The Development of Race

Introduction Author(s): Tamar Diana Wilson Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 3, East Asian Migration to Latin America (May, 2004), pp. 3-17 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185181 Accessed: 22/11/2010 13:34

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Introduction by

Tamar Diana Wilson

Imperialism, by distorting the economies of countries subject to its influ- ence, has led to the dislocation of populations and massive migrations. A number of countries in the Far East were penetrated by imperialist forces in the nineteenth century. In its mercantile relations with China, Britain had nothing to offer for the vast quantities of tea (and lesser quantities of silk) that it imported except the silver bullion so desired by the imperial government, the "foreign" Qing, or Manchu, Dynasty. To prevent the draining of their cof- fers and to even the terms of trade, British merchants sought to broaden the Chinese market for opium. First commercialized by the East India Company, the opium trade was later commandeered by private interests, including, among its biggest players, the British Jardine & Matheison Company (Hanes and Sanello, 2002). Chinese efforts to abolish opium imports led to the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. The Chinese were forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain, open a variety of ports to trade with the British, Ameri- cans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and others, and pay huge war reparations. For example, the reparations imposed after the first Opium War amounted to "half of all of China's yearly tax revenues" (153). The Taiping Rebellion of 1851 to 1864, led by converts to an indigenous and quasi-Protestant religious movement that eschewed opium use, resulted in an estimated 20 to 30 mil- lion deaths (173). China, weakened by these events as well as sporadic re- bellions against the Manchu emperors and plagued by floods and periodic famines, was unable to stop the semi-coerced "coolie trade" despite pro- hibitions against emigration. It is estimated that at least 1 million Chinese emigrated between 1847 and 1874, when because of international pres- sures the indentured Chinese labor trade was halted (Gonzalez, 1985: 86). Peasants and other sectors of the population displaced by the wars, left un- employed because of treaty port dynamics or subjected to excessive taxa- tion, were coerced or seduced into leaving China, mainly for Peru, Cuba, and the United States. In Peru and Cuba they initially constituted a cheap labor force for export-oriented plantation agriculture, among other export-oriented

Tamar Diana Wilson is an associate editor of Latin American Perspectives. The collective thanks

her for her work in organizing this issue.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 136, Vol. 31 No. 3, May 2004 3-17 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X04264494 ? 2004 Latin American Perspectives

3

4 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

activities. After their contracts were terminated, the Chinese indentured laborers entered other fields of endeavor and were joined by friends, family, and countrymen, ensuring a lasting Chinese presence in Latin America.

Although the Western powers, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, were able to penetrate isolationist Japan and impose unequal trade treaties, Japan's stronger state prevented ravages similar to those that occurred in China. Selden (1983: 61) speaks of the Meiji state (established in 1868) as presiding over "a 'revolution from above' which opened the way to the for- mation of industrial capital while crushing the challenges from below in the form of peasant rebellion."' The Meiji government subsidized and financed imports of technology that led to shipbuilding, munitions manufacture, and other heavy industry that would facilitate Japan's own imperialist expansion (61). By 1879 Japan had annexed Okinawa, a sovereign kingdom with tribu- tary ties to China (Nakasone, 2002: 4). Subjected to heavy taxes by the Japa- nese government and turned into a vast sugar-exporting reserve, Okinawa's population began to emigrate. Early emigrants went to Japanese cities, to Southeast Asia, to Hawai'i, and to Mexico, Cuba, and other countries in Latin America including, eventually, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, and Bolivia (17-18). Displaced Japanese peasants, descendants of deposed sam- urai, retired servicemen, and others also formed a migration stream that took some of them to Latin America. By 1905 Japan had made Korea a protector- ate, causing population dislocations that led to emigration, though given the paucity of literature on their early presence in Latin America it can be sur- mised that this was not a major destination.

In the following pages I will outline the early history and development of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigration to Latin America2 to provide a historical context for the articles included in this issue.

