Afro-Asian Alliances: Marriage, Godparentage, and Social Status in Late-Ninteenth-Century Cuba1
2008; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-9648
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoLucrecia kept her money in an account at the Chinese bank on Calle Zanja. She'd opened the account after Chen Pan had gone off to deliver machetes to Commander Sian. Little by little, she deposited her profits there. A year after Chen Pan returned from the war, Lucrecia gave him the seven hundred pesos she'd saved to buy her freedom. He took the money. What choke did he have? He knew she couldn't have loved him otherwise. But instead of leaving, Lucrecia told Chen Pan that if it pleased him, she preferred to stay. -Cristina Garcia Chinese Cuban history spans multiple generations, continents, and migrations, as depicted in Cristina Garcia's novel Monkey Hunting. Weaving throughout this larger narrative is a story of interactions between diasporic Asians and Africans. These encounters, some unintentional and fleeting, others purposeful and permanent, produced new dynamics on the ground during the age of emancipation in the Americas. In the novel Chen Pan, a Chinese indentured laborer, escapes from the brutal regime of the sugar estate to which he had been contracted. Lacking the means to return to China, he starts a small business in Havana's burgeoning Barrio Chino. As early as 1858 former indentured laborers had laid the foundations of the city's Chinatown, reinforced by later arrivals of Cantonese merchants and craftsmen from California, Mexico, and directly from China (Chuffat 17; Perez de la Riva 178). Chen Pan purchases an enslaved woman named Lucrecia for domestic service. When he realizes that she lacks housekeeping and sewing skills, he allows her to make and peddle candles in Havana, through which she saves enough money for her own self-purchase. However, after becoming free, she decides to stay with Chen Pan. Eventually the couple raise a family together and develop a partnership based on friendship, mutual respect, and perhaps even love. Although a fictional portrait, this relationship is symbolic of some of the possibilities for Chinese indentured laborers and African-descended slaves during the period of gradual emancipation in Cuba in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The use of Asian indentured labor in the Americas was directly linked to the decline of slavery. In Cuba, however, Chinese coolies were imported between 1847 and 1874, while slavery was still in full force on the island. It is no surprise, therefore, that in practice Chinese contract workers were treated like slaves. Indeed, the atrocities of the system so closely resembled the Atlantic slave trade that Cuban historians have called it the trata amarilla.2 During the twenty-seven-year period of the coolie trade to Cuba, approximately 142,000 Chinese, mostly men from southeastern China, were kidnapped or otherwise recruited as indentured laborers (17,000 perished enroute due to illness, violence, or suicide) (Perez de la Riva 179). Like slaves, Chinese who survived the journey were sent to Cuban sugar plantations, where they were beaten, chained, deprived of food, and forced to work from fifteen to twenty hours daily. The monthly salary of four pesos stipulated by contract was often completely withheld. Cuban writers, scholars, and statesmen have commented that a shared history of oppression under the Spanish colonial regime brought Chinese indentured laborers and African slaves together in the common struggle against their oppressor.3 However, cross-racial unions did not organically arise from common plantation experiences. To the contrary, ample evidence attests to the animosity between Chinese and slaves during the indenture period.4 Tensions between Chinese and blacks in the cane fields sometimes erupted in physical assault and murder, and planters and overseers learned to manipulate the friction. Li A'hui testified before an international commission sent to investigate the conditions of Chinese coolies: when, on the plantation, I was incapacitated for work by sickness, four negroes were directed to hold me prostrate, whilst I was being flogged on my naked person (Cuba Commission Report 98). …
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