Asian migrations to Latin America in the Pacific World, 16th–19th centuries

Abstract

This historiographical essay discusses Asian migrations to Latin America from a Pacific World perspective and employs a longue‐durée periodization. The Pacific World paradigm offers a path for studying the movement of people and ideas as multi‐directional flows that impacted communities around the Pacific basin. The pre‐1900 century timeframe similarly urges scholars to move beyond nation‐bound narratives and to consider instead the long‐standing cultural and ethnic ties that connected Asia and the Americas before the reification on national borders.

Uncovering the hidden history of transpacific contact between Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia through skeletal population genetics

“…4.1 | Shared history in greater Latin America (Giráldez, 2015). With this new era of maritime commerce and the demand for cheap labor, transpacific slave trade moved about 8000 Asians to New Spain and Peru during the 17th century (Mason, 1998;Seijas, 2016), including individuals from India, Indonesia (Mason, 1998), the Philippines (Mason, 1998;Sanabrais, 2009), China, and Japan (Sanabrais, 2009). By 1815, it is estimated that at least 40,000-60,000 Asian immigrants arrived in Acapulco, while other sources cite up to 120,000 individuals in over 250 years of uninterrupted slave and other trade (Slack Jr, 2009).…”

“…After the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, the Chinese laborer trade system met the high demand for labor, and new immigrants settled in Latin America (Slack Jr, 2009) DeHart & L opez, 2008). In general, it is hard to trace Japanese individuals in the earlier colonial diaspora as they usually took Christian names (Sanabrais, 2009), but, it is known two small groups of Japanese also arrived in México in 1610 and 1614 (the latter was over 150 individuals; Sanabrais, 2009), a portion of whom probably settled in Guadalajara (Hu-DeHart & L opez, 2008;Seijas, 2016), which was the location of a small diaspora of Japanese in the 17th century (Sanabrais, 2009).…”

Chinese migration to Latin America: From colonial to contemporary era

“…The studies on Chinese migrants in colonial Latin America destabilize the nation-state framework more commonly found in migration history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the political borders of nations solidified. Tatiana Seijas (2016) argues that historians should pay more attention to the vibrant history of transpacific Asian migration to the Americas prior to the crystallization of the nation-state construct in the 1900s. She believes that by extending the temporal frame back to the sixteenth century and expanding the geospatial frame to include Latin America and the Pacific World, historians may better appreciate the complex transnational dynamics exhibited by Asian migrants without conforming to the frameworks influenced by or entirely succumbed to the nation-state construct.…”

Tres problemáticas de la inmigración china en el norte de Chile

“…El interés académico por la inmigración asiática tuvo un impulso hacia mediados del siglo XX y en las décadas siguientes (Sánchez-Alonso, 2019;Seijas, 2016). Lo tardío de esta preocupación pudo deberse a la influencia muy marcada de Europa y Estados Unidos, que inhibió la mirada fuera del mundo occidental y, como señaló Toloza (2010, p. 8), "uno de los lados negativos de esta influencia es depreciar lo que proviene de otras zonas del mundo".…”