LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

Promises of Freedom: Racial representation and visual perception of Chinese in coolie trafficking to Latin-America

• In Event: Chinese in colonial Cuba

Abstract

Between 1847-1874 a remarkable number of Chinese men abandoned China against Qing’s emigration policies. Since its defeat in the Anglo-Chinese war, meridional Chinese ports were used by Europeans, although many dealers from Latin America engage in the hooking, hiring, and selling, local labor force to replace slavery and voluntary work in Cuba island. Despite significant push factors related to socio-economic turmoil in China, immigration coolie must consider the promises of freedom that involve the morality of the coolie-dealer and the rational action of the coolie fooled. In this regard, nineteenth-century people conceived their own moral’s frames, which interpreted the coolie dealing as a business matter no as an issue of crime.
Based on the analytical notions of the production of the representation system, composed of individual and social factors, significant in the vision and perception of the sectors –in this case– dominant (coolie’s agent) on the dominated (labor force), will be studied the tension generated by the morality historical aspects, which defend colonization of the racial and civilizational weak sectors, as part of a Western modernist project. By analyzing the techniques and strategies of the main coolies’ traffickers, some of them from prestigious families in Latin America, to contracted Asian settlers in China to send it to Caribbean islands, it will be possible to observe the ethical-moral predicament, in a context where free labor and slavery involve labor force shapes that concern the social status of the worker.

Author

• Hernando Cepeda