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

Chinese and Korean immigrant ideoscapes in Brazil: institutional and community trajectories

• In Event: Asian Communities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Appadurai in his discussion on ‘ideoscapes’ observes that nation-States exploit ‘heritage politics’ to construct a welcoming and idealized profile (1990: 304). The construction of the history of immigration in positive terms leads to the idealization of the nation-State: “the nation is imagined as a community because without considering inequality and exploitation that currently prevail, the nation is always conceived as a deep and horizontal companion” (Anderson, 1989: 16). Ethnography problematizes social interaction (Polezzi, 2012). It records the psychic (Christian & Churchill, 2005) as well as legal dilemmas of moral recognition as this is linked to who becomes visible or remains invisible in terms of legal residence, citizenship or deportation (Domenech, 2015; Marinucci, 2016). Within a legal institutional framework, immigration is not only about human diaspora. There is a sociology of actors involved in the legal ruling; circumstantial arguments must be organized and represented according to truth values in institutional knowledge vis à vis social imagery and social indifference (Angermuller, 2018; Bloor, 1991; Herzfeld, 1992; Van Dijk, 2014) This paper focuses upon Chinese and Korean immigrant trajectories in Brazil in both an institutional and community sense through Koreans and their involvement in sweat shops in São Paulo and the more specific trajectory of the life of a Chinese immigrant woman who works in a street market in Brasília.

Author

• Rachael A. Radhay, Universidade De Brasília