws on autoethnography, archival work and a formal interview, is that Hello Kitty's peculiar power lies in what she lacks. She has no mouth. That absence, rather than being a limitation, is an invitation, making her an unusually open surface onto which communities project their own meanings, memories and desires.
"I've come to see Hello Kitty as a tool for identity, belonging, love, community and labor," Rivera says.
The thesis sits at the intersection of material culture, racial identity and consumer behavior, territory that Rivera was initially not sure anyone else would want to explore with her. She did not need to worry. Every time she has described the project to faculty or colleagues, the recognition has been immediate.
Luis Sánchez-López, an assistant professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies and Rivera's honors thesis mentor, is direct in his assessment.
"Karen is an exceptional student and exhibits a tenacity that is rare," he says. "I have learned a lot from her as her honors thesis mentor and cannot wait to see all the things she will accomplish once she graduates. I am proud to say she is my student and a major in Chicano/Latino studies."
The Hello Kitty project is, in Rivera's view, one example of a much larger question she finds herself returning to again and again.
"I'm always looking at how we see ourselves in the objects and spaces around us," she says. "Sometimes that's Hello Kitty, sometimes it's your political affiliation."
Equally layered
Rivera grew up in Hacienda Heights, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County where strip malls, taco trucks and nearby swap meets reflect the layered cultural life of the region. Her own background is no less layered. Her mother is from Japan, her father from Mexico. Neither graduated from high school, yet both made education a priority in their home.
"They told me to treat it like a job," she says.
Her father, who is deaf, gave her an unexpected gift. The two spent long hours at the library together, and at home the television often ran on captions only, without sound. Rivera remembers sitting with her father at four or five years old, reading the words as they scrolled across the screen. It was, she says, where her love of reading began.
As a first-generation, low-income college student, Rivera had little room to think about anything beyond stability. Her first year was hard, academically and socially, in the way that first years often are for students who arrive without an instruction manual. Her parents were far from indifferent to the struggle.
"Even when they couldn't always offer financial support, they were always there for me emotionally," she says.
Rivera gradually found her footing. A roommate she had known since sixth grade, someone who had grown up under similar circumstances and understood what it meant to be the first in your family to navigate university life, made the transition more bearable. They have lived together all four years. But settling in personally was only part of the challenge. Rivera had come to UC Irvine as a political science major with her eye on a stable career, not a research agenda.
"As a first-generation, low-income student, I was always thinking about finances and didn't consider how much fulfillment and joy I could find in research," she says.
The idea that research could be something she loved, not just something she completed, had not yet occurred to her. It did in her third year, when she added Chicano/Latino studies as a second major and enrolled in her first course in the field. For the first time, the communities and narratives she was studying included her own.
Building a path in academia
The academic confidence that made the leap into research possible did not come from nowhere. Rivera found her way to the School of Social Sciences' Summer Program in Research and Leadership, known as SPIRL, a program designed to support undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds in developing research skills and building relationships with faculty. This was exactly what Rivera needed. Sitting across from professors and talking through ideas, rather than simply absorbing lectures from a distance, turned out to make an enormous difference.
What helped most was not just the access but the recognition. SPIRL's director, global & international studies professor Long Bui, is himself a first-generation college student, and that shared background was not lost on Rivera.
"Having a mentor with a similar background to mine and my peers has made a real difference," she says.
Rivera did not simply pass through the program. She came back to it, eventually working as a reader for several social sciences courses and for SPIRL itself. The experience of returning alongside the professors she had once approached nervously reoriented something in her. She has been finding ways to replicate that for others ever since, including through her work as a tutorial leader at UC Irvine's Learning and Academic Resource Center.
"I like to share what I know. If I come across an opportunity, I make sure to pass it along," she says.
That instinct extends to her larger ambition, one that surprised her: becoming a professor. She plans to take a gap year before applying to Ph.D. programs. The path is still taking shape, but its foundations are clear. She has never seen her identity as separate from her scholarship, and she does not intend to start. That thread runs through everything she has done at UC Irvine, from her Hello Kitty thesis to her work supporting other students.
"I love being Mexican and Japanese," she says. "That's a big part of my personality and identity."
It is also, it turns out, the foundation of some genuinely original work.
—Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences