Chinese Cubans

Chinese Cubans is now the standard text on the history of the Chinese in Cuba. Utilizing a transnational and hemispheric approach, Kathleen López examines the history of Chinese immigration to Cuba from 1847 to the present. In many significant ways, she revises our understanding of Chinese migration to Cuba during the coolie trade and the subsequent waves of Chinese settlement that took place between 1902 and 1959. As her overarching aim, López seeks to explain “how racist ideologies in a multiethnic society, class stratification, gender imbalance, kinship and business networks, and generational differences converged to shape Chinese identities in Cuba” (p. 5). She accomplishes this goal quite superbly.Chinese Cubans makes an outstanding contribution to the recent literature on Asians in Latin America, which includes works such as Julia María Schiavone Camacho's Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960 (2012), Grace Peña Delgado's Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the US-Mexico Borderlands (2012), and my own The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940 (2010). During the early twentieth century, Cuba and Mexico formed important nodes of a broader Chinese transnational commercial orbit in the Americas, and López fills in our understanding of this complex network in substantial ways.Chinese Cubans also makes landmark contributions to the multiple literatures of Latin American / Caribbean history, Asian diaspora studies, Asian American studies, and Chicano/Latino studies. Building upon the pioneering work of Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Robert Irick, Yen Ching-hwang, and Lisa Yun, López advances our understanding of Chinese coolie migration by supplying fresh historical detail and challenging the popular transition narrative, which asserts that Chinese immigrants represented an ethnic labor force somewhere between that of black slaves and free whites. The analytic scope of Chinese Cubans goes far beyond that of the coolie narrative. It also examines the Chinese transition from coolies to free agricultural laborers and entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth century, Chinese participation in the wars of independence, interracial marriage, and the formation of Chinese transnational communities during the early twentieth century.It is interesting to note the way in which López contrasts the historical experience of Chinese Cubans with that of their contemporaries in the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Jamaica. According to López, “The Chinese in Cuba did not experience institutionalized discrimination to the same extent as their counterparts in the United States, which maintained a policy of exclusion from 1882 to 1943, or Mexico, where anti-Chinese campaigns led to their violent expulsion. ... Nor were they victims of sustained anti-Chinese riots, as in Peru and Jamaica” (p. 4). This bold argument will be sure to engender healthy scholarly debate among Latin Americanists and scholars of East Asian and Asian American studies.Despite some negative views of the Chinese expressed in popular attitudes, the press, and government and police reports, López asserts that the Chinese achieved successful incorporation into the national citizenry of Cuba because of their participation in the wars of independence, their formation of cross-racial alliances, and their assent to an ideal of racial democracy. As evidence of this favorable political integration, López quotes a popular Cuban saying that highlights Chinese national loyalty during the wars of independence: “No hubo un chino cubano desertor; no hubo un chino cubano traidor”(p. 289).Chinese Cubans is methodologically sophisticated and weighty. It is a superlative historical study that draws from multilingual sources in Chinese, Spanish, and English. Sources include plantation correspondence, merchant, notarial, judicial, association, and civil records, newspapers, memoirs, and remittance data. A unique methodological strength is its use of Chinese archival sources. Whereas most prior studies of Asians in Latin America have been conducted by scholars with little formal training in East Asian studies and the Chinese language, Chinese Cubans is firmly grounded in López's East Asianist disciplinary roots. Beyond its methodological rigor, this book is also written in a clear and engaging style.Chinese Cubans is necessary reading for Latin American, Caribbean, East Asian, Latino, and Asian American historians. It is ideal for graduate and upper-division undergraduate courses, but it would also work nicely for introductory survey courses in Latin American and Asian American history. Because the writing is clear and free of unnecessary jargon, this book would also be useful and rewarding for the educated general public

Asian American studies · China · Chinese americans · Diaspora · Ethnology · Geography · Homeland · Ideology · Immigration · Kinship · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

• Chinese abolitionism

  Open Access•Steffen Rimner•Journal of Global History•2016

  Add to list

• El orientalismo chino en el Caribe universal de Ramón Illán Bacca

  Open Access•Andrea Juliana Enciso Mancilla•Estudios de Literatura Colombiana•2023

  Add to list