A History of Chinese Settlers in Peru in the 19th and 20th Centuries

FAIN: FEL-257592-18

Ana Maria Candela
SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton (Binghamton, NY 13902-4400)

A book-length study of the Chinese Peruvian settlers and merchants during the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Intimate Others: Peruvian Chinese Between Native Place, Nation and World” recovers the trans-Pacific and Global South histories of Cantonese settlers in Peru between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. Migrating when Anglo-Saxon settler colonial practices inspired migration, nation making and empire across the world, Cantonese pursued new labor, commercial and agricultural opportunities in Peru that brought material and cultural benefits to their native places and expanded a Cantonese Pacific world. Deploying a translocal methodology grounded in multi-scalar analysis, “Intimate Others” explores how Cantonese in Peru positioned themselves in relation to the native places, nations and worlds their lives brought together.

Associated Products

Picturing the World: Snapshots of a Cantonese Peruvian Ecumene, circa 1924 (Web Resource)
Title: Picturing the World: Snapshots of a Cantonese Peruvian Ecumene, circa 1924
Author: Ana Maria Candela
Abstract: This exhibit makes The Chinese Colony in Peru, a community album published by in 1924, accessible to readers and also provides a reading of the album as a snapshot of a translocal Cantonese Peruvian ecumene. This translocal reading suggests ways of conceptualizing the history of Asians in the Americas and ways of engaging with questions of traffics, territories and modes of belonging (i.e. citizenship) that do not default into methodological nationalism. Rather, it suggests a way to take the social, cultural and geographic complexity of migrant worlds as both the point of departure and the end goal in the conceptualization of those histories. By shifting the analytic lens away from a focus on the album’s narrative of integration, traces of this translocal world become more visible. When read critically as a snapshot of a bigger Cantonese Peruvian ecumene, the album offers a glimpse into the social, physical and imagined geographical contours of this particular translocal migrant world that is all too easily eclipsed by the consolidation of bordered and settler nation states during the long 19th century.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://ttc2016.binghamton.edu/exhibits/show/chinese_in_peru/chinese_in_peru

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