Chinatowns in Latin America and the Caribbean
Chinatowns in Latin America (Spanish: barrios chinos, singular barrio chino / Portuguese: bairros chineses, singular bairro chinês) developed with the rise of Chinese immigration in the 19th century to various countries in Latin America as contract laborers (i.e., indentured servants) in agricultural and fishing industries.
Latin American Chinatowns may include the descendants of original migrants — often of mixed Chinese and Latino parentage — and more recent immigrants from East Asia.
After the major official visit by the Cuban Revolution's Fidel Castro to the People's Republic of China in 1995, materials were given for the new Chinese arch on Calle Dragone in Havana's Barrio Chino.
[citation needed] Chinese immigration to Cuba started in 1847 when Spanish settlers brought in Cantonese contract workers to work in the sugar fields.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers were brought in from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan during the following decades to replace the labor of African slaves.
After completing 8-year contracts, the Chinese immigrants generally settled permanently in Cuba, where their descendants have since intermarried with local Cubans.
[7] Unlike that of Argentina and other Latin American countries, the overseas Chinese population of Cuba was once large, but the now-diminished Chinese Cuban community is today clustered around the largely dying Barrio Chino — called Barrio Chino de La Habana — on Calle Zanja, in Havana.
There are also reports that a businessman named Gregorio Riva brought a handful of Chinese laborers over from Cuba to make bricks and quicklime in the Cibao region.
By the 1950s Chinese-Dominicans had established a small niche in the Duarte area of Santo Domingo and most of the businesses in that part of the city were Chinese-owned.
On 8 December 2004, through an agreement with the Santo Domingo municipal authorities, the Foundation was given the go-ahead to start construction on the project.
Some of the earliest Chinese settlers who arrived in the United States eventually went south to Mexico to escape institutionalized anti-Chinese persecution in California.
This restaurant was utilized by many U.S. and Mexican officials and celebrities throughout the years; its end eventually came due to the devaluation of the peso in the 1980s and the new border crossing that takes tourist and locals away from the original heart of Mexicali.
Currently there are more than 80 Chinese restaurants from small coffee shops (cafés de chinos) to huge 750 occupancy dining rooms.
[citation needed] After the USMCA was ratified, an industrial Chinatown with signs in both Spanish and Chinese formed in Monterrey to take advantage of tariff free trade with the United States given its proximity to Texas.
As Tijuana was a border town, it was an important city towards the establishment of the Mexicali Chinatown, where at the time, the Chinese community would outnumber Mexicans 2 to 1.
Racism would keep the population small for many decades until the early 2000s when Aeromexico would first offer direct flights from Tijuana to Japan.
[20] Other Peruvian cities with notable Chinese-Peruvian populations include Chimbote, Trujillo, and Chiclayo,[21] all on the north coast, where Chinese immigrants were brought to work on sugar cane plantations.
Historical Chinese immigration to the Amazonian region of Peru may be documented in a small village intriguingly named "Chino" several miles outside of Iquitos.
[citation needed] The Caribbean, English speaking majority country's capital, Port of Spain, has a Chinatown with an arch on Charlotte Street, which has Chinese businesses and merchants since 1970s.
[citation needed] Cantonese is widely spoken among Chinese Venezuelans, especially the variety commonly known as Hoisan or Toisan, but there has been recent Taiwanese immigration, adding to the linguistic and cultural diversity.
Chinese from other places of the world also settled in Venezuela, especially from the Philippines, where they were experienced persecution in the 1970s under Ferdinand Marcos, and Cuba, where Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution seized their businesses.
