Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru (1849–1930)

Notes

• The brief sketch that follows is based on my articles: “Immigrants to a Developing Society. The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875–1932,” Journal of Arizona History 21 (Autumn 1980): 49–86; “Racism and Anti-Chinese Persecution in Mexico,” Amerasia 9(1982): 1–28. See also: Charles Cumberland, “The Sonoran Chinese and the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40 (1960): 191–211; Leo M. D. Jacques, “The Anti-Chinese Campaign in Sonora, Mexico, 1900–1931,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1974.
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• The demographic discussion is based on the following sources: Mexican censuses for 1900, 1910, 1921, 1930; “Extranjeros residentes Estados Unidos de México. Resumen del censo practicado por la Sría. de Gobernación en 1927; y extranjeros, distribución por estados, 14 marzo 1928,” Archivo Histórico del Gobierno e Estado de Sonora (AHGES), 50, 1930; Consul A. Willard to State Department, Guaymas, December 31, 1887, U.S. National Archives, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, M284, Roll 4, #851; Willard to State, May 8, 1890, RG59/M284/Roll 4, #983; Ramón Corral, Memoria de la administración puóblica del estado de Sonora 1 (Guaymas, 1891): 586–602; “Comisión oficial encargado del estudio de la inmigración asiática en México, 18 noviembre 1903,” reports submitted by district prefects in 1904, AHGES vol. 1900; Sonora State Government, Census of Chinese residents, submitted by municipal presidents, 1919, AHGES vol. 3345; “Estado de Sonora, Sección de Estadística, Año de 1925, Censo Chino,” AGHES vol. 3741; Departamento de Trabajo. Sección de Conciliación. “Informe que rinde el Jefe de la Sección sobre la situación de las colonias asiáticas en la Costa Occidental de la República,” 1919, Archivo General de la Nación/Trabajo, México, D.F.
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• International Chinese Business Directory, 1913.
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• Estado de Sonora. Sección de Estadística. Ano de 1925. “Censo Chino.” AHGES vol. 3741.
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• “Lista de los causantes sujetos a la contribución directa ordinaria que tienen capitales de $20,000 en adelante.” AHGES vol. 2968.
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• “Sociedades civiles y mercantiles en Sonora, 1912, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920,” taken from the Registro Público de la Propiedad (property registration) of each district. AHGES vol. 3432.
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• “Noticia estadística comparativa de los giros comerciales e industriales con especificación de su capital invertido, de Nacionales y Chinos establecidos en el Estado de Sonora,” June 2, 1925. AHGES vol. 3758.
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• For a fuller discussion of the Chinese in Baja California Norte, see my article: “The Chinese of Baja California Norte, 1910–1934,” Baja California and the North Mexican Frontier, Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, vol. 12, 1985–86 (San Diego: San Diego State University Press). This pattern of Chinese leasing land from American landowners and contracting Chinese labor gangs to work the land is similar to what happened in California, as described in Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
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• Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del Celeste Imperio en el Perú (1850–1900). Migración, agricultura, mentalidad y explotación (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1988), 31–32; Michael J. Gonzales, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Perú, 1875–1933 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 13–23.
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• After experimenting briefly with Chinese coolies in the early nineteenth century, the British exported massive numbers (one to two million) of East Indian coolies to the West Indies and East Africa; for a comprehensive study of this coolie trade, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery. The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). In addition to Peru, I am also studying the coolie trade to Cuba. For existing material on the coolies in Cuba, see: Denise Helly, Idéologie e ethnicité. Les Chinois Macao a Cuba, 1847–1886 (Montreal: Les Presses Universitaires de Montreal, 1979); Juan Pérez de la Riva, various articles in his collection of essays, El Barracón. Esclavitud y capitalismo en Cuba (Barcelona: Ed. Crítica, 1978); Juan Jiménez Pastrana, Los chinos en la historia de Cuba, 1847–1930 (Havana: Ed. Ciencias Sociales, 1983).
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• The pioneer study of the Chinese in Peru is Watt Stewatt, Chinese Bondage in Peru. A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1951).
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• For a brief, though most extended study to date of Chinese labor in the guano industry, see Cecilia Méndez, “Los chinos culies en la explotación del guano en el Perú,” Primer Seminario sobre Poblaciones Inmigrantes 2 (Lima: Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 1988): 91–107.
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• Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, La rebelión de los rostros pintados. Pativilca 1870 (Lima: Ed. Instituto de Estudios Andinos, 1979). The rest of the population in Pativilca was composed of 436 “indios” (13.6 percent), and the remaining 25 percent made up of “otras razas”—meaning Whites, Blacks, Mestizos.
