Coolies into Returnees: Peruvian Chinese Destitution in the Wake of Indenture and Acts of Charity as Community Self-Governance in the Cantonese Pacific

• In Event: La Huella Asiática en América Latina: Agency, Transnational Politics, and International Identities

Abstract

In 1909, after decades of escalating efforts by Lima public officials to address the perceived sanitation threat posed by the growing barrio chino, mayor Guillermo Billinghurst razed Callejón Otaiza. The alley was one of the few places where poor Chinese, many of them former coolies, eked out a living among other members of Lima’s lower class sectors. The alley’s destruction left hundreds of Chinese homeless. In response, Chinese elites mobilized to remedy the situation by finding temporary housing and by arranging for the repatriation of large numbers of the displaced back to China. As part of these efforts, Peruvian Chinese elites founded the Milu huaqiao anjisuo (Peruvian Overseas Chinese Peaceful Gatherings Asylum) to house repatriated poorer members of the community back in Guangzhou, and initiated a series of forced repatriations. In Guangzhou the repatriates became poor guiqiao (returnees) who were dependent on the charity of their more successful compatriots. This paper examines how the Anjisuo, which was connected to the Nine Charitable Halls in Guangzhou, the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong, the Chinese Benevolent Association in Lima, and a host of smaller Chinese Benevolent and native place associations across Peru, functioned as an institutional node in a broader Cantonese Pacific formation. The paper explores how this formation, which was defined by the flow of people, goods, and money between the Pearl River Delta region and spaces across the Pacific, was also defined by the common use of charity as a translocal strategy of community self-governance.

Author

• Ana Maria Candela, Binghamton University