Making community under shared conditions of insecurity: the negotiation of ethnic borders in a multicultural commercial neighbourhood in Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT

Multicultural commercial neighbourhoods are key spaces where individuals learn to relate to cultural difference in increasingly diverse cities worldwide. Host countries’ pre-existing social dynamics and environmental conditions mutually shape everyday interactions between people from different ethnonational backgrounds within specific spaces. This article examines two kinds of community-making practices consisting of both intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic exchanges and collaborations, under conditions of shared insecurity in a multicultural commercial neighbourhood in Santiago, Chile. Drawing on ethnic Chinese experiences and responses to crime, we discuss how inhabitants of multicultural sites create more hospitable spaces by building and overcoming boundaries with co-ethnics, other migrants and ‘locals’. Our ethnographic study finds that Chinese residents engaged in what we term ‘strategic ethnic groupism’, which aims to prompt the solidarity of an ‘ethnic-based’ collective in order to politically organise towards long-term solutions. Yet, simultaneously, with other migrants and citizens, the Chinese negotiated everyday intercultural conviviality through creating relations of trust and care to address more immediate insecurity concerns. Discussing both strategies, this article contributes to understanding the productive frictions between ethnicity, community and belonging, under shared conditions of insecurity, in multicultural urban spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese migrants
• insecurity
• conviviality
• community
• groupism
• South American cities

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of JEMS, Carolina Stefoni, colleagues at the Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios Migratorios (PRIEM, Chile) and Claire Alexander for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Wechat is a Chinese app for messaging and social media, which allows instant messages and calls. This is widely used by Chinese in Chile and worldwide. For more details, see page 17.

2 For the rest of the paper, unless otherwise qualified, we use the term Chinese to refer to ethnic Chinese (huaren), acknowledging the complex diversity and associations by ethnic Chinese persons with China as a nation.

3 Where relevant, words in Chinese-Mandarin and Spanish follow (in brackets) their English translations. This is mainly to clarify, for readers acquainted with these languages, the exact term or expression used by participants themselves.

4 Complementing participant observation (which involves attention to action and talk) and the diverse sources of data, interviews with Chinese residents were conducted in Mandarin (and transcribed in English), with others in Spanish when participants were fluent. This includes 12 in-depth one-to-one recorded and semi-formal interviews conducted with ethnic Chinese shopkeepers and workers in Meiggs. Another 10 interviewees with non-Chinese were conducted. Interviews varied between 20 minutes to an hour and a half, often with repeated follow-up visits at participants’ business premises over the period of study. Following the guidelines of the Ethic Committee of Universidad Alberto Hurtado and the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development, FONDECY (Chile), data were collected under consent and confidentiality was guaranteed. All interviewees were anonymized and pseudonyms were used.

5 During the course of the fieldwork, the second author was invited by a Chinese merchant during an interview to participate in several semi-private online chat groups for Chinese persons living in Chile. Consent was solicited publicly via the chat groups, and consent was granted by group members and the group leader for content to be included in this research.

6 While the perceived inefficacy of the police is beyond the scope of our paper, studies of community policing practices in contemporary urban China have shown that the Chinese police actively engage with local communities through both formal and informal means to confront security issues in neighbourhoods, looking for solutions outside the criminal justice system (Chen 2002, 9). These collaborative mechanisms are uncommon in Chile.

7 Chinese migrations to Chile can be categorized into three main waves. In nineteenth to early 20th century, Guangdong-Chinese men escaped from slave-like contract labour in Peru to northern Chile. Many worked in nitrate extraction and railroad construction (Lin Chou 2004). In the 1970s–1990s, Chinese migration from Guangdong and Fuzhou followed the end of the Cold War. Most of these migrants opened Chinese restaurants and other small businesses in Santiago and northern Chile. Twenty-first century Chinese migration followed the Free Trade Agreement between China and Chile in 2005. These migrants are visibly present in Meiggs through Chinese malls and diverse wholesale shops.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico [grant numbers 3160327 and 3170051].