La migración china en República Dominicana: 1862–1961

Resumen

Contributing to the growing body of scholarship that attends to Asian diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, José Chez Checo's book performs a historical mapping of Chinese migration to the Dominican Republic from 1862 to 1961. The Dominican historian of Chinese descent unearths the Chinese presence from government decrees, census records, local newspapers and magazines, memoirs, autobiographies, other historiographical writings, and literary and cultural productions, highlighting the diplomatic, economic, and cultural exchanges between China (the Qing dynasty and later the Republic of China) and the Dominican Republic. With Chez Checo's personal Chinese Dominican experience and his correspondence with other Chinese Dominicans included, this book serves as not only an attempt to write the Chinese into the national history but also the author's nostalgic investigation into the otherwise lost roots of his own identity.La migración china en República Dominicana is organized in chronological order and sectioned into five time periods. The first chapter dates the Chinese presence back to 1862, when nearly 200 Chinese indentured laborers were deported from Cuba to Samaná for having fought against overseers, landowners, and sometimes the enslaved Africans. The displacement of these penal laborers speaks to the historical violence of the coolie trade in the 1860s and 1870s, while extending the negative characterization of the Chinese as incomprehensible criminals to the Dominican Republic. According to Chez Checo, the Chinese only arrived in the country in small numbers before 1900, most of whom were from Cuba; yet they began to take on different roles in the local society that ranged from business owners to service workers, paving the way for the integration of their Dominican-born descendants and new Chinese immigrants into the nation in the twentieth century.The next three chapters track Chinese migration to the Dominican Republic from 1901 to 1930. Although the government's immigration laws and policies still prevented the Chinese from entering the country without extra requirements, and the long-standing national ethos of whitening the race tended to exclude the Chinese from the racial makeup of the Dominican nation, the number of Chinese immigrants across the country still grew from 255 in 1920 to 410 in 1930. The majority of these immigrants came to the Dominican Republic as laborers, and their strong work ethic gradually refashioned Dominicans' perception of them as more conscientious and disciplined than evil and detrimental to the society. As Chinese immigrants became more visible during these three decades, local newspapers and magazines, literature, and music began to address their presence. While Chez Checo does convey some of these representational examples, he does not go so far as to explore how such cultural representations add up to particular conceptualizations of Dominican Chineseness.As chronicled in the last over-400-page chapter, the Chinese continued to immigrate to the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961. That Trujillo's government established the diplomatic relationship with the Republic of China and advanced its agricultural trade with the latter in the 1940s made the Dominican Republic an attractive destination for Chinese immigrants during this period. Drawing heavily on both Trujillo's and Chinese diplomats' speeches, Chez Checo underscores these immigrants' support for China in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and their political alignment with the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) even after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. In so doing, he demonstrates that the bonding between these two states (the Republic of China and the Dominican Republic) is premised on and strengthened by economic reciprocity and shared anticommunist and anticolonial beliefs. Besides these official relations favoring Chinese immigration, Chez Checo's tracing of the genealogies of renowned Chinese and Chinese Dominican families in Santo Domingo, including his own, also attests to the integrating processes through which these immigrants and their descendants have become part of the nation since the 1950s, not just economically but also socioculturally. The historian concludes this chapter with Dominicans' writings about the Chinese, their religion and cuisine, and their participation in local arts and sports. Yet again, as comprehensive and foundational as Chez Checo's study is, it refrains from deeper analysis of the implications of these extensive textual references for the national imaginaries of Chineseness.This book will be crucial for expanding scholarship on Dominican and Caribbean history. Researchers may also want to consult La migración china en República Dominicana 1961–2018 (2022) and La presencia china en el Gran Caribe: Ayer y hoy (2022), written and edited, respectively, by another Chinese Dominican historian, Mukien Adriana Sang Ben, for Sino-Dominican and Sino-Caribbean experiences of more contemporary relevance. Those who are particularly interested in theorizing Chinese diaspora in the region, however, may find Chez Checo's book more informative than argumentative, as it is packed with direct citations from archival and media sources. Therefore, his work calls for a critical reengagement with these materials and further explorations of the positioning and the theorization of the Chinese and, more broadly, Asian presence in the Dominican Republic and beyond.