CHINESE IN LATIN AMERICA: ORIGINS

Chinese arrived in Latin America for the first time in the post-Columbian period via the Manila-Acapulco trade of the mid- and late sixteenth century. This trade carried porcelains, silks, and other luxury goods transshipped by Chinese merchants in the Philippines to Mexico, in exchange for silver from that country's prolific mines, and to Cuba (Chang-Rodriguez, 1958: 347- 375; Hu-DeHart, 1999: 256; Look Lai, 1999: 248). In the sixteenth century there evolved what Schell (2001: 89) calls "a Sino-Mexican symbiosis" based on the exchange of Mexican silver pesos for Chinese raw silk. This

Wilson / INTRODUCTION 5

symbiosis persisted until 1850, when the industrial revolution undercut the manufacture of silk cloth and silk-cotton rebozos in Mexico. Some immigra- tion of Chinese from Manila occurred in the seventeenth century, at the height of this trade (118).

The first cluster of Chinese immigrants documented as living in Latin America was a group of barbers in Mexico City who came to the attention of the Mexican government in 1635 because of protests by Spanish barbers over unfair competition. The Spanish petitioned that the Chinese be removed to the outskirts of the city (Dubs, 1942; Hu-DeHart, 1982: 2; 1999: 256). The second settlement of Chinese documented for the Americas occurred in 1810 and involved a Portuguese-government-sponsored scheme promoting the growing of tea in Brazil by several hundred imported Chinese tea farmers (Chang-Rodriguez, 1958: 377; Irick, 1982: 4).3

Large numbers of Chinese did not begin to enter Latin America until the mid-nineteenth century with the so-called coolie trade (known in Spanish as la trata amarilla). Beginning in 1847 and continuing intermittently until 1874, 132,435 "coolies" or contract laborers were imported into Cuba, and it is estimated that between 87,000 and 100,000 were imported into Peru between 1849 and the end of the trade in 1874. In both the Cuban and the Peruvian case labor shortages, primarily on the sugar plantations after the ter- mination of the slave trade in 1834, impelled private landowners and gov- ernment officials to collude in seeking contract labor from China, a practice earlier instituted by Britain for its West Indian colonies (Chang-Hwang, 1985: 32,46; Chang Rodriguez, 1958: 380,386,388; Hu-DeHart, 1999: 254; 1989: 103; Look Lai, 1999: 248; Moreno Fraginales, 1981: 54-55). In gen- eral the need for cheap labor on the export-oriented sugar and cotton planta- tions was the primary motive for seeking these workers.

The earliest Chinese immigrants in Peru also worked as domestic servants and artisans, in the mines, on the guano fields, and in the construction of the Andean railroads (Hu-DeHart, 1999: 254; Real de Azuia, 1981; Rodriguez Pastor, 2000). The railroads were built under the auspices of U.S. and British interests: Peruvian, Chilean, and Chinese contract workers were recruited to construct them (Harriman, 1988: 154-155). The "guano boom" of the 1840s onward was based on exports of guano to European farmers who utilized this fertilizer on their exhausted soils (Gonzalez, 1985: 21; see also Rodriguez Pastor, 2000: 54-56). A number of labor pools were tapped for the exploita- tion of the guano beds, including semiproletarianized Peruvians, convicts, and, after 1847, indentured Chinese. Mendez (1988: 96) argues that, after the convict labor force, the Chinese proved to be the cheapest source of labor for this export-oriented activity, which was, according to Gonzalez (1985: 21),

6 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

largely in the hands of British merchants. Chinese contract laborers were also recruited into plantations and other work sites in Brazil, Panama, Chile, and Ecuador in lesser numbers (Irick, 1982: 8).

