We're very excited to be back uh this semester uh where the lecture series is focusing on the
issue of Chinese migration, we're going to be looking at a movement of Chinese people globally,
as well as domestically, historically, as well as in the contemporary moment. And uh
I'm super excited about this, it's linked to a new course that I'm teaching, I'm pleased to see
a number of my students here. Um I want to thank the East Asia Program for making this happening,
obviously we had initially planned to do this in person um and, like everything else,
we're making do. Um but uh it's it's gonna be a really great series uh and and pleased that
that East Asia Program has been able to continue uh to support this. Before we turn it over to
our speaker, just a few housekeeping items. Um the first is I just want to alert everyone to the next
CCCI event, we're going to be inviting Chenchen Zhang here she's giving a talk called "Hukou and
Suzhi as Technologies of Governing Citizenship and Migration". It's going to be March 8th at 2:30 PM.
Um there's going to be another event in March on March 18th called "Inequality, Labor,
and Migration in East Asia Through the Prism of the Global Pandemic", so these should both be
really excellent events and I believe information to those has just been posted into the chat.
While Professor Candela is giving her talk, we ask that everyone keep their their audio muted uh and
your video off in order to save on bandwidth um and we would invite you to to turn both of those
back on during Q&A while you're posing questions. You can either use the raise hand function um,
if you prefer to just post something in the chat, then I'll be monitoring that and I can
and then I can pose them to Professor Candela. So, um with that, I just want to say that we
are extremely pleased to welcome Ana Candela as the first speaker in this lecture series um
Professor Candela is an assistant professor of sociology at Binghamton University uh which is
just down the road in Binghamton. Today actually Ana is joining us from Paris, France. Uh like many
of us her, plans have been thrown up in the air uh and so that is uh partially why we're we're doing
this talk somewhat earlier than than usual um given uh given the time difference and we're glad
that she's able to sort of join us from across the ocean. Um her work, I won't say much about it,
but she she takes a global perspective on Chinese migration and specifically is looking at Cantonese
migration to Latin America uh in the 19th and early 20th century and she's currently writing
a book on this very topic. So I'll leave it at that and now I'll turn it over to Ana.
Thank you Eli um let me to switch over and share my screen if you'll give me one second to adjust.
So I'm honored to be here and uh I'm really um pleased that everyone could
join us this morning um it's to see 40 people at 9:30 in the morning is a wonderful treat.
I want to thank Professor Eli Friedman for inviting me to speak. I first met Professor
Friedman in Guangzhou when I was beginning just beginning my research and had no idea what this
project would be, so it's actually quite a treat to be able to share what came out of that moment.
And I also would like to thank Amala for making all the arrangements for today, as well as the
East Asia Program and the Contemporary China Initiative at Cornell University for hosting this
this talk this morning. It's my great honor to be here to open the speaker series today.
So my talk today is entitled from Compradors to Hacendados: Cantonese Merchants In Peru and
the Expanding Settler Colonial Frontiers of the Cantonese Pacific. It draws on a book project that
I'm working on, which is titled Peruvian Chinese "Intimate Others: Peruvian Chinese Between Native
Place, Nation, and World, 1880s - 1940s". The book will examine a series of print capitalist projects
produced by Cantonese, either in Peru or in their native places of Guangdong province, who maintain
very close ties to Peru. And the book will situate these projects within a global settler colonial
moment to examine the distinct ways in which settler colonialism, as a global structure,
reshaped the Pacific during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and also shaped the
subjectivities, the imaginaries, and the life trajectories of Cantonese migrants, moving or
traveling back and forth between Guangdong and Peru. These are people that we might consider
Peruvian-Chinese, but that's also a term that must be historicized. But I won't deal with that today,
so what I'll do with my talk is um sort of move through several sections of my talk and after each
major section I will pause for a few minutes and take a couple of questions, just to break up the
Zoom fatigue that can quite easily set in. I'll start off doing a little bit of reading, but, as
we move more closely into the archival materials and case studies, then I can sort of ad lib
more uh to also not be reading a paper, which can be quite exhausting for everybody to listen
to on Zoom. So, if you get lost along the way, if I don't explain something clearly,
please let me know, there will be times and opportunities to ask questions as we move forward.
So, let me begin by taking you back into 1920s Peru. In 1921,
in commemoration of the Centennial Anniversary of Peruvian Independence,
the China Legation in Lima and prominent members of the Chinese community in Peru raised funds
to commission a marble fountain from Italy for Lima's Park of the Exposition. The arrival of the
fountain in 1924 occasioned an inaugural ceremony and the publication of the Album of the Chinese
Colony in Peru, which commemorated the success of the prominent Chinese of the Chinese community and
its contributions to Peru's national development by featuring the colony's prominent commercial and
agricultural elite across all the northern coastal provinces of the nation. The fountain offered an
allegory of the album's narrative in material form. At the top of the fountain, in the photo on
the left, a group of racialized figures depicted nature lavishing her protection upon the races,
portraying a scene of racial hierarchy and uplift that invoked the production of nature through the
practice of agriculture as a civilizing process. At the base of the fountain, the figures of a man
and a woman, this is on the right hand photograph you can kind of see them just a little bit
towards the bottom, a figure of a man and of woman are accompanied each by a small child and each
child is pouring water from their respective jugs into the fountain's basin, signaling that the rice
and silk of the Yangtze Valley have arrived at the banks of the Amazon River and the coffee and sugar
of Chanchamayo Valley have arrived at the ports of the Huanghe River. As Henry Lefebvre noted
in his work, "On the Social Production of Space", such monuments invoked the splendor and meaning,
but also the power and domination that accompany the state mode of production, as it works to
territorialize and produce the national space. In commissioning and inaugurating the fountain
and album, Chinese elites in Peru crafted an image of the Chinese colony that situated the community
within the Peruvian state's mode of production during the aristocratic republic of 1884 to 1930.
Towards these ends, the fountain communicated messages that associated national and racial
progress with the harnessing and distribution of nature's bounty, through the circulation
of raw materials and commodities in national and global markets. And yet, when read critically, the
fountain also contained messages about power and domination. It communicated messages of racial,
spatial, and class hierarchies, namely of the domination of the educated, civilized, urban
creel and immigrant elite over backwards, rural, and laboring peasant Mestizos, Indios, colonos,
and, by extension, even the former Black slaves and Chinese coolies, who had once labored in large
numbers on Peruvian plantations. The fountain also conveyed messages about the universality of these
racial and spatial hierarchies as the fault lines of power, progress, civilization, and development
across the world during the early 20th century. Thus, in commissioning the fountain, the elite
of the Chinese colony in Peru sought to position themselves towards the top of the hierarchy within
the Peruvian state's mode of production, but also within capitalism's global division of labor,
by situating the Chinese and Peruvian nations and peoples towards the top of these hierarchies.
