Multiculturalism in Latin American Studies: Locating the "Asian" Immigrant; or, Where Are the Chinos and Turcos?

When the editors of Latin American Research Review invited me to write a review essay on the topic of multiculturalism in Latin America, which I interpreted to mean multiculturalism in Latin American studies, and offered a few new books from which to choose, I thought "of course" and "why not," then "it's about time." But on further reflection, it seemed that, in a conventional sense of the meaning of multiculturalism, Latin American studies is by definition multicultural. After all, where would the field be if not for Indians and blacks? On still deeper reflection, I realized that, while there is no question about the centrality of race and ethnicity as far as blacks and Indians are concerned, the picture is incomplete: multiculturalism is considerably richer than reflected in scholarship on Latin America to date. I trace the omissions at issue to the marginalization of immigration and immigrants as a focus of research in Latin American studies. Let me venture to speculate on why this is the case, what we lose in not paying more attention to immigrants, and the subsequent implications for a more comprehensive approach and understanding of multiculturalism in Latin America.

In graduate school and during my early career in the seventies, I do not remember immigration being a major topic of discussion; indeed, I can recall only one major monograph in those days by a U.S.-based scholar who put immigration in the title. I speak of Carl Solberg's study of immigration to Argentina and Chile at the turn of the twentieth century.¹ Many of us can undoubtedly cite important works on the economic history and industrialization of Brazil during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Warren Dean and Thomas Holloway, published in 1969 and 1980, respectively, which highlighted the significant role of immigrant entrepreneurs, notably Italians, Portuguese, and other Europeans.² Holloway did note the arrival of Japanese immigrants and included them in discussing new patterns of landownership and agricultural development, while Dean highlighted individuals of the Syrian-Lebanese immigrant community in São Paulo's new industrial base.

Immigrants remained peripheral until Samuel L. Baily came along in the late 1980s to call attention to "mass migration to modern Latin America," editing a volume of essays by that title.³ This alerted us to some of the excellent new work around the corner in the 1990s, perhaps none more acclaimed than that by his student José Moya on Spanish immigration to [End...