A high percentage of the Chinese laborers were contracted through kid- napping, fraud, or deceit (Chang-Hwang, 1985: 57-59; Irick, 1982: 27-28, 395-396; Cuba Commission Report 1993 [1876]; Mei, 1984: 234-235). Many died on board the prison-like ships, which were run by companies that in many cases had previously been involved in the African slave trade; losses often hovered around 10 percent, and as many as 35 percent died on some crossings (Chang-Hwang, 1985: 62; Chang-Rodriguez, 1958: 388; Irick, 1982: 209-211). Coming in under eight-year contracts, many Chinese were subjected to slavelike conditions of housing and labor and to such mistreat- ment in the form of flogging, use of leg irons, and even branding that rebel- lions, running away, and a high rate of suicide ensued (Chang-Hwang, 1985: 63-69; Hu-DeHart, 1989: 107-108; Irick, 1982: 213). In Cuba many joined the first War of Independence (1868-1878) "in exchange for promises of freedom from bondage" (Look Lai, 1999: 248). In Peru, Chinese joined Chil- eans during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884) to gain freedom from oner- ous treatment under the eight-year contracts that were still extant despite the official end of the coolie trade in 1874 (Hu-DeHart, 1999: 255; 1989: 108).

Although the international outcry against its cruelty and efforts by the Ch'ing government to end it led to the termination of the trade in indentured laborers in 1874, contract laborers were brought into Panama in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries to build the Trans-Isthmian railroad and later the Panama Canal (both in 1882-1898 with the French Canal and later with the American Canal) (Mon Pinzon, 1981: 23; 1998: 72). At the begin- ning of the twentieth century as well, Chinese entrepreneurs, working with the U.S. entrepreneurs Harrison Otis and Harry Chandler and their California- Mexico Land and Cattle Company, brought contracted Chinese laborers into the Mexicali Valley of Baja California Norte to grow cotton (Hu-DeHart, 1985-86: 9-10).4

Earlier, partly because of the attacks against Chinese in the United States that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1892, Chinese had moved to Mexico. In 1893 the Chinese-Mexican Treaty of Amity and Commerce opened the doors to Chinese migration (Cumberland, 1960: 191; Hu-DeHart, 1980: 277; Jaques, 1981: 13; Sanderson, Sidel, and Sims, 1981: 173). Mexicans brought over Chinese laborers, especially to Sonora and Baja California (Cumberland, 1960: 191). Eventually the Chinese moved into commerce and small business, such as shoe and clothing factories, grocery stores, restaurants, laundries, and hotels, becoming a major economic force in the Sonoran economy (Jaques, 1981: 14) and elsewhere. Anti-Chinese

Wilson / INTRODUCTION 7

movements occurred, however, during the Mexican Revolution and later dur- ing the Great Depression. Anti-Chinese legislation enacted in 1930 drove the Sonoran Chinese across the border to the United States, to other parts of Mexico, such as Baja California, and back to China (Cumberland, 1960; Hu- DeHart, 1982; 1980; Jaques, 1981). There is a possibility that Chinese re- migrated to other Latin American countries as well.

Although Chinese migration to Latin America ceased during World War II, by 1950 there was a Chinese presence in almost every Latin American coun- try. As part of its anticommunist efforts, funded by the U.S. Central Intelli- gence Agency (CIA), beginning in 1950 Taiwan established economic and technical assistance programs throughout the Third World, including Central and South America (Myers, 1997: 106). Thousands of Taiwan Chinese, with historical links to Fujian Province in China, worked in these foreign-aid pro- grams and were joined by thousands of Chinese entrepreneurs interested in opening import-export-related businesses who became part of established local overseas-Chinese communities.

Between 1950 and 1967, the numbers of Chinese in Cuba increased from 23,000 to 25,000, in Peru from 12,000 to 30,000, in Panama from 2,700 to 8,000, and in Ecuador and Guatemala from 1,000 to 4,000 or more (Ho, 1967, cited in Hu-DeHart, 1999). The numbers of Chinese in Mexico fell between 1950 and 1967 from 12,000 to 10,000. Notably, in the Mexican cen- sus there is no category for ethnic group membership aside from that dealing with indigenous peoples. Thus, Chinese born or naturalized into Mexican cit- izenship would not be counted as Chinese. The numbers of Chinese may have increased, but naturalization had become more common. By 1967 there were 2,000 or more Chinese in Chile, Venezuela, and Costa Rica and at least 1,000 in Colombia, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic (Ho, 1967, cited in Hu-DeHart, 1999). There were also transit communities for smuggled Chinese in Panama, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina (Kwong, 1997). Many of the Chinese communities established in this period became transit points for Chinese being smuggled into the United States beginning in the 1970s and continuing until the present (DeStefano, 1997; Chin, 1999; Myers, 1997).