Well, Adam McKeown has recognized the fountain and the album of the Chinese
colony as expressions of a cosmopolitan identity, crafted by Chinese transnational commercial elite,
in connection with the nation making agendas of the Peruvian state and its aristocratic republic.
I would like to probe these identity making efforts further by examining their settler
colonial dimensions and situating them within what Henry Yu describes as the Can- as the
Cantonese Pacific: a diasporic social world that took shape from the 1850s to the 1940s during the
era of mass Cantonese or Chinese migrations across the Pacific, which corresponded with
what Lorenzo Veracini describes uh in the 19th century as the global settler colonial moment.
My goal is to overcome some dimensions um uncover some dimensions of this Cantonese-specific world,
but to also recover what Lisa Lowe recognizes as the often obscure,
racial inst intimacies created by the co-emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the
Americas, the Transatlantic slave trade, and the expansion of the East this and the I would argue
and also the Transpacific coolie labor trade, as she does, and the expansion of the East Indies and
China trades. So to accomplish this, I build on a recent set of studies emerging from East Asian,
Asian American ethnic studies on Asians and settler colonialism.
There's not a tremendous amount of work that has been done on this topic, but it is beginning to
emerge. Um, it's one area is on the expansion of the Japanese Empire and the movement of
Asians through imperial expansion projects, and especially similar colonial projects, into the
Americas. The works of Sidney Xu Lu and Eiichiro Azuma track these migrations um and also look at
how the the the movement of Japanese settlers into the North America, and also South America,
were part of an effort to and and conceptualize as part of the building of a borderless empire using
migrants and settler colonial migration companies and schemes to advance a project in which an
imperial project in which colonization and the bringing of land into development was considered
a force of progress in a global context and by immigrants traveling abroad and doing that for
other peoples in other nations, they could earn the skills and contribute to national development
projects elsewhere that would also feed back uh benefits towards the empire. But in the process
of migrating, they also encountered encountered tremendous amounts of racism by white settlers and
by the northern uh by the nation-states of North America. And this forced the sort of borderless
empire of Japan to sort of look elsewhere and develop settler colonial schemes in other parts
of the empire other parts of the world in the Pacific, including moving some of them into South
America to create a new kind of model of settler colonialism that was more hospitable than the
settler colonialism of of the which was defined by a white anti-Asian racism in North America.
China as well um had also some um visions of migration as a form of colonialism, or
specifically settler colonialism. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Chinese were
not in any capacity colonizing anyone around the world, but there were intellectuals, reformers,
revolutionaries, who were concerned with China's deteriorating position in a global context,
who began to regard the large Chinese diaspora on the world as a potential source of economic,
cultural, and social progress, and for helping the transformation of China into a modern
nation state. And they begin to play around with imaginaries of Chinese migrants, uh in Chinese
migration, as a form of colonization, drawing specifically on white settler colonial nations
where uh immigrants-turned-settlers uh become a kind of model, although for the Chinese imaginary,
the Huacheng, the overseas Chinese migrant, is really a sojourner, so he doesn't go abroad
to settle permanently, as much as he remains very devoted to, is supposed to be remain very
devoted to his native place and his nation, and make contributions and return back home
and also working contributing his experience and his returns, both financially and his returns
home, to the progress and development and racial uplift and national uplift of a struggling nation.
So, uh in there's not a lot of systematic studies on on this dynamic between migration as a form of
colonization, but we do know from the works of people like some research by Evelyn Hu-Dehart,
a little bit of research by Tang Yaobing, that both figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao,
who were essential to the reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
uh were advocates of this. Kang Youwei looked to um, after the end of the failure of the
late teen reforms, went to North America and ended up in Mexico, where he was um
involved in helping to finance and to expand and to purchase land in Torreón, Mexico, where there
was a huge truck-farming population of Chinese there were truck-farms, there were farmer owners,
as well as large Chinese laboring populations, one of the largest concentrations in South America
at the time. Uh and Liang Qichao, who also was went into exile after the failure of the reforms,
started to travel abroad and saw and, through his traveling experiences, began to imagine migration,
travel, and sojourning, as colonization uh because it connected Chinese migrants and travelers across
the world to processes of capitalist development and to the capitalist mode of development,
exposing them to new mechanisms for modern world making, uh to modernizing enterprises,
to things that could then strengthen the nation and uh equip the people for racial uplift and
national survival in a global, Darwinian struggle for survival between nations.
But the most path-breaking work path-breaking work thus far has been the work of Shelly Chan,
"Diaspora's Homeland". Uh, in this book, she tracks diasporic moments,
these kinds of moments when what was happening in the diaspora came flooding back home
to China, forcing a kind of recognition of the experiences of the diaspora as somehow related to
modern nation making and what it meant for China to exist in a global context
and one of the moments she tracks uh in her book is the 1920s and 1930s when the first sort of
systematic studies by Chinese sociologists and anthropologists of overseas Chinese begins to
get underway. It's in that moment when a big debate unfolds around migration, is it a form
of colonization and is it a force of progress and development that china could harness in a
global context? And one of the figures who was part of this production of this research
was Chen Da, uh one of the first sociologists of migrations, who studied migrations of Chinese and
their laboring conditions outside beyond China, then subsequently, a couple of decades later,
produced a book on the impact of migrations on their native places in the social, cultural,
economic uplift they brought. Ultimately, he would draw on a lot of this knowledge in the 1940s, in
the wake of the war with Japan, to conceptualize migrations within China, of Han people from the
coastal, more developed areas to the western, the southwestern, northwestern provinces, uh as
a force of settlement and progress and development that could help China recover during the war, to
recover after the war, and be a force of national salvation. So these things uh have lingering
histories, this earlier moment um could that continue to reiterate and and are with us today,
if we think about Han migrants in Xinjiang and we can discuss that a little bit later if you'd like.
So, aside from the work of Asian scholars, um there are two pieces of scholarship that
have been fundamentally um critical for me in developing a very sharp critique
of the position of Asians as if their colonists in the Americas, has been in the work of um of
Asian American scholars um Candace Fujikane and Jonatham Okamura,
took up the the critique of Haunani-Kay Trask, a native Hawaiian scholar, an activist who
criticized Asians as being not simply victims and seeing themselves for not simply as simply victims
of settler colonialism in Hawaii, but also needing to recognize that they have been uh beneficiaries
of so of settler colonialism uh because once they left the conditions of the laboring conditions on
the plantations and settled into native Hawaiian society, they actually benefited uh and through
the of this they benefited from the structures of settler colonialism at the expense of the native
Hawaiian peoples. And so Okamura and Fujikane uh put forward this critique and urged Asian
American scholars to embrace it and it has led to a tremendous interrogation of the complex
positions of Asian Americans in Hawaii and in the Americas and new work is unfolding out of that.
