The Catholic Foundations of the Chinese Latin American Community in Portuguese Macau and British Hong Kong, 1930s–60s

Chinese men settled in Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, among other places, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Latin America, these migrants were generally allowed marry local women, unlike in the United States during the era of exclusion. Such marriages helped Chinese men become part of local societies. Nevertheless, anti-Chinese sentiment emerged in some of these places. For this and other reasons, Chinese men took the families they established in the diaspora back with them to the villages and towns from which they had emigrated in Guangdong Province in southeastern China. Conflicting sets of gender expectations often tore through Chinese Latin American families. People in diverse family situations were drawn to China’s foreign colonies for their cosmopolitanism, the presence of consuls, economic opportunities, and other reasons. In particular, Portuguese Macau’s Iberian flavor offered Latin American women a sense of familiarity. Catholic churches and other institutions provided spaces to meet, connections with home through foreign clergy and missionaries, and jobs as scribes and porters in seminaries. People connected to the church spearheaded efforts to repatriate to Mexico. In the postwar era, Chinese Latin Americans in Hong Kong founded the Asociación Hispano-Americana de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, a social, political, and religious club that established a crucial link between the communities in both colonies. Revering the indigenous icon of the Virgin Mary that had originated in colonial Mexico, the group became central to the diaspora and to people’s longing for homelands they reinvented abroad.