From Compradors to Hacendados Cantonese Merchants In Peru and the Expanding Settler Colonial Frontiers of the Cantonese Pacific. Ana Candela, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University Embracing the gendered and racialized settler colonial imaginaries that animated Peruvian nation-making, Cantonese merchants deployed new ideas about nature, labor, and technology to position themselves as ideal colonos Chinos (Chinese settlers) and overseas Chinese pioneers (xiangiao). Through these activities and imaginaries, Cantonese merchants brought greater coherence to a broader Cantonese Pacific world that linked South China and northern coastal Peru through migration and commerce during an era of expanding industrial capitalism.