Some of that work is Iyko Day's work, "Alien Capital", which looks at how uh the Chinese,
um situated on the American frontier, the railroad workers in North America and in Canada and the US,
uh became a sort of racialized other that became associated by white laborers and white settlers
with all of the abstract and negative um um prices paid by labor uh, as they become
incorporated into industrial capitalism. So all the abstract processes like alienation uh,
from the means of production, um the stereotypes against Asian workers are really the the the
mechanisms that used to displace those alienations and those processes onto the bodies of Asians.
And it allows the white worker to sort of cover up his own complicity uh in the process of
settler colonialism to view himself as a victim and not have to deal with the
victimhood and the dispossession of indigenous peoples and land and the displacement that
their process of becoming workers, white workers, um produces within this settler colonial context.
So, these works have helped to bring forward a very critical perspective on settler colonialism,
race relations, labor relations, and capitalism, and the nuances of that.
Now to bring all of this together, one of the largest challenges of my project,
coming out of grad school, moving into producing a book really to figure out how to bring a history
that is a transnational history of Chinese moving from South China into Peru and Latin America
into a global context, but also a hemispheric context of in the Americas, but in East Asia
context, a Pacific context, how to juggle these multiple spatialities and multiple histories
that are kind of jostling uh with one another and in order to tell the story of Peruvian-Chinese,
the reference must continuously be made to these processes that work at multiple scales.
And for me, it's been the work of Henry Yu on the Cantonese-Pacific that has been the most
productive and the most useful framework to draw on, so let me explain briefly
uh why I think of this. Um first, Henry Yu really recognizes like Elizabeth Sinn in her book on the
Pacific crossings, that the emergence in 1850 of Hong Kong as a hub for Transpacific shipping,
trade, and travel uh that was intimately linked to the emergence of San Francisco
as a hub on the of the Pacific trade in the Americas uh, tied not only to the gold rush
but also the expansion of the American and the closing of the American frontier,
um really shifted the dynamics of migration within China. And because of the emergence of Hong Kong,
the vast majority of people who moved out of China and started to migrate across the Pacific,
to the Americas, to Australia, to New Zealand and to fill the settler colonial
and labor and commercial needs of these expanding settler colonial nations were really Cantonese
people instead of the Fujianese migrants who have, of an earlier period, moved down towards Southeast
Asia. So the vast majority of migrants moving across the Pacific were Cantonese, taking their
their language and their kinship and their business networks with them, but also
even Fujianese and other Chinese migrants who wanted to move out across the Pacific were leaving
from Hong Kong. So even Cantonese commercial firms and travel networks and the credit ticket systems
were the ones mediating a lot of these migrations. So for him it was very much uh for Henry it was
very much a Cantonese-Pacific moment that emerges. And so, for Henry Yu, this is a world that is kind
of like a an expanding world and, and I think Arif Dirlik put it best in his uh analysis of Chinese
on the American frontier, that what you have, and when this Cantonese-Pacific world expands,
as it's moving, it is a frontier of Asians, not just Cantonese we cannot Japanese as well,
there is an Asian-moving frontier that is moving eastward across the pacific and eastward across
the Americas that moves together and and collides with and clashes in the middle, with a westward
moving white, settler colonial frontier and as this Cantonese-Pacific expands, it is continuously
encountering efforts uh, either through racialized exclusion acts, which are legal acts, or acts of
racial violence that push back the frontiers of this world. And like the scholars of settler
colonialism in the Japanese empire, what Henry Yu notices is that the Cantonese-Pacific world
is subject to a lot of shifting rhythms and routes because it depends on the temporalities
of exclusion acts and violence, but this that the possibility to move to some places
of North America become impossible and that the migrations then shift southward into South America
and there's all it's kind of like a jazz symphony that the the migrants in the Cantonese-Pacific
are moving around, responding to the pressures and opportunities made available to them in the
Americas at any given moment or in the broader pacific at any given moment, so there's a lot to
actually keep in mind when we are tracking the movements of peoples um in this world.
Okay, um for me to put the Cantonese-Pacific in this global settler colonial moment
is an important thing to do because uh it tells us something about what W.E.B Du Bois described as
the creation of a world in the 20th century, defined by a deepening global color line
and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have done tremendous work to trace out the actually
ideologies of whiteness that came to shape um this world of the like the late 19th and early
20th centuries, through the expansion of white men settler colonial nations. Uh but I think
that adding and the stories of the Chinese uh tells us something really important about how
Asian peoples, Indigenous peoples Black peoples um across the Pacific contributed tremendous amounts
of labor and capital and initiative to the making of a modern world, but ultimately were excluded
through racial acts of exclusion, whether they were legal or violence, uh based on violence,
that uh through settler colonial expansion of settler colonial processes helped to shape a
world made for white men, dominated for white men, organized by white men and that it was white men
who got to set the terms of that organization and who would become the beneficiaries of that world.
And we see this sort of playing out um in this history quite um clearly.
Let me um return to Glen Coulthard later, but let me pause for a minute and see if anyone has
questions at the moment before I move back into the case studies
um from the research. It's a lot of historiography and scholarly pieces to move together.
Okay, so we continue then.
All right, well thank you. Let me take you back to Peru. So,
when this album was produced uh in 1920, there had already been a history of Chinese migrations
obviously at this point uh, Chinese migrations unfolded in two ways. The first was from 1849
to 1874 and these were the coolie labor migrations of people who signed contracts, whether they were
tricked, or free, or often times not um very clear what was going to happen to them, they moved from
South China to Lima, to the port of Callao, which is close to Lima in the city, and then
most of them were redistributed in the northern coastal provinces that you see here from Lima,
Ica also but up northward, some in Arequipa, but mostly moving into plantation production of sugar
and cotton to replace um a dwindling uh black slave labor force, as uh all of the world moved
for more forward towards abolition. Uh and this ended in 1874, when reports of abuses
of the coolie labor trade to both Cuba and Peru uh became so disconcerting that the Qing Empire
actually sent an investigative commission to Cuba and was supposed to also go to Peru, but was
unable to complete its project because Peru ended up having a crisis in war uh so but though the the
report from Cuba, the Cuba commission report, was so damaging that it enabled the Qing to bring a
complete end to the coolie labor trade, both in Cuba and Peru. And then subsequently, in 1884,
they would the Qing would then send the investigative commission to Peru to try
to tease out from the remaining Chinese on the coastal regions who, some of them continued to
work out their contracts on the plantations of the conditions that they lived under.
