Chinese migration to Latin America: From colonial to contemporary era

This historiographical essay surveys the major works on the history of Chinese migration to Latin America spanning from the colonial to the contemporary era. Tracing the main historical events that scholars have examined, this paper comprehensively presents the various arguments and approaches represented in the current scholarship while delineating the research frontiers. Attending to the different geographical and temporal frameworks found in the historiography, this paper shows that the studies on Chinese migration to Latin America in different eras are unevenly distributed by country. It further argues that new perspectives and innovative methodologies for investigating the lived experiences of Chinese Latin Americans unfettered from the nation-states’ standpoints are still wanting. Paying attention to the primary sources used by historians, this paper especially points out that the lack of Chinese-language sources in these studies have hampered historians from constructing narratives from the perspectives and voices of the migrants themselves. However, such trend has been slowly changing in recent years.