At the Margins of the Nation: Chinese Migration and Mainland Narratives in San Andrés Island, Colombia

During the twentieth century, San Andrés Island occupied an ambivalent position within the Colombian national imagination: geographically peripheral, culturally Caribbean, religiously non-Catholic, and economically shaped by transnational commerce. It was within this contested space that Chinese merchants began settling on the island in the early decades of the century, generating debates about immigration, economic control, and belonging that extended beyond the archipelago. Mainland newspapers and travel accounts frequently portrayed Chinese migrants as commercial monopolizers whose economic success threatened the island’s social balance. These representations echoed longer-standing anti-Chinese narratives circulating in the continental Caribbean, particularly those shaped by encounters with poor Chinese laundry workers in cities such as Barranquilla and Cartagena. Yet such portrayals contrasted sharply with social dynamics in San Andrés. Drawing on newspapers, travel writing, immigration records, commercial documentation, church and parish registers, and published accounts, this paper examines how Chinese merchants were incorporated into island society through everyday practices of commerce, kinship, and community formation. Their economic position facilitated social recognition, including marriage with local women and the formation of interracial families embedded in San Andrés’s social landscape. This paper argues that anti-Chinese narratives developed on the mainland circulated toward San Andrés but found limited acceptance on the island. San Andrés’s peripheral position within the Colombian nation, combined with the commercial activities of Chinese migrants, produced a social environment in which such sentiments were mitigated or reinterpreted. By foregrounding the gap between representation and local practice, this paper demonstrates how social class structured narratives of immigration in the Colombian Caribbean and how insular spaces could destabilize racialized frameworks forged on the mainland.