Session Abstract

This formal session centers on the Asian dimension of Latin America history, from the late nineteenth century to the present, with special emphasis on mass migration, diaspora and identity.  The panel is chaired by Georgette M. Dorn (Chief of the Hispanic Division, Library of Congress), a distinguished historian and renowned librarian of Latin America and the Caribbean. First, Eric Vanden Bussche (Stanford University) examines Chinese government’s changing attitude and policies toward Chinese immigration to Brazil in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, based on his substantial archival research both in Chinese and Portuguese.  Once strongly opposing the mass migration of Chinese coolies to Brazil, the declining state power of the Chinese empire began to see Brazil as a laboratory for the preservation of the Chinese civilization outside China through immigration. Vanden Bussche examines how imperial China’s attitudes shaped the Chinese empire’s reconceptualization of Latin America, as well as elite Brazilians’ perception of the Far East. Second, Yinghong Cheng (Delaware State University) discusses the political importance of Havana’s Chinatown in order to uncover the important aspect of global migration history.  Called “the little Paris in the Caribbean” and once the largest ethnic Chinese community in Latin America, Havana’s Chinatown drastically declined after the Revolution but has undergone a limited revival since the 1990s.  Cheng examines the dramatic transformation of the ethnic space in the context of socialist revolution, the Cold War and post-Cold War, and changing Sino-Cuban relations. Cheng’s study provides a unique perspective for our understanding of historical connections between Asia and Latin America determined by global trends.  The last paper by Mieko Nishida (Hartwick College) treats Japanese immigration to Brazil, by focusing on the Japanese Immigrants Monument in Santos, Brazil’s major port city, where most immigrants had landed.  Nishida discusses why Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo craved to have a monument for their historical memory, how they campaigned and fundraised for years for such a monument, and what an immigrant statue they decided on before commissioning a Brazilian sculptor.  Once inaugurated in June 1998, the monument became a popular tourist site and in 2008 the image of the statue almost migrated “back” to Japan for the Japanese government’s state celebration on the centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil.  Georgette M. Dorn, the Chair, will also comment on the three papers comparatively and facilitates further discussions with the audience.  This session is intended to reveal the little known aspects of Asian immigration to Latin America and to examine how Latin Americans of Asian descent have remembered their past and come to understand who they are, in relation to the constantly changing global context to this day. The panel has a strong appeal not only to Latin Americanists, Asianists, and Asian Americanists but also to many other scholars in comparative and international history and/or interdisciplinary studies, who are particularly interested in mass migration, diaspora, and globalization.