Institutionalizing Multiculturalism or Ghettoizing Difference?

• In Event: Ethnic Urbanisms in Latinx/Latin America

Abstract

Negotiating the Spatial Politics of Chineseness in Costa Rica’s Chinatown
In 2012, the mayor of San José, Costa Rica inaugurated the opening of a new Chinatown in San José’s city center. A municipal collaboration with Beijing, the new urban district was designed to promote tourism and memorialize a history of Chinese presence within the Costa Rican nation. From the outset, however, local critiques plagued the project, putting its assumptions and goals into question. Some locals complained that the project imposed a “foreign” culture onto a space of Hispanized identity and democratic traditions. Many members of the Chinese community, on the other hand, critiqued how the project perpetuated a history of Chinese ghettoization in Chinatowns across the Americas, thereby reifying their ethnic difference anew. These critics sought, instead, a Chinatown that could promote a more “modern” model of Chineseness, whose spatial arrangement and location reflected the glossy images of a cosmopolitan China. In this sense, the Chinatown operated as a space to debate competing ideas about the relationship between a familiar, “domesticated” China that was constitutive of Costa Rican national identity in the past and present, and a foreign but “rising” China to which Costa Rica’s future development prospects and/or problems were increasingly tied. Based on ethnographic research in San Jose, this paper explores the contours of this debate and its stakes for members of the Chinese community in Costa Rica. In particular, it engages the question of how ethnoracial forms of difference are spatialized within the city and linked to shifting geopolitical formations.

Author

• Monica C Dehart, University of Puget Sound