JAPANESE IN LATIN AMERICA: ORIGINS

Japanese immigrants have been present in a number of countries in Latin America since the last years of the nineteenth century. Citing a Japanese source, Befu (2002: 6) reports the earliest dates for Japanese settlers in

8 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Latin America as follows: "Mexico 1892, Peru 1899, Chile 1903, Cuba 1907, Argentina 1907, Brazil 1908, Panama 1915, Bolivia 1916, Colombia 1921, Uruguay 1930, Paraguay 1930, and Venezuela 1931." Other sources put Jap- anese migration to some of these countries even earlier. Currently there are more Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Latin America than in the United States and Canada combined.

The abolition of slavery in 1888 and the growing demand for coffee in Europe led Brazil to recruit laborers from a number of countries, including Japan (Yamanaka, 1997: 12). A Brazilian-Japanese friendship treaty, signed in 1895, paved the way for the immigration of 2,000 Japanese to Brazil, many of whom eventually turned to rice cultivation (Prada Queiroz Guimaraes, 1981) and others to the production of fruit, vegetables, and spices (Staniford, 1973). Approximately 190,000 Japanese immigrants entered Brazil between 1908 and the beginning of World War II. Lesser numbers arrived after World War II: between 50,000 and 60,000 arrived between 1953 and 1973 (Suzuki, 1981: 59; Yamanaka, 1997: 15). In contrast to the Chinese immigrants to Latin America, who, if married, usually left wives and children behind, most Japanese immigrants to Brazil and elsewhere on the continent were accom- panied by their wives or later acquired Japanese wives through the "picture- bride" system (Yamanaka, 1997: 12; Staniford, 1973).

A Mexican-Japanese treaty of 1888 permitted free movement of peoples between the two countries. The motive of then-President Porfirio Diaz was to import labor to aid in economic development; the motive of the Meiji regime in Japan was to rid itself of discontented elements, including the now unem- ployed samurai as well as peasants dislocated from the land (Ota Mishima, 1981: 82-88). The first colonizing movement brought Japanese to Chiapas. The Japanese-Mexican Colonizing Society sponsored 20 Japanese laborers and 6 free immigrants to Escuintla, Chiapas, in 1897. The 1895 census showed that there were 13 Chinese and 2 Japanese in Chiapas at the time (92). These colonizing efforts, based on agricultural labor, were a failure. A num- ber of the Japanese colonists formed companies to trade in agricultural goods or livestock; some established stores and drugstores, one a watch repair shop, and one an electrical company (102-103). Japanese continued to migrate to Mexico in small numbers during the following decades and worked on sugar- cane and coffee plantations and in railroad construction in the early 1900s (Ota Mishima, 1982: 55). By 1910 Japanese immigrants had established themselves as cotton producers in Mexicali, as fishermen in Ensenada, and as small merchants (pequeios comerciantes) in Ciudad Juarez (73-93).

Japanese began migrating to Peru in 1899; immigration "began as a vol- untary form of contract migration arranged by employers and governments via mediating Japanese emigration companies" (Takenaka, 1997: 83). It was

Wilson / INTRODUCTION 9

intended that they replace the Chinese laborers whose contracts had expired by this time (Rodriguez Pastor, 2000). Initially most Japanese immigrants came from poverty-stricken Okinawa (Takenaka, 1997: 84). Unlike the Chi- nese, who because of the high rates of male migration and extremely low rates of female migration often took local women as wives, the Japanese were largely endogamous: even among third-generation Japanese, 71 percent marry Japanese partners (85).