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• For a fuller question of these questions, see my paper: “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba and Peru in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neoslavery?” Presented at the XV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, September 21–23, 1989.
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• Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba. The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 31, 109.
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• One of the official Chinese documents in English on the coolie trade to Cuba used the term “employer.” See The Cuba Commission, “Chinese Emigration. Report of the Commission Sent by China to Ascertain the Condition of Chinese Coolies in Cuba.” Original edition published by the Imperial Maritime Customs Press, Shanghai, 1876; the original English and French versions reprinted by Ch'eng Wen Publishing Co., Taipei, Taiwan, 1970. A number of coolie contracts can be found in the Archivo Nacional de Perú; one is in the Meiggs Papers, Bolsillo 2.
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• Juan de Arona, La inmigración en el Perú, 1972 edition, 93, cited by Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos, 33. Arona was an abolitionist who also opposed the coolie trade, although this did not stop him from acquiring a few coolies from one of the earliest shipments for a relative.
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• Stewatt, 25–76; Helly, 121–136, 211–230; Rodríguez Pastar, Hijos, 34–35, 83–112. Both Helly (189) and Rodríguez Pastor also discuss homosexual behavior among this exclusively male population.
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• See Rodríguez Pastor, Rebelión, for a vivid account of the Pativilca uprising in 1870. For Chinese response and resistance to the coolie system, see the testimonies of over a thousand coolies gathered by the Chinese Commission to Cuba in 1874; Helly, 211–229; Jiménez Pastrana, 81–128; Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos, 83–112; Wilma Derpich, “Sistema de dominación: cimarronaje y fugas,” Primer Seminariosobre Poblaciones Inmigrantes, 79–90. There are many documents in the National Archives of Peru and in the Archivo del Fuero Agrario of Perú on coolie runaways, suicides, assaults on administrators and overseers, complaints, protests, uprisings.
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• The nineteenth century Lima newspaper El Comercio has occasional notices about coolie runaways during the 1850s, 60s and 70s. For example, the July 10, 1868 issue has a long story of Acui, whose repeated attempts to escape forced his master to put him in leg chains; the issue of July 4, 1870, has a notice offering a reward for the return of a “chino perdido” (lost Chinese); the issue of August 17, 1870 has a reward offer for the return of a “chino prófugo” (fugitive Chinese); the issue of February 23, 1872 offers reward for the return of a “chino cimarrón,” and the July 17, 1851 issues has a notice “se vende un chino” (Chinese for sale).
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• Many different terms have been used by scholars studying the worldwide coolie trade to compare it to slavery. For example, Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos, prefers the term “semiesclavo”; Jiménez Pastrana, 2–4, describes the coolie system in Cuba as “esclavitud disimulada” (disguised slavery); Hugh Tinker calls the British coolie system “a new system of slavery.”
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• A preliminary discussion of the Peruvian Chinese in commerce is my brief article “Chinos comerciantes en el Perú; breve y preliminar bosquejo histórico 1869–1924),” Primer Seminario, 127–135.
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• “Actas de la comisión inspectora de asiaáticos en la provincia de Santa,” El Peruano, April 29, 1870.
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• Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos, 108, 121.
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• “Expediente sobre la averiguación practicada por la Comisión China asesorada por funcionarios del gobierno, respeto a la situación de sus connacionales que prestan sus servicios en las haciendas,” Lima, May 9, 1887-December 1888, Biblioteca Nacional, Lima, Peru. This document, also based on testimonies taken from the Chinese (in this case, mostly ex-coolies, given the late date), is the Peruvian equivalent of the Chinese Commission to Cuba.
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• Rodriguez Pastor, Hijos, 145–46, 165.
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• A study of a small but important Chinese community in a sierra town is contained in: Isabel Lausent, Pequena propriedad, poder y economía de mercado. Acos, Valle de Chancay (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1983).
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• Lausent is also the only one who has published on the Chinese in the Peruvian Amazon: “Los inmigrantes chinos en la Amazonía Peruana,” Bulletin Institut Francois d'Etudes Andines 15 (1986): 49–60.
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• Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Middleman Minorities,” American Sociological Review 38 (1973): 583–98; W.F. Wertheim, “The Trading Minorities in Southeast Asia,” East-West Parallels: Sociological Approaches to Modern Asia (The Hague, 1964). Bonacich and Ivan Light, Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Howard Johnson, “The Anti-Chinese Riots of 1918 in Jamaica,” Immigrants and Minorities 2 (March 1983), 50–63.
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