Many of these migrants came from the popular uh uh immigrant districts of South China,
so these are the spaces I wanted to show you that we're going to be
referencing today. They came predominantly you see Hong Kong in the lower right hand corner with a
in red and they came predominantly from all of these immigrant districts, but the elite
that I will be talking about uh very closely came almost all of them from Zhongshan County,
and with Macau very close by, it's no coincidence that one of the people taking, who I will mention,
his village was very close to Macau, he became someone who participated in the Qing investigative
commission and that facilitated later he was that one of the main people who opened um the movement
of free migrants to Peru, uh claiming there were a lot of opportunities there. Uh so the the
while Chinese, who moved to Peru uh, ended up the coolies ended up in the northern coastal areas, as
many of them finished their contracts, they also began to move out. They began to move out into the
Amazonian regions uh and to the Andean Highlands as well. Some of them escaped as fugitives,
kind of like a fugitive slave and disappeared, others, as they transitioned out of the contracts,
either they recontracted or they transitioned back into the local communities, uh taking up commerce,
partnering with local women, having local children, intermarrying, and kind of
folding into the local population and gradually disappearing that way. But when um the the the
merchants that I will be discussing uh went in the 1880s as part of the second wave of migrations,
free migrations, they encountered already huge populations of freed and kind of settled Chinese
inhabiting the coastal areas of Northern um Northern Peru. Okay,
so when the elites from Zhongshan start to move over there, they're moving at a moment when uh
there is a huge national reconstruction project in Peru, because there's been a war with Chile,
that ended in 1884, and the the economy, the landscape, and and particularly their plantations,
because there are huge coolie uprisings as part of this war uh coolies welcomed their arrival up to
the Chilean army and helped to ransack and destroy and burn and kill people on the plantations.
Uh, so it's a very destroyed uh uh atmosphere and economically very destroyed and needing to
be rebuilt, and all across Latin America there was this need and this sort of consideration
of national development in the wake of um national liberation, the revolutions. So these
post-colonial nations are struggling to figure out how to develop uh as robust, strong, independent,
nation states that can also survive in the national on the national stage and there's a
kind of urge to get agricultural production going, this is part of the pattern in Latin America that
leads to resource dependency that was already established during the colonial period, is now
continuing this need to rely on agricultural production as a mechanism or mineral extraction
as the mechanism by which national economies can become robust and self-sufficient, but because of
the moral stigma with plantation agricultural and slavery, there's a consideration of the need to
move towards small small farming in Latin America or the desire to move towards small farming and
Juan Bautista Alberdi is one of the people who is sort of at the front forefront of thinking about
this, he comes up with the idea that to govern is to populate and what Latin American nations could
do is to sort of bring settler colonists from Europe, especially Northern Europe, where they're
super white, a robust race of people, who can come and take up settler colonial agriculture
and bring more land to production, small farming ventures, and these states could then give them
land and tools to get them going. Now, some nations like Argentina did a lot with this
but um Peru, which tried to, was very not was not very successful at doing this
and drew on the ideas of Alberti and it tried to create a couple projects, but they failed
and then they started to have discussions in the newspapers, the liberal elite who came to power
in the wake of the war, thinking that maybe we can look at other labor sources again. So they begin
to look at South Asia, but they decide that South Asians, while a very good labor force, they don't
want to compete with the British Empire, this might get them into trouble in the sugar market,
and so they want to avoid any complications with Britain. And then so they look to Indochina
and then that falls apart for some reason in their imagination and they start to think again
about the Chinese but, like the Indochinese, these are sort of poor people, but then they
look to North America, where there's a different population of Chinese, the Gold Mountain Guests,
uh the ones who arrived on the credit-ticket system, rather than a coolie labor trade system,
uh the ones that are sort of entrepreneurially minded, independent, who take on debt, who
migrate, become successful workers or successful businessmen, establish their own enterprises,
pay off their debt, and then become really example immigrants, model kind of minority figures.
And so they decide that maybe this is the way to go and so if Peru offers a sort of
settler colonial scheme for these people then they can come and settle and bring more land
into production and help Peru integrate its national economy and help it integrate more
closely with the global economy and become a more successful nation. None of this ever happens,
the imaginaries, however, continue and the imaginaries become a dynamizing force of what
is actually happening on the ground and I will explain what is actually happening on the ground
bit by bit, but let me begin first by showing you what these imaginaries kind of look like.
These new-had demonic visions um were first presented to the world in publications of
print capitalist publications and community albums like the album of 1915, "Lima Grafico",
which was produced by the Lima elite, for Lima and for the larger nation to reposition Lima
as a city um as the modern metropole tied to the global economy and as a hub of a new commercial
aristocracy. Chinese commercial elites appeared in "Lima Grafico" as members of this aristocracy,
if you look at the bottom right two pictures, you see which is the famous Wing On Chong & Xia,
which is the famous Wing On company, a branch a subsidiary of Wing On, which is one of the four
huge commercial firms the um department stores that were born out of Zhongshan and Hong Kong and
they had branches in Shanghai from migrants who had gone to Australia. And Pow Lung & Xia is also
a huge commercial firm in established in Lima, by the person who was a member of the investigative
Qing investigative commission report. These are two of the most powerful figures of the community,
so they figure in this community album.
Um but then they also want to these elites and want to not only represent be represented
alongside the Peruvian elite, but they also choose to create their own album in 1924,
as I mentioned in my introduction, to demonstrate how um they themselves fit into the national
imaginary, on their own terms. So, following the precedent set by Lima, Chinese elites
pictured their businesses as part of an expanding network of institutions and infrastructures that
facilitated the flows of capital and commodities that were integrating the national economy and
connecting the national economy with a global economy. So they've pictured themselves inside
of their commercial firms and their businesses like we see here with Aurelio Pow San Chia, the
godfather of the community, the individual who was part of the Qing investigative commission,
he was um returned in 1884 to open this commercial forum uh in Peru, but it he was an
importer of so-called Chinese luxury goods uh, for example silk and tea, for the Peruvian market, but
these firms also traded and dealt with a lot of regional products in Peru and circulated regional
products, so while they uh sold themselves as importers and exporters, they were also very much
involved in the creation of in the integration of regional commercial circuits within Peru.