The first Japanese immigrants to Argentina settled in 1873: they were part of a Japanese touring circus. Immigration from Japan did not begin in earnest until 1898, when a treaty of friendship, commerce, and cooperation was signed between Argentina and Japan (Maletta and LePore, 1990: 425-426). As in Peru, most immigrants initially came from Okinawa (469). There was some remigration of Japanese from Peru and Brazil to Argentina in the first decade of the twentieth century (Higa, 1995: 480). Although initially clus- tered in factories and foundries and as domestic and farm workers, after World War I the Japanese tended to be self-employed, many in the raising of fruits and vegetables, flowers, and livestock and a significant number in dry- cleaning establishments (Higa, 1995). Immigration increased slightly after World War I but, as elsewhere in Latin America, came to a halt during World War II. It increased again slightly after 1948 (Maletta and LePore, 1990: 427). The peak immigration year after World War II was 1961, with 1,228 Japanese immigrants. Between 1975 and 1989 from 60 to 257 Japanese immigrants entered Argentina per year, with a tendency for their numbers to decline (Maletta and LePore, 1990: Tables 1.4 and 1.5).

Beginning in the mid-1980s, with economic expansion in Japan and high unemployment and inflation rates in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, Japanese and their descendants in Latin America took the initiative to find work in Japan (Mori, 2002; Higa, 2002; Takenaka, 1997). Some of the return migrants to Japan, known as dekasegi, had been registered at birth with Japanese consulates and thus held dual citizenship (Higa, 2002: 264). Others took advantage of a provision for renewable annual residence visas for those who had relatives in Japan (Mori, 2002: 239). In 1990 a new immigration act permitted those who could prove Japanese ancestry to apply for a permanent residence visa good for up to three years (239). Spouses and children of those of Japanese descent eligible for one of these visas were also extended oppor- tunities for residence and employment in Japan (Roth, 2002: 25). Japan was seeking a low-waged labor force in subcontracted automobile-parts facto- ries, construction, and hotel and other service and manufacturing industries: Latin American-born Japanese as well as other Latin Americans who were able to make false claims to Japanese ancestry rushed to fill these dirty, dan- gerous, and difficult jobs (Mori, 2002: 240; Roth, 2002: 26-27). Their

10 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

earnings in these jobs in Japan were far higher than the salaries they earned in Latin America; meanwhile, many Japanese, used to a higher standard of liv-

ing, were refusing to work at these low-level semiskilled and unskilled jobs (Mori, 2002: 239-240). Many of the dekasegi viewed their employment in

Japan as short-term and a means to acquire capital to build a house or open a business (Mori, 2002: 237). Citing a Japanese source, Roth (2002: 3, Table 1) shows that the vast majority of dekasegi came from Brazil: they numbered 189,781 in 1996. The Peruvian-born or Peruvian-resident Japanese num- bered 36,616 in that year; much smaller numbers had returned from Argen- tina (3,035), Bolivia (2,811), and Paraguay (1,235). Japan, as an advanced

capitalist country, had a need for cheap labor. The dekasegi performed much of the segmented labor functions that Mexicans do in the United States.

KOREANS IN LATIN AMERICA: ORIGINS

There is evidence that between 1904 and 1905 the Japanese-owned Conti- nental Settlement Company (Dairoku Shokumin Kaisha) recruited slightly more than 1,000 Korean contract workers for Mexican plantations, possibly because of fear of Korean competition with Japanese laborers in Hawai'i (Pomerantz, 1984: 302-303). Japan established a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and began dispossessing Korean farmers to replace them with Japa- nese. This led to an emigration of Koreans to northeastern China (about 1 million persons), to Siberia (about 200,000), and, as unskilled laborers, to

