The Making of Asian America: A History

Asian migration to South America predates its North American counterpart. The Europeans’ historical encounters with Asia included several historical precedents, such as the 13th-to-14th-century “Pax Mongolica” and the popularization of Asia by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo. Columbus searched for Asia inspired by Polo’s book Travels. After Columbus came Amerigo Vespucci, Hernán Cortés, and Francisco Pizarro. Their respective 16th-century voyages led to the establishment of a large Spanish Empire, known as “New Spain,” in the Americas and the consequent dispossession of the continent’s native population. Andrés de Urdaneta’s voyage helped establish the Philippines as Spain’s “seat of its Pacific empire” (18). Sailors from the Philippines and China came from Manila to New Spain. Their voyages were dangerous due to killer diseases.

Manila became a center of the Pacific slave trade, and enslaved Asians from India, Java, Pegu (Myanmar), and Macao followed. Portuguese slave traders sometimes resorted to kidnapping. Some men were skilled workers, while women’s jobs ranged from cooking and sewing to being forced into concubinage. Asians were referred to as los chinos as a group in Acapulco, and the “Indians of China and Manila” in Lima (24). For example, the 17th-century Mirrha Catarina de San Juan was an enslaved Chinese young woman brought to Puebla. There, she became a popular saint who represented “Europe’s search for Asia and Christian converts, and the successful spiritual conquest of the New World” (28). She also inspired the 19th-century la china poblana—“an iconic symbol of Mexican womanhood” (28).

Meanwhile, Chinese tea was popular in the Thirteen Colonies, including Darjeeling tea used at the Boston Tea Party. The first documented Chinese woman, 19-year-old Afong Moy, arrived in the US in 1834. She served as a living advertising for Chinese products sold by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne and later worked for the P. T. Barnum show as “Chinese Belle” (33). Other Asians had come from Mexico starting in the late 18th century. The Spanish-American War (1898) and American imperialism also led to the migration of the Filipinos.

At least 419,000 South Asians traveled to work in British-controlled Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad, and other locations in the Americas and the Caribbean, from 1838 until the early 20th century. They were indentured workers, “coolies,” primarily employed in the plantations whose work was contract-based. In the mid-19th century, Chinese men worked in Peru and Cuba as “part of an unregulated multinational business” (34). The Chinese, “slaves all but in a name,” were exploited and experienced high mortality rates due to poor sanitation and diseases (34). The “coolie” term was also used “to fuel violent anti-Asian movements in the United States” even though the trade occurred in Latin America, not the US (35).

As Britain, the US, and Spain abolished the slave trade in the early 1800s, the resulting labor shortages led to politicians and labor recruiters focusing on “India and China to provide the labor needed to maintain the plantations that sustained both local and imperial economies” (36). Almost 18,000 Chinese traveled to the British-controlled West Indies to work as indentured laborers in addition to almost half a million South Asians between 1838 and 1917.

At this time, the British Empire also controlled much of the Indian subcontinent through annexations and violence. The Punjab province supplied the British Empire with raw materials. The local farmers “suffered the effects of overcrowding and overused farmland,” fleeing their homes abroad “as part of the British-controlled indentured labor system that was created to serve its colonies abroad and its markets and industries at home” (38-9). By 1868, women comprised more than 40% of laborers working as farmers, milkmaids, and midwives. At times, they were sexually exploited.

The mortality rate for laborers aboard ships ranged from one-third to one-tenth, falling lower toward the 1870s. By the 1890s, more than 80% of workers in British Guiana sugar plantations originated in South Asia. Poor working conditions and physical punishment were common, as were strikes. However, most laborers stayed once their contracts ran out, getting re-indentured or finding other opportunities. In the early 20th century, they replaced Africans as the largest population group on the islands and “transformed the fabric of everyday life in the Caribbean” (44).

The European presence in China “similarly resulted in Chinese migration abroad,” as their unequal relationship led to “even greater instability” in 19th-century China, for instance, through high taxation on peasants (45). Canton (Guangdong) became an important trade center, as the British colonized Hong Kong. It was from Guandong that 96% of Chinese migrants traveled to the Americas. Some Chinese were deceived (or even kidnapped) and taken to work on the guano islands in Peru instead of in San Francisco. Mutinies were not uncommon.

The mortality rate of Chinese coolies at sea “rivaled those of African slave ships” (49). In Cuba, the Chinese laborers “were taken from the ship and readied for sale” akin to slaves (50). They turned into “the main solution to the labor problems in both Cuba and Peru” (50). The Chinese were free men according to their labor contracts, which were often not followed: “The status of Chinese coolies and African slaves—Cuba would not abolish slavery until 1886—often overlapped” (52). Some tried to escape, others died by suicide. By the 1870s, coolie trade was condemned internationally and prompted investigations and a ban. However, not all coolies were able to leave afterward.