Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and the Rise of China by Adrian H. Hearn (review)

China’s economic influence on the world market has garnered substantial attention in the last three decades, but China’s relationship to Latin America, though of interest in the world of finance and politics, is often overlooked ethnographically. Adrian Hearn argues that it is not only interactions between state-level actors and analyses of changing international regulations that should be considered. Equally important, though understudied, are the on-the-ground everyday interactions between Chinese diaspora communities, the citizens of Latin American and Caribbean countries in which they live, and citizen-state exchanges. Hearn proposes that we cannot fully understand the potential of these strengthening international ties without looking closely at both horizontal and vertical relationships, particularly those involving the roles of local Chinese entrepreneurs, business leaders, and neighborhood associations. To consider this multilevel entanglement, Hearn draws on 15 years of field research in Cuba, Mexico and China, and in the process presents not only a study of immigrant transnationalism, but also what could be considered an emerging paradigm in domestic development and foreign engagement.

This new paradigm, Hearn contends, is one in which trust remains a central concern. Trust is at stake, in part, because the business ventures of Chinese migrants and their families are often perceived as tied to ethnic favoritism at the expense of the shared national interests of the “receiving” country. Perceptions of Chinese ethnic “clannishness” have historical roots in Latin America, traceable at least as far back as the Great Depression and spiking at times of economic vulnerability. Understanding the multiple dimensions of trust would illuminate how vertical state-society connections relate to horizontal community-level connections with resident diaspora groups.

Such an understanding is not solely an intellectual exercise. It is of practical concern for all actors involved: without strategic connections to local actors, Cuba and Mexico cannot benefit fully from China’s presence, and local governments risk the inability to control regulation of trade, business and patterns of migration. From China’s perspective, expanding international markets means not simply considering Chinese national interests, but extending a hand to the Chinese diaspora and local Latin American populations to ensure fuller cooperation. In all cases, guanxi (the connection or relationship built on reciprocity and fostering mutual confidence), social capital, and trust, and even the black market or, as Hearn calls it, “the dark side of trust” (20), are keys to navigating the shifting economic currents in Sino-Latin American engagement.

Of course, Cuba’s state socialism and Mexico’s market liberalism present telling contrasts in themselves within Latin America’s political and economic spectrum. What the two countries hold in common is China’s current role in their national economies as second largest trading partner (behind only behind Venezuela in the Cuban case, and only the US in the Mexican case). However, while Mexico has attracted Chinese investors to its flourishing industries, Mexican officials have neglected to connect with local Chinese communities (Chapters 2 and 4). Cuba, on the other hand, maintains deeper historical ties with China; these expose the difficulties with the top-down approach in which economic cooperation is managed exclusively by the state (Chapters 1 and 3). Both cases highlight how state, market, and civic concerns hang in delicate balance.

As a cultural anthropologist who has studied social capital for the duration of his career, Hearn is well positioned to observe the fine-grained details of informal connection and exchange in all three countries as they confront the stresses and possibilities introduced by China’s growing influence. Complex, culturally comparative, and dealing with multiple economic levels, Hearn’s text may occasionally seem to contain too much for a single monograph. However, the careful attention to contextual background in the ethnographic vignettes based on fieldwork in Havana’s Chinatown, Tijuana’s local Chinese associations, and Beijing’s universities and research institutes mitigates this concern. The case studies illuminate how the actors in question interact in novel...