But when they picture themselves, they talk less about that and and then they advertise all of the
other businesses in Peru that they're connected to they're connected to banking systems, German,
Italian banks, they're connected to national railway projects, and even to a shipping
railroad project, a shipping line that they tried to establish. Uh one of the things that we see is
that the importance of Hong Kong in this uh because in the Banco Aleman Transatlantico,
the bottom right hand advertisement of a German bank, transatlantic German bank, it's actually
a Transpacific German bank as well, with branches in Hong Kong, and when you read the advertisement
that they're making for the can the Chinese language readers, what all of these banks
who advertise in this community album are telling the Chinese audience is if you come to our bank,
then we have special agent who speaks Chinese and then we have a firm also our branch in Hong Kong
and they can process your remittances and they help you with the Transpacific
business um transactions that you need to engage in. So, it's actually a very much a commercial
world that they're part of and an expanding world of capitalist banking and railroads
and infrastructure that links a Transpacific and a transatlantic world, all of these people
are our entrepreneurs who are sort of moving into Peru and Latin America with the new opportunities
available in the area and the Chinese are simply just one of the groups that are benefiting from
that. Uh the Chinese are uh elite, the continuous elite, um the Zhongshan elite in particular
become such a powerful group um that they the elite are all serving this, like a group
of about a dozen of them, the biggest plantation and commercial firm earners by the 1920s who are
they are all sort of serving us the board of dir on the board of directors of the Benevolent
Association of the Zhongshan uh Native Place Association of also they've established this
conglomeration to form a shipping line, a conglomeration to form an insurance company,
and they've also got a newspaper that they're running all together. So it's a pretty tight group
of people running this community and choosing how they're going to represent themselves.
Aside from positioning themselves within the global circuits of capitalism and as movers
and shakers within that, that they are also uh featuring themselves in the album as settlers
um using photography as a mechanism by which to open uh up their interior spaces of their homes,
which is quite unusual. Um and so Aurelio Pow San Chia, the godfather of this community, is sort
of a key figure in this process of of presenting himself and encouraging the community to present
themselves as localized population because so many of the pressures against them, anti-Asian
sentiments targeting them as foreign workers, uh as foreign um businessmen who were robbing the
poor, Peruvian, uh working class uh everything was about their commercial activity as poor laborers
to former coolies who were contaminating the national market area the the market area in Lima,
everything was really about their impact on the Peruvian public through their public activities,
so opening up spaces and and giving vision to the way they lived on the inside of their homes
as settled, domesticated, bourgeois individuals, who are part of this aristocratic republic,
serve as a way to counteract that. And Aurelia Pow San Chia was a strong advocate of localization
as one of the mechanisms for integration and to counteracting anti-Asian racism, not only
through advocating for this, but also through intermarriage. He married a Peruvian woman, who's
pictured here, and instead of having children with her maybe they couldn't, but he adopted her niece
and nephew and their families as his children, and so he became emblematic of an integrated sort of
mesti- of family where mestizaje takes place and so very much appropriate models for um becoming
Peruvian subjects. And in addition to picturing their homes, they also pictured their plantations.
So, these were sites where the rural and the urban met. They depicted
modern machinery on the plantation spaces in the rural spaces, especially the modern sugar mill,
which you can see on the top right hand side, and they pictured on the on,
you see on the left-hand side, uh a white um North American white-collared engineer,
who was one of the is involved in sort of in uh rationalizing and making more efficient
plantation production from the labor on the plantation, rationalizing the work of the workers
to the way that the sugar mill was run. All of this was done to maximize profit and efficiency
on the plantation, so this effort to picture the plantation was not simply to say we also do
this kind of work, we have a successful commercial business and a successful agricultural business,
but also to talk about how they are contributing to the economic advancement of the Peruvian nation
through these engineering and rationalization efforts. They also talk about this in the bottom
right hand side picture, the workers inside the sugar mill as people who benefit from this sort of
rationalization of production um in in the this produces the racial uplift of the mestizo worker,
so they're very much positioning themselves in the state's project to create a a functional uh
working class, uh mestizo working subject, rather than the indigenous subject,
and uh to bring everything sort of integrated for and maximize production for the global economy.
So this creates connecting them closely to the state's mode of production to integrate
the rural agriculture areas, which were sort of lingering behind. But in the process, they picture
themselves sort of out there, on the landscape kind of like John Wayne-esque figures, um you
know with these very romantic imaginaries, um sort of settler colonial horseback riding, enjoying
the leisurely, romantic, pastoral settings and lifestyles of the haciendas, complete with cattle,
dogs, porches, families, and gardens, and through these visions, they combine the rural, pastoral,
nomad, romantic, and leisurely countryside with the industrial, productive, efficient, and urban
modes of production. Cantonese elites use these to position themselves as kind of model citizens,
um model settlers, in a new aristocratic republic and participants in this ongoing
structure of plantations as spaces of settler colonialism within the state's mode of production.
All right, let me pause here before I complicate this picture a little bit more. So this is how
Asians are sort of, Asian immigrants, and particularly Chinese or Cantonese elite from
Zhongshan, are beneficiaries and perhaps even in some ways agents of these processes
of the expansion of settler colonialism. And does anyone have any questions at the moment?
I see a question from Mimi
Yes, I think we have a question from Michelle. [guest] Hi
yes thank you for um coming to talk with us. My question was about how you're discussing these
migrants within the racial hierarchy and I was wondering if you could provide more information on
how um Cantonese migrants viewed themselves like in relation to as you're saying like local
populations mestizo and indigenous populations and how like their view
of themselves sort of like affected their relationship with those people. [speaker] Um so
it's complicated uh it's complicated because um you know first uh the history of the migration
happened in two waves. The coolies um, because they were bachelor communities,
uh with uh they as soon as they were able to even on the plantations, when they had liaisons with
local women, they were black women and they were indigenous women and sometimes mestizo women,
and when they transitioned out of the plantations and settled, they also pursued relationships with
these kinds of local women, but more increasingly towards mestizo women, they married within the
church, they sought um padrinajes, padrinos, which are like godfathers of the church,
you have to have somebody sort of testify for you from the larger communities, oftentimes mestizo
populations, so the early migrants, out of the necessity just to sort of integrate and survive,
because there were not Chinese women around, um tended to mix in with the local population and
then produce mixed offspring. And when they were doing that I'm not sure that the mestizaje project
was really so strongly conceptualized that they were trying to desire to use it was so out of
necessity and for survival. So, with regard to the later migrants, the elite that come, the free
migrants, I haven't found traces of any kind of pejorative view towards of the mestizo population.
