{"id":34130,"date":"2013-10-07T17:11:02","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T17:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=34130"},"modified":"2014-11-22T02:32:01","modified_gmt":"2014-11-22T02:32:01","slug":"chinese-cubans-a-transnational-history-by-kathleen-lopez-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=34130","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen L\u00f3pez (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen L\u00f3pez (review)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Journal of Latin American Geography<\/a>
\nVolume 12, Number 3<\/a>, 2013
\npages 234-236
\nDOI: 10.1353\/lag.2013.0049<\/a><\/p>\n

Joseph L. Scarpaci<\/a><\/strong>, Professor Emeritus of Geography
\nVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University<\/em><\/p>\n

Kathleen L\u00f3pez, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History<\/a><\/em> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)<\/p>\n

The new millennium cast into the academic and general public\u2019s dialect the word \u2018globalization\u2019 as well as the call that everyone should \u2018think globally and act locally.\u2019 That may be all well and good, but this adage often falls flat when scholars aim to connect the local with global (glocal). Like the words \u2018impact,\u2019 \u2018effect,\u2019 and \u2018affect,\u2019 the terms at once say everything but communicate little. As the graduate coordinator of my doctoral program was fond of harping in front of frightened graduate students many decades back, \u201cperfectly general, perfectly true, but absolutely meaningless.\u201d Clich\u00e9s, alas, often substitute for deep, critical thinking and analysis.<\/p>\n

For these reasons, when one sees a subtitle that includes the ambitiously stated \u2018transnational history,\u2019 a little skepticism inevitably comes to mind. Geographers are no doubt even more skeptical because, after all, scale and spatial analysis situate both human and physical geographies in the broader context of social and natural sciences, respectively.<\/p>\n

Enter Kathleen L\u00f3pez<\/a>: Assistant Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (a title that might also give one pause) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Whereas many Latinamericanist geographers struggle to speak any semblance of Spanish and conduct fieldwork with the assistance of Latin American and Caribbean scholars, Dr. L\u00f3pez approaches the study of transnational migration to the island of Cuba armed with fluent Spanish and Chinese. Armed with extensive field work in Cuba, China, and the United States, Dr. L\u00f3pez assembles a tour d\u2019force that brings archival, ethnographic, and historic analyses to bear on a story that traces the history of Chinese migrants to Cuba in the nineteenth century, through the alliance with Cuban forces to overturn the colonial yoke imposed by Madrid, to the twentieth century events that include strong xenophobia, the Japanese-China war, WW II, and the Cuban Revolution. Copiously referenced and gracefully written, Chinese Cubans<\/a><\/em> tells the tale of a truly global transnational migration pattern that documents how the Chinese in Cuba used investment, remittances, and return visits to bridge these migrants\u2019 search for the best of Cuba and their homeland. The tale begins with the importation of more than 100,000 Chinese workers \u2013 indentured servants often treated as slaves because of Great Britain\u2019s objection to the African slave trade\u2014who build rail lines and work in sugar plantations in ways similar to how Chinese \u2018coolie\u2019 workers did in the United States. Chinese Cubans were fiercely loyal to the Cuban independence movement of the nineteenth century, and great accolades were given to them by the fiercest and most venerable of revolutionary fighters. Unlike conditions in Peru, Jamaica, and the especially harsh anti-Chinese movement in Mexico in the 1930s, we learn that Cuba was relatively welcoming (overall) in receiving the Chinese diaspora. They added to the miscegenation (mestizaje<\/em>) stew (ajiaco<\/em>) that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ort\u00edz highly praised. However, to L\u00f3pez\u2019s credit, she calls into question the much-venerated Ort\u00edz\u2019s description of this marginal contribution to Cuban culture (which Ort\u00edz postulated that, numerically at least, was a European and African fusion). The so-called \u2018third founder\u2019 of Cuba (after Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), Ort\u00edz derided Chinese immigrants for their certain tolerance of homosexuality, their (limited) use of opium. That is why he classified them phenotypically (i.e., \u201cyellow mongoloids\u201d\u2026.\u201dand essential otherness\u201d (p. 210).<\/p>\n

Readers will find that similar prejudices hurled upon immigrants elsewhere were also cast upon Chinese Cubans. They were often characterized as \u2018inassimilable\u2019 just as Jews were in Europe in the twentieth century and much the way Mexicans are portrayed in the current U.S. immigration debacle. When hard economic times fell upon Cuba, anti-nationalism was whipped up against Cubans of Chinese descent, who were often portrayed as perennial strike breakers and \u2018scabs.\u2019<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, there are indirect parallels to be drawn between the relationship of mainland (communist) China and Taiwan, on the one hand, and Cuba and the United States, on the other hand. The 1949 Chinese communist takeover of mainland China and the exodus of Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa (Taiwan) generates yet another out-migration of Chinese to Cuba. And in 1959, many Chinese…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen L\u00f3pez (review) Journal of Latin American Geography Volume 12, Number 3, 2013 pages 234-236 DOI: 10.1353\/lag.2013.0049 Joseph L. Scarpaci, Professor Emeritus of Geography Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Kathleen L\u00f3pez, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) The new millennium cast […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,5,21,459,8],"tags":[673,16031,16032,16033,14606],"class_list":["post-34130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-book-reviews","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-cuba","tag-joseph-l-scarpaci","tag-joseph-scarpaci","tag-journal-of-latin-american-geography","tag-kathleen-lopez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}