Chinese, Japanese, and Lebanese are the largest Asian ancestries; other major ethnic groups include Filipinos, Syrians, Koreans and Indians, many of whom are Indo-Caribbean and came from neighboring countries in the Caribbean and the Guianas.

[12] With as much as 5% of their population having some degree of Chinese ancestry, Peru and Mexico have the highest ratio of any country for East Asian descent.

[4][13] There has been notable emigration from these communities in recent decades, so that there are now hundreds of thousands of people of Asian Latin American origin in both Japan and the United States.

For two and a half centuries (between 1565 and 1815) many Filipinos and Chinese sailed on the Manila-Acapulco Galleons, assisting in the Spanish Empire's monopoly in trade.

Some of these sailors never returned to the Philippines and many of their descendants can be found in small communities around Baja California, Sonora, Mexico City, Peru and others, thus making Filipinos the oldest Asian ethnic group in Latin America.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of a million Chinese migrants in Cuba worked primarily on sugar plantations.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century, approximately 25,000 Chinese migrants in Mexico found relative success with small businesses, government bureaucracy, and intellectual circles.

In both cases, the influx of Asian migrant workers was to fill the void left in the Latin American work forces after the abolition of slavery.

[21] Many past and present Peruvian Cabinet members are ethnic Asians, but most particularly Japanese Peruvians have made up large portions of Peru's cabinet members and former president Alberto Fujimori was of Japanese ancestry who was the only Asian Latin American to have ever served as the head of any Latin American nation (or the second, if taking into account Arthur Chung), Fujimori died in 2024.

More than 1,000 in Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Honduras and Peru where Jung Heung-won, a Korean Peruvian, was elected mayor in City of Chanchamayo.

There are small and important communities (less 1,000 peoples) in Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Puerto Rico and Haiti.

[24] Their experiences bear similarities to those of Japanese Peruvian immigrants, who are often relegated to low income jobs typically occupied by foreigners.

[27] Argentina Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Costa Rica Cuba Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Mexico Nicaragua Paraguay Panama Peru Puerto Rico Uruguay Venezuela