This is not uh there's not a sense of a record that they certainly probably had ideas um and I
imagine that they had ideas that were very similar to white Europeans, um white North American
populations, whiter Creole populations that, to be Creole to be white or to be whiter is better,
so that mestizos were okay, but you don't want to associate with the indigenous people so
much. They took a much more strategic approach in their intermarriage practices, which tells
you something of their belief systems, that they chose to move up in the racial hierarchy,
they chose to marry the daughters of these mixed-race marriages because they could have
access to somebody who spoke the language, because many of them are Cantonese speakers,
but they chose to marry mestizo women or, on rare occasions like Aurelio Pow San Chia, they could
to marry somebody who fit into the white or Creole population, although that was a little bit rarer.
So the mestizaje was the mechanism through which they could enter into a kind of whitening
trajectory, and mestizaje was a whitening project anyway, so they were just sort of
following those trajectories. I think we see that more closely through their marriage practices
than we're able to tell by their writings at all. Later in the 1930s, which I won't talk about
today, there is a project um, a magazine called "Oriental" that gets produced, which becomes
the voice of a new generation the offspring of these guys that I'm talking about today
and they create their own mestizaje project, which they call themselves "tusán", which comes from the
Chinese Tushan, which is locally-born Chinese, and that's a kind of mixed population, some of them
are offspring of Chinese and Peruvian parentage and it come becomes a catch-all category, so they
create their own sort of category for fitting into the mestizaje project of the nation.
Is that enough for you and to answer your question? [guest]
Yes, thank you! [speaker] Okay, you're welcome okay so is there anyone else at the moment?
Okay, then I'll continue and complicate this um and talk about the victimization of Asians um and
the complexities of that. Here's more settler colonial visions of the plantations. Um so um,
one of the places where we get a different picture of the real complex realities beneath the settler
colonial imaginaries that these uh hacendados, these Cantonese, are are presenting of themselves
is in the uh cases um that have been filed and with the Ministry of Development. The Ministry
of Development creates the labor section in the 1920s because there is so much uh labor
unrest and complaints coming in, specifically from the plantations, because the labor unions
are really quite active in the cities, so that seems to be the main realm of activities for
labor resistance. Um but in the countryside there's there seems to be a greater need
for a mechanism to address the problems there, and so in the labor petitions, by
people working on the plantations, you you they're they're against all kinds of hacendados,
not just the Chinese, but you have a handful of cases against the Chinese, including several cases
against Aurelio Pow San Chia, who again is the the godfather of this community, and we'll take a look
at closely at one of them, which is the last one from the 1930, because it had a lot of information
and it has a lot of complexity to it. And this is the case of a group of yanacones farmers
who um yanacones are sort of a tenant farmer system practice that existed in Peru
at this time period. It originates from Inca practices but it changes over time and it's
more of a tenant farming system at this point. Um, so this family of yanacones farmers are they are
working and residing on the plantation La Villa, La Hacienda Villa, owned by Aurelio Pow San Chia,
and he approaches them and says look I have this strip of land at the edge of the plantation
that's not brought into production, I would like you to work the land. You can live there,
you can do whatever you need to do to bring it into production, you can have it for two years
without paying rent and then after two years we reassess everything and then I'll start to charge
you rent for living there, but for two years all the benefits, all you sell from the land, you take
all the income um as compensation for all the work that you're putting into this. And so, they do,
they agree to this and you see their pictures here and they go about and then work the land for about
a year and then uh one year into this process Aurelio Pow San Chia comes back to them and says
okay well, now you know we should sign a contract based on the terms we agreed to last year,
just to formalize everything because next year we'll have to do things differently and switch
and so they said okay, but they're illiterate, so they don't really know what they're getting into.
They sign the contracts based on the verbal agreement from the year before.
One more year passes and uh the the yanacones have fulfilled their terms of the agreement,
they brought the land into production, it's doing really well, it can now be integrated
into the larger hacienda system, it will be highly productive um and they go to Aurelio Pow San Chia
to work out the terms of everything and he said actually um you owe me two years worth of back
rent. And they're like wait a minute, this is not at all what we agreed to. And he said okay well,
if you have disputes then uh you need to take it up not with me because actually your contract that
you signed is not with me but it's with uh Julio Sasaki, who is a Japanese overseer uh for you guys
as workers on the plantation. So you signed a contract with him, which they had no clue about
and so they go to Julio Sasaki and then everything sort of becomes evident that this is a a kind
of Aurelio Pow San Chia uh has manipulated the sort of labor divisions, the racialized
labor divisions, on the plantation, in order to engage in what Marxists would probably call an act
of primitive accumulation, an act of essentially theft. These people have contributed and what they
say in their petition is we contributed our labor, we used our tools, we invested into the property,
and we brought this land that we dwelled on into production, we made it productive and profitable
and all of that is going to be now destroyed and we're going to lose
everything and we're going to be kicked off the land. Um, so there's an active dispossession
um in a sort of set of uh in a plantation system that had all kinds of very complex
labor arrangements uh between different racialized subjects indigenous mestizos or yanacones or wage
labor and some of them even had communal land rights on the plantations, indigenous people had
communal land rights that they had carried with them since the early colonial period to reside
and and dwell and and work land for themselves um and yanacones also had land and residential rights
um, but all of that is is being done away within this moment. Um and we don't know what
the resolution of the case is, but we do know that this is a moment when we situate this case
alongside all of the other cases. What becomes uh really evident in reading all of the cases
is um the that um everything is in the process of transformation, that the Ministry of Development
and creating the second labor section um for these worker petitions is actually creating a mechanism,
a legalized mechanism, through which the ministry of development will regulate um the conditions of
of production and wage and uh the working day and the task. So this huge process, led by the state,
um is being unfolding is unfolding in this moment and so it's a period when the relationship between
the worker, whatever kind of work condition he has, and the land on the plantation is being
rationalized and and the workers or indigenous people or mestizo subjects and yanacones are being
dispossessed of their right to reside and produced that land and derive its profits, that the profits
belong to the plantation owner, uh their labor is increasingly rationalized because there's
now time periods being assigned to all of the labor tasks on the plantation, so there's
this huge process of what Glen Coulthard in the um in his study of settler colonialism
describes as the double-fold dimension of settler colonialism when it comes to indigenous people,
which is that it is not simply the introduction of a capital labor relation, which is the production
of the worker as a proletariat in industrial capitalism who's regulated by the capitalist
uh and who is paid through the wage uh and owns nothing else owns no property uh uh on or no land
or doesn't control the conditions of production or derive its benefits, and at the same time it's the
capital-colonial relation is unfolding which is the relationship between capital and land,
uh a property, so there's a huge privatization of space within the plantation that is being
dispossessed of people who once had a right to work and reside and labor there
in with complex arrangements, that is also being undone. And that's because this is a moment when
the prices of sugar and the global economy are really high and to maximize the benefits of
selling sugar on the global economy, they want to bring more land into production,
they they want to rationalize the labor force to make it as efficient as possible, and the engineer
the the mills to be as efficient as possible. They also want to expand the frontiers of the
plantation system and they do that through a variety of needs that dispossess indigenous people
or mestizo workers or yanacones of their land rights or use rights or residential rights
to those properties, um and then take all the benefits of that. And this is what is trackable
in these petitions, um so here we see that um how Aurelio Pow San Chia is still very much an agent
and a beneficiary of all these processes unfolding in Peru. At the same time, he is also starting to
be racialized by them, so the petition by the yanacones say "Que todo se lo llevo el chino",
their biggest complaint is he took the Chinaman took everything. And the chino was a you know
the racial or what became a racialized term to designate this sort of racialized theft um,
this playing on stereotypes of the Chinese as sort of robbing these Chinese-Peruvian working-class
subjects. This becomes a prominent discourse within the labor movement, and the labor movement,
the unions, are involved in helping the petitioners to organize their statements and
create the language. So, objectively speaking, he is very much an agent of these processes,
but at the same time it's the language is playing into a growing anti-Asian sentiment that is
part of the creation of a mestizo working-class subjectivity and identity within the nation that
are part of these processes of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. So, he's already positioned a very um
sort of both as victim, a racialized victim, in some ways through the discourses, but also very
much as a victimizer and and of these kind of unfolding settler colonial practices.
