Asian Migration in the Americas in the Age of Globalization

Session Abstract

The papers in this panel demarcate the movement of Asian migrants across the Pacific Ocean and through the Americas, facilitated by technological innovations as well as the demand for labor in the New World. Moreover, they examine how, after their arrival, Asian migrants were constructed as racial and ethnic others. Individual papers provide different perspectives on the reception and treatment of Asian migrants at different points chronologically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as spatially across Western Hemispheric nation-states. Collectively, the papers will place the histories of Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada in conversation in order to advance discussion on the construction of racial ideologies that marginalized Asian migrants, as well as how these migrants negotiated notions of racial and gendered hierarchies.