From Compradors to Hacendados: Towards an Asian Settler Colonial History of Chinese Migrations to Peru

• In Event: Asian Migrations and Settler Colonialism in Latin America

Abstract

Chinese merchants from Hong Kong-based Gold Mountain commercial firms (Jinshan zhuang) began establishing branch firms in Peru during the 1870s and 1880s. They first established branches in Lima, then expanded Chinese commercial networks across the interior of Peru. Functioning as a comprador trading class, their efforts became foundational to the integration of a modern Peruvian national market and its articulation with the global economy, particularly with an expanding East Asian regional economy tied to US, British and Japanese commercial networks in the Pacific.

The arrival of these merchants coincided with Peruvian schemes encouraging white settler colonial immigration projects, which failed to attract European settlers but led to new projects to attract Asian labor. By the 1920s, a group of these Chinese merchants had risen to economic prominence within Peru by expanding beyond their commercial undertakings to become hacendados, who owned or rented cotton and sugar plantations and employed large mestizo labor forces. Some of these Chinese elites even joined together to form their own trans-Pacific steamship line.

This paper examines the settler colonial visions of space, population and development that underpinned the Peruvian migration debates of the 1870s and 1880s and explores how they were tied to a shift towards a new mode of production in Peru, which Chinese migrant elites of the late 19th and early 20th century embraced. The paper explores how this settler colonial imaginary shaped a new politics of representation among the Peruvian elite, which Chinese merchants and hacendados adopted in crafting self-representations during the 1920s. Such representations included adopting a politics of paternalism towards mestizo workers, which justified the exploitation of those workers, as revealed in Chinese community albums and worker petitions of the 1920s.

Author

• Ana Maria Candela, Binghamton University