Okay, so we don't know what ended up happening because there's not a resolution to the case,
most of these cases the the documentation is in the the the grievances, um the resolutions
don't often times get recorded so clearly, but um I want to give another example of how um
this victimization, this racialization of Chinese, uh plays out to push back the frontiers of the
Cantonese-Pacific, which we don't see as much with the elite, but we do see them in other sectors and
how the elite play a role in mediating, but does anyone have any questions at the moment?
Okay, Joshua Young, if you would like to go.
Hi, Joshua would you like to speak? [guest] Sorry, I I muted and unmuted or the other way around,
um thank you for this is fascinating and I just have a real quick question about um the
anecdotal nature of this case that you're just pointing to um and the
um the history of this, so the foreman was this uh Julio Sasaki, right, a Japanese-Peruvian, um
and so along with this language about um the Chinese, right, um is there also is there any
language about the Japanese as distinct from other Asians? And
the reason seems you know this the 20s, the 10s, 20s, and 30s is the um is the rise of Japanese
colonial-expansion, right, um and so you know that, the distinction between different East Asian
nationalities, ethnicities, you know, as is something, so. [speaker] Absolutely and it
um in these cases, we don't see it, but where you see it is this this case I refer to is 1930
and I think the Ministry of Development stops the cases right around that time,
um but the 1930s it becomes really uh clear and then there are other sets of agricultural records
or from the provinces where the Japanese really feature prominently as a problem
um. And the discourses are shifting, there is also newspapers um, uh fascist newspapers that appear,
and they really drive an anti-Asian sentiment to a higher pitch than ever before, and the Japanese
here figure as the main culprits because of the expanding empire and so the sentiment that the
that these sort of fascist newspapers, there's two of them, I don't recall the names of them,
but there's a whole campaign that's been documented by a Peruvian scholar
and you can see the the articles reprinted, if you um want the reference I can get it to you, but um
the the idea of that period is that, um well, Japan is a colonizing and expanding empire
and it's uh through these migrants, it is expanding into the Americas,
and it's actually um moving southward from North America, we see these immigrants coming here
and these immigrants are agents of a Japanese imperial expansion and what they will ultimately
do is to displace us and we will become the slaves of Asians inside of Latin America and inside of
Peru and Chinese, by extension, who are also being colonized, are under threat of being fully
colonized by the Japanese, um are also going to end up becoming agents of Japanese empire,
so they, too, are part of the problem here. So it's uh it's it's something that
um the Chinese actually get roped into this Japanese-colonial and imperial imaginary
as people to be feared and resisted uh and the attacks um become more intense in the 1930s.
Does that help and answer your question? [guest] Yeah, that's great, thank you. [speaker] Okay,
so let me move forward to another example um that gives us a kind of a more complex vision of what
the Cantonese-Pacific looks like. So we've seen sort of the merchants and on how they're moving
into different sectors of the economy, moving into different spaces of the economy, and they have
one of the largest commercial sectors in all of Latin America are of the Chinese are in Peru,
so you can imagine this expanding really in the northern coastal areas, these kinds of businesses
like Aurelio Pow San Chia's, uh it's operating, but smaller scale all across the landscape.
On the other side of the Pacific, um there's also um a strong infrastructure, so
I'll turn my attention here to a different person, Yu Jeuk Sang,
um Cesario Chin Fuksan um, who was also a prominent member of the community, also
from Zhongshan, and he is the owner Wing On Chong, the firm that is connected to Wing On in uh the
the department stores, four department stores, one of the four department stores that are in
uh Zhongshan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, this very successful business-enterprises in South China.
Uh, it has a branch in Hong Kong, uh and it has he is um connected to the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong
Kong, which is a huge charitable association uh, and in the late 19th, early 20th century,
when the Qing government and the early republican government were not really fully prepared to
handle the affairs of overseas Chinese, I think uh overseas Chinese affairs offices as a government
institution or overseas Chinese affairs bureaus didn't really have the capacity to do much. They
got started I believe in the 1920s and what I've seen of those early, archival records is that they
were really doing a lot of information gathering and they hardly knew how many people were in,
Chinese, were in parts of the Americas, particularly South America, and they were trying
to, you know, send teachers there and and and educate the Chinese and educate local populations
in Cantonese and nationalism, uh but it was very chaotic and incomplete knowledge of the world that
they had. So the Tung Wah Hospital becomes like kind of a hub of of governance, self-governance,
in the diaspora communities. This is again that a key element of that Cantonese-Pacific is how
voluntary associations play a fundamental role in addressing social problems and arrest addressing
even problems of racial exclusion and violence and I'll give you an example of that um through
this person. Um, so Cesario Chin Fuksan, who is a member of the Benevolent Association in Lima,
was a key figure linking this Transpacific world for uh Peruvian-Chinese, or Cantonese in Peru.