Japan (about 1 million) (cited in Pomerantz, 1984: 305). A Korean migration stream to Latin America is more recent than the Chinese and Japanese ones, however, having developed only in the second half of the twentieth century, after the end of the Korean War (1951-1953) and the division of Korea into North and South. The first Korean settlers in Argentina were North Korean prisoners of war, who arrived in 1956 and 1957 (Mera, 1998: 40; Courtis, 2000: 17 n. 5). In 1953 the International Red Cross had settled one man from Korea in Chile (Chac6n S., 1995: 12). Argentina and South Korea established diplomatic relations in 1962, and in 1965 13 families of Korean immigrants arrived in that country. With the help of the Corporaci6n Coreana de Desarrollo Ultramar (Korean Corporation of Overseas Development), vast stretches of land were acquired on which the immigrants were to practice fruticulture, horticulture, beekeeping, and the raising of chickens and pigs (Mera, 1998: 41).

Koreans began to settle, in the 1960s, in Brazil and Paraguay as well as Chile and Argentina (Mera, 1998: 41; Chac6n S., 1995: 12). Later

Wilson / INTRODUCTION I1

immigrants to Argentina (in the 1970s) settled in Buenos Aires, forming a Koreatown in the barrio Flores. Immigrants from South Korea in the 1980s tended to possess capital that they invested in small factories, garment work- shops, textile mills, import-export businesses, and other small firms, mainly outside of Koreatown. In the 1990s Argentine newspapers such as La Nacion and Clarin denounced the superexploitation by Korean entrepreneurs of undocumented workers from Bolivia, Peru, and Paraguay (see articles re- printed in Courtis, 2000: 169-206).

That immigrants to Argentina from South Korea would be selected for possessing capital to invest was guaranteed by a 1985 law demanding that South Korean immigrants in particular deposit US$30,000 per family in the Banco de la Naci6n Argentina in New York in order to be issued an immigra- tion visa (Courtis, 2000: 17; Mera, 1998: 43). This money was eventually returned to the families. By 1998 this sum had been increased, however, to US$100,000 (Mera, 1998: 43 n. 44; Courtis, 2000: 18 n. 7). In Chile, a more modest amount, US$5,000, had to be deposited in a local bank by potential immigrants from South Korea (Chac6n S., 1995: 13).

CASE STUDIES

It is apparent that Latin America has become an area of settlement as well as a step in transitory immigration on a trajectory leading to the United States or Canada for immigrants from all the major countries of East Asia.

The articles included in this issue include works on the Chinese in Cuba in the nineteenth century, the Japanese in Brazil and in Peru, and the Koreans in Brazil. Joseph C. Dorsey examines Chinese identity politics during the "coolie trade" in Cuba in relation to the conditions of their labor, the restric- tions on their sexuality (given an absence of Chinese women and a color bar), and the evidences of their rebellion against an oppressive regime of labor relations and racial constructions. Chinese laborers were often conflated with African slaves in the way they were viewed and treated in nineteenth- century Cuban society and legal practice. Running away, homicide, and sui- cide were common responses to unendurable hardships. There were in- stances of Chinese and Afro-Cuban friction but also of cooperative efforts against injustice. Dorsey presents a number of case studies to illustrate the reactions and agency of the Chinese in the face of their indentured servitude and the absence of endogamous reproductive options.

Ayumi Takenaka and Nobuko Adachi take up the issue of Japanese immi- gration to Latin America: Takenaka addresses the situation of the Japanese in Peru and Adachi that of the Japanese in Brazil and Japanese-Brazilians in

12 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Japan. Adachi interrogates the bipolar (black-and-white) discourse of racialization in Brazil to speculate on the position of Japanese-Brazilians in that society. While challenging the approach to Brazil that proclaims it a "racial democracy," Adachi offers the concept of "diasporic racialization" in an attempt to understand the shifting, other-imposed identities of Japanese- Brazilians: They are identified as "Japanese" in Brazil and "Latin" in Japan, where many have returned in search of work. One of her conclusions is that Japanese-Brazilians are marginalized in both nations and subjected to a vari- ety of "racisms," some of which may have universal components while others are locally based.

