The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama: Lessons in History, Identity, and Culture, and Interconnections with the Chinese in the Philippines

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-302
Author(s):  
Richard T. Chu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Silver Mining ◽  
Diasporic Community ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Gold And Silver Mining ◽  
External Forces

Abstract The Chinese in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, and Panama have had long histories of migration dating back to the nineteenth century, when British and Spanish colonial powers started to bring them to the Caribbean and Latin America from Guangdong province. The primary goal was to provide labor for the sugar cane, guano, bird nest, gold and silver mining, and other industries. In the 1870s, Havana could boast of having the largest Chinatown in the Caribbean, with more than 10,000 Chinese. Today, it has fewer than 100 Chinese Cubans. Trinidad and Tobago’s population of Chinese waned after the nineteenth century, but many Trinidadians have some Chinese ancestry, while Panama currently has the highest percentage (7 percent) of Chinese among Latin American countries. What stories, approaches, and lessons can be learned by comparing their histories to that of the Chinese in the Philippines? More specifically, how are the experiences of the Chinese in these three countries, whether citizen or recent immigrant, similar to those in the Philippines? What can we learn from the scholarship on the Chinese in the Caribbean that can help shape our own research agenda in studying the Chinese in the Philippines? Through a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this essay discusses the ways in which the identities of each Chinese diasporic community are being shaped by local and external forces, including China’s increasing presence in the region. This essay hopes to serve as a guidepost to Chinese diaspora scholars interested in examining further the transhemispheric connections between the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

A Philippine ‘coolie trade’: Trade and exploitation of Chinese labour in Spanish colonial Philippines, 1850–98

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-483
Author(s):  
Mònica Ginés-Blasi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Coolie Trade

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

Deportation of “Undesirable” Chinese in the Philippines, 1837–1882

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-246
Author(s):  
Jely Agamao Galang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Supply ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The State ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Primary Materials

Abstract Between 1837 and 1882, the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines deported “undesirable” Chinese—vagrants, drunkards, unemployed, idlers, pickpockets, undocumented, and the “suspicious”—to various parts of the archipelago. Deportation, in this context, refers to the transportation or banishment of individuals deemed “dangerous” by the state to different far-flung areas of the islands or outside the colony but still within the Spanish empire. Deportation primarily served as a form of punishment and a means to rehabilitate and improve the wayward lives of “criminals.” This paper examines the deportation of “undesirable” Chinese in the nineteenth-century Philippines. Using underutilized primary materials from various archives in Manila and Madrid, it interrogates the actors, institutions and processes involved in banishing such individuals. It argues that while deportation served its punitive and reformative functions, Spanish authorities also used it to advance their colonial project in the islands. Chinese deportees formed part of the labor supply the state used to populate the colony’s frontier areas and strengthen its control over its newly-acquired territories.

‘The salvational currents of emigration’: Racial theories and social disputes in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-444
Author(s):  
Florentino Rodao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
White Race ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article analyses the changing significance of racial theories in the writings of Spanish emigrants in the late nineteenth century Philippines. Works by Antonio Cañamaque, Pablo Feced (Quioquiap), and Antonio Barrantes show how racialised understandings of colonial society in the Philippines evolved, from an initial dismissal of hybridism and rejection of mestizos to assertions of the innate superiority of the ‘white race’ and advocation of a rigid separation between local communities. These developments are considered in the context of the rising popularity of biological determinism alongside an influx of Spanish emigrants into the Philippines. The Spanish settlers used biological determinism to proclaim their role as the sole purveyors of both ‘progress’ and of a kind of egalitarianism. This article describes these debates and arguments, analyses their inconsistencies, and addresses the Filipino elite's responses to the settlers’ racial theories. These responses are read not simply as part of the development of Filipino nationalism, but as reflective of rivalries within the Spanish colonial community in the Philippines, where the locally born found additional reasons to support anticolonialism.