He had businesses in Panama and Brazil and Chile, so he was critical and linking several places
in Latin America across the Pacific to governing mechanisms over there. In 1909, there is a worker
uprising and um that leads to violent attack in Lima on a little alleyway called Callejon Otaiza,
which is very close to the market, the central food market in Lima, and this has been attacked by
um working class because it's the the conditions of destitution, of the poor Chinese that lived
there, many of them were former uh coolies, uh who have now aged out of the plantation system,
uh they're begging on the streets, there's a lot of gambling, there's opium, there's prostitution,
there's all kinds of uh poverty, and um and crowdedness, uh overcrowding in this area,
and people are really just surviving, these are the you workers whose bodies have been used up,
there's not a lot that they can do. So they beg on the streets um and it's considered unsanitary,
it comes under attack, uh the governor of Lima tries to do an assessment in a survey and um to
is building up towards a kind of uh effort to resolve this problem.
But before he can take action, the workers do, and they violently destroy parts of this alleyway
and it sort of drives about 500 uh Cantonese, uh people of Cantonese origin, um leaves them
destitute and and homeless and living out on the streets. And so now, the uh, this is a problem,
what do you do with these people? Uh, and so, the elite of the community, uh the Chinese community,
step in very quickly to address this problem, because this is reflects a kind of shame, a
racial shame, and humiliation for them, um already that these destitute people exist and the coolie
problem was something that they've tried to get away from since their arrival, uh and now it's uh
sort of this destitute homeless community, a group of 500 people need to be attended to, housed uh,
and accommodations made for them for for the long term. So the elite organized, through the
Benevolent Association in Lima, and what they end up doing is working with the Tung Wah Hospital in
Hong Kong, along with a group of organizations in Guangzhou, on the interior of Guangdong Province,
um these nine charitable halls, they create a repatriation project to get them out and send
them back, uh get them away um take care of them by sort of basically exporting them back home.
Now, many of them had not been home to their native places for 40, 50 years, so they didn't
know where they were going to, they had no connections there, no ties to family anymore,
uh some of them maybe even didn't really remember how to speak uh parts of the language, so you have
um newspaper accounts um describing how some of them were now returning to a land that no one
recognizes them anymore and even describing how they were crying when they were sitting
on the docks waiting to board the ships as they were being sent back home. And this introduces
a practice that continues from 1909 into the 1930s, so as older Chinese,
who become sort of increasingly destitute, with no family members to take care of them,
who are relying on the Benevolent Associations, and native place associations to sort of take care
of them as they age, along the northern coastal provinces, every once in a while the elite of
Lima organize a repatriation project, gather them up, and send them back across the Pacific.
This is one of the last images of people being uh who were sent to be deported in 1935,
deported because many of them didn't do this by choice, they're really quite old. I don't know how
many we don't have records of their what happened on the other side um, but this gives you a sense,
okay. And this is gives you a sense of what this Cantonese-Pacific world looks like,
just from a glimpse of Lima, but you can imagine this expanded to every place across the Pacific
where Chinese are located, so in order to facilitate this project, um in Peru, on the
right-hand side, it involved collaboration with the Peruvian government and the China legation,
but also overseen by elites, a commercial elite, who are members of the Benevolent Associations,
and they are overseeing the native place voluntary associations
of each individual native place of the people from Zhongshan and the people from other areas
um, each have their associations, so they connect all of this, they gather up the elderly people,
and through these associations, they send back bones and coffins, they send charitable donations,
they send the elderly bachelors, and destitute returnees, so this whole mechanism gets worked out
through this repatriation project. And on the other side of the Pacific,
um with Hong Kong government underneath, uh underneath the auspices of the government,
the Tung Wah Hospital is operating as the main receiving mechanism um and it has connections
to native place um native places, on the interior of Guangdong Province,
that match sort of these native place associations that are in Peru and other parts of the Pacific.
And then it helps to redistribute people back to their native places, who need to find a home,
but then for people who don't have anywhere to go out, these elderly elderly, destitute bachelors,
they are then um put into this Peruvian-Chinese Peaceful Gatherings Asylum, which is created in
1909, after the destruction of the the alleyway in Lima, and it is fundraised by uh Peruvian
elites in Peru, and money is shipped across the Pacific as well, through all these mechanisms,
going from the Tung Wah Hospital in collaboration with the Guomindang government in Guangzhou,
down to the 9 Charitable Halls, and one particular charitable hall of the Aiyu Shantang,
the Aiyu charity hall in, established in 1871, becomes the overseer of the Peruvian-Chinese
Peaceful Gatherings Asylum. And this is the sort of self-governance mechanisms, collaborating with
state mechanisms, that don't have the capacity to do the work to repatriate these subjects,
sort of the Chinese elite across the Pacific, the Cantonese elite organizing to make these
repatriations possible and solve the problems that emerge out of race acts of racial violence
um. So this is one example um of how what I call sort of the world
comes home through the pushing back of the Cantonese-Pacific, any questions at the moment?
Okay um so, I I guess I can give you another example, but I want to make time to wrap up
the talk and uh and take questions from the audience because I think we only have
what's um like 20 minutes or so, Eli? [Eli] Yeah, okay, until 11. [speaker] Yeah, okay,
so um when I try to give you a glimpse that there are other projects that I look at, which
are print capitalist projects that distribute news of how the world comes home, how reports
like these about racial violence and how it pushes the frontiers back and actually sends people back
across the Pacific um is one of the ways we can track the enclosures of the Cantonese-Pacific.
Um, so it's both the expansion and simultaneous enclosure of this world, but just sort of just
wrap up my talk very um briefly, I think the main thing to think about the Cantonese-Pacific um,
from Henry Yu and and and the work of W.E.B du Bois, Henry Reynolds, and Marilyn Lake, a sort of
a global um the making of a global color line and how settler colonialism is a structure that keeps,
that once in place it continuously produces a kind of indigenous dispossession, but at the same time
uh positions uh Asians immigrants in very complicated complicated positions where they
can be both agents, beneficiaries of settler colonial practices, particularly the elites,
but also as victims of it, racialized others, who, through acts of racial violence and legalized uh
exclusion acts, um are pushed back um, either killed sometimes in massacres,
uh through acts of violence, or there are there they're dispossessed of their
belongings in their homes, left destitute, and sometimes forced, uh left with no resources,
but to go back or to be sent back to their native places and then the native places in China become
places that absorb the cost of these processes and and this violence of settler colonial expansion.
So, um, it is part, these stories are fundamentally a part of the ongoing legacy
of settler colonialism as a structure that remade the world and the Pacific during the 19th century,
and in particular, that paved the way toward the making of a white man's world
across the world. Okay, thank you very much and uh I'm happy to take your questions.