After outlining the history of Japanese immigration to Peru, Takenaka shows how legislation denying Japanese the possibility of owning land drove many of the immigrants into a middleman minority adaptation in Lima. Ini- tially concentrating on barber shops, they eventually became owners of small grocery and clothing stores and restaurants and later expanded into other types of small business, partially as a consequence of their "sojourning men- tality." A racist backlash that reached to government circles sought to under- mine their economic viability-a phenomenon, incidentally, found world- wide and directed against other middleman minorities such as the Chinese in Mexico in the 1930s. Acts excluding or restricting Japanese immigration similar to the one in the United States were passed throughout Central and South America, including Peru. In 1940 Japanese businesses were subjected to looting, resulting in an immense loss of property but also, according to Takenaka, heightened motivation of the Japanese to become integrated into Peruvian society. Their economic success in the midst of a poor Indian and mestizo population, coupled with their tendencies toward endogamy, has, however, continued to fuel their racialization.

Simone Buechler examines the position of the newest wave of Asian immigrants to Latin America-the Korean-and its involvement in the informalized garment industry in Brazil. At first recruited by the Brazilian government in the early 1960s to develop unpopulated rural areas, most Korean immigrants-having little farming experience-moved to Sao Paulo. After Brazil closed its doors to further Korean immigration in 1974, more and more Koreans entered illegally, often stopping first in Paraguay or Bolivia, where they were better received. From the late 1960s on, some Kore- ans in Brazil opened garment sweatshops, hiring at first undocumented Kore- ans and later undocumented Bolivians. Thus they too have come to constitute a multinationally embedded middleman minority.

This issue contains only a sprinkling of the types of research that should be carried forward on East Asian migrations to Latin America, where one or more groups are found in every Latin American country from Mexico to

Wilson / INTRODUCTION 13

Argentina and Brazil. Much still remains to be done on patterns of immigra- tion and settlement and the various immigrant groups' successes and failures given the particular economic and historical conjunctures in the various countries of Latin America.

NOTES

1. Selden's 1983 article does a fine job of contrasting the development of capitalism in China and in Japan, taking into account the disruptive forces of imperialism.

2. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are not the only Asians to have immigrated to Latin America. Because of the dislocations in Southeast Asia during and after the Vietnam War, a num- ber of Latin American countries accepted refugees. In 1979, for example, Argentina accepted 1,000 refugee families, 241 of which were Laotian (Redondo, 1987: 92).

3. Concerning the early presence of Chinese in Latin America, Look Lai (1998: 6) writes: "The trade nexus that had been established between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in New Spain in the sixteenth century had facilitated the arrival of small numbers of Chinese sailors and labourers to New Spain. There are authorized reports of Chinese servants, textile workers, farmers and barbers in Mexico City, Acapulco, and the state of Michoacan in the early seven- teenth century. Chinese emigrating via the Philippines also found their way into the woolen tex- tile mills of Peru in the seventeenth century. Chinese were recorded as engaged in shipbuilding in

Spanish-controlled lower California as early as the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and

they accompanied the Spanish in their early northward expeditions to upper California in the late 1700s. Even in the gold mines of Minas Gerais in Brazil, there were reports of Chinese in the

early 1700s, brought there no doubt via Portuguese controlled Macao. The writer Alexander von Humboldt who travelled to Latin America between 1799 and 1804 also encountered Chinese in Cuba who had gone there on the Manila galleons."

4. Otis and Chandler were publishers of the Los Angeles Times and founders of the Colorado River Land Company, which was the parent company to the California-Mexico Land and Cattle

Company. They acquired vast tracts of land in the Mexicali valley in 1902 and began cotton culti- vation in 1910. Most of the land was leased to Chinese entrepreneurs or to Chinese cooperatives in subsequent years (see Hu-DeHart, 1985-86).

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Wilson / INTRODUCTION 15

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Wilson / INTRODUCTION 17

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