Teaching the Asian Latin American Experience

Abstract

This essay reviews three recent monographs that focus on Asian diasporas in Latin America. Diego Javier Luis studies the mobility of free and enslaved Asians to and throughout the Americas from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Ignacio López-Calvo analyzes literary works, autobiographies, and performances by Japanese Mexicans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Koichi Hagimoto turns to the vision of Argentine elites at the turn of the twentieth century in regard to what he denominates “transpacific modernity”, the comparably smooth assimilation of Japanese immigrants in Argentina, and works by contemporary Nikkei Argentine writers. Altogether these studies emphasize the importance of recovering archives of forgotten histories (as well as acknowledging the limitations of these archives) and pay attention to the self-fashioning (at times strategic essentialism) employed by Asian subjects in Latin America. The wide range of archival materials and cultural productions these scholars analyse make it possible and necessary to rethink how Latin American and Asian diasporic studies are being taught.