Latin American Cities

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-51
Author(s):  
Carles Crosas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Caribbean Sea ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Urban Imaginary ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
New Generation ◽  
American Cities

During the nineteenth century, capital cities in Latin America established a new generation of “green” grids, inherited from the tradition of Hispanic colonization that introduced new elements of modernity: technique, transport, and ecology. From hundreds of cases, it is worth paying attention to those that are most outstanding for embodying a number of characteristics: certain isolated condition, perfect geometrical layout, tram connection, “hygienist” inspiration, innovative engineering, new urban imaginary, etc. The brief presentation of some cases in Buenos Aires, México DF, Montevideo, and Sao Paolo leads the authors to assess the outstanding case of El Vedado in La Habana (1859) within its contemporary panorama. This is a canonical grid district settled in a vast and privileged area near the Caribbean Sea, with its quiet tree-lined streets and notable for its exquisite buildings. After 150 years, reviewing the transformation of this unique grid allows one to gain insight regarding the flexibility of urban grids, appreciate the splendour of its past, and explore the potential for its future.

Seeking Influence Abroad

2020 ◽  
pp. 209-253
Author(s):  
Atul Kohli
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Pacific Asia ◽  
The Caribbean

Born an anticolonial nation, the United States burst upon the global scene as an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter analyzes the American expansion into the Caribbean, Central America, and Pacific Asia. When the United States became a major industrial power in the late nineteenth century, it sought profit and power overseas, especially new economic opportunities. The United States experimented with colonialism but settled on creating stable but subservient regimes in peripheral countries as the main mechanism of control. Benefits to the United States included gains in trade, opportunities for foreign investments, and profitable loans. Countries under US influence, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Nicaragua, experienced some economic growth but became commodity exporters with sharp inequalities and poor-quality governments.

Colonial wars in Cuba and the Philippines in the Nineteenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Alistair Hennessy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

The wars in which Spain was involved in the nineteenth century were those of a declining, not an expanding imperialism. They were not frontier wars, nor wars of conquest but rather wars of national liberation, comparable to the War of American Independence, the Haitian Revolution or the wars of Latin American Emancipation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois Parkinson Zamora
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
The World ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Over Time

During the seventeenth century, the Baroque was exported wholesale to the areas of the world being colonized by Catholic Europe. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable, and in all areas colonized by Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed or were ignored for reasons of expediency. Asian influences arrived on the Nao de China (the Manila Galleon) with artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World baroque. And, in time, the baroque was also transformed in Europe by New World influences: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating).

From Bohemia to Balintawak

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Jose Rizal ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a seemingly unusual, but potentially illuminating, vantage point from which to approach the cosmopolitan dimensions of the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century — the Bohemian town of Litoměřice. It recounts the visit of Dr. José Rizal, the great Filipino novelist and celebrated progenitor of Philippine nationalism, to Leitmeritz and his relationship with Ferdinand Blumentritt, a local gymnasium teacher and avid student and scholar of Philippine history and society. The chapter provides a coherent narrative account, one whose emplotment follows the nationalist logic so prevalent in the study of Southeast Asian history. On the one hand, the revolution is said to have been led from above by urban — and highly urbane — educated young men familiar from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Filipino nationalists who emerged from Spanish colonial schools in the Philippines. On the other hand, the Philippine Revolution is also said to have been driven from below by a broader pool of the Filipino masses, by peasants and fishermen across the provinces of the archipelago, and by artisanal laborers in Manila and other port cities. The chapter argues that the struggles leading up to the Philippine Revolution can be understood in terms of what scholars have termed the “Culture Wars” of the late nineteenth century, a transcontinental if not global conflict pitting “anticlerical” scientists, Freemasons, liberals, and republicans against the Catholic Church in its ultramontane incarnation.

Masonería, Cofradía, Katipunan

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-71
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
International Context ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter argues that the Philippine Revolution of the late nineteenth century can be most fully understood in light of the international context in which it unfolded and the cosmopolitan mobilizing structures that enabled and impelled the trajectory it followed. The chapter suggests that the timing of the Philippine Revolution — late relative to South America, early in Southeast Asia — owed less to the nationalizing impact of Spanish colonial state formation than to the cosmopolitanizing consequences of the deepening integration of the Philippine archipelago within the world capitalist economy over the course of the nineteenth century. The chapter reviews the church's fundamental role in the formation of a modern public sphere in the Philippines and in linking the Philippines to the very same cultural, intellectual, and linguistic world of Christianity, which liberal and republican cosmopolitan challenges to the universalist claims of Rome had emerged. Ultimately, the chapter discusses how plebeian and egalitarian forms of brotherhood provided the basis for a revolution within the Revolution, with the associational form of the cofradía providing a popular vehicle for subaltern mobilization in many provinces across the archipelago.

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