Diasporic Cultural Citizenship: Chineseness and Belonging in Central America

In the summer of 1996, I traveled with a group of Chinese Panamanians to San José, Costa Rica, to attend the annual convention for Chinese Associations of Central America and Panama (La Convención de Asociaciónes Chinas de Centroamérica y Panamá). Upon our arrival, an entourage of Chinese Costa Ricans greeted us: young children furiously waving small flags of both Costa Rica and the Republic of China, senior men dressed in suits greeting and shaking hands with their counterparts, young women passing out red carnations, and the lovely Miss Chinese Costa Rica, adorned with her sash and crown, gracefully waving her hand and smiling sweetly as we passed by. Without our notice, they had guided us through the airport and onto one of the many tour buses that would take us to the convention hotel. Full of excitement and anticipation, we studied the schedule of the three-day convention and planned our sightseeing activities around the meetings, cultural performances, social gatherings, and the Miss Chinese Central America and Panama beauty contest.

These annual conventions, organized by the Federation of Chinese Associations of Panama and Central America (Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador), began as official meetings in which community leaders gathered to discuss political and economic issues confronting their communities. The primary aim of the federation was to create a supranational support network among the Chinese diaspora in this region. In 1965, the federation called its first meeting, and soon thereafter, the Republic of China (ROC, popularly known as Taiwan) embassy helped institutionalize the organization and began cosponsoring the annual gatherings. Six years later, in 1971, the federation expanded its meetings to include women and youth, and it incorporated various social and cultural components to the initial format. The small boardroomlike meetings quickly transformed into large conventions, and in this process the federation not only extended its outreach, but, more importantly, it created a mechanism that would sustain and reproduce a transnational network of Chinese communities, ties between the diaspora and the ROC government, and the federation itself.

This article uses the case study of the Federation of Chinese Associations in Panama and Central America to extend theories of cultural citizenship beyond the framework of the bounded nation-state. While the anthropological literature on cultural citizenship has focused primarily on how marginalized immigrant groups are incorporated into the U.S. nation-state (Flores and Benmayor 1997; Ong 1996), I will examine how cultural citizenship operates in a diasporic context in which people actively identify, participate, and engage in more than one cultural-political system. By bringing diaspora and cultural citizenship into conversation, I examine how the triangulation of diasporic communities, the homeland state, and the nation-state of residence determines ideas of belonging and practices of transnational community formation. Analysis of cultural citizenship for a diasporic community must consider the relationship between not only the diaspora and the nation-state of residence but also that of the diaspora and the homeland. Taking this approach underscores the interaction between the diaspora's local-national engagements and their transnational links and practices to the homeland and the greater diaspora. Here, I use diaspora descriptively to refer to the condition of imagining and maintaining relations with other communities that articulate a shared history, identity, and cultural heritage (Hall 1990; Lavie and Swedenburg 1995). As a unit of analysis, diaspora references two scales of community formation: a local ethnic-cultural community within the borders of a nation-state and a transnational network of these same communities dispersed in different nation-states. In this particular case study, I am concerned with the Chinese communities in Central America and Panama. Using this definition of diaspora, I hope to move cultural citizenship out of its restricted focus on the internal workings of a singular nation-state. Instead, I treat it as a localized process that is thoroughly enmeshed in the global context, a process in which the formation of a diasporic...