Chinese Labor (Peru)

Imports of Chinese labor into Peru began when social and diplomatic pressure to end black slavery by 1854 forced coastal export planters to seek substitute cheap labor. They began contracting peasant labor from Macao. Between 1849 and 1874, nearly 100,000 men were kidnapped or lured from wharf-side taverns, shackled on ships, and traded at Peruvian ports for about 300 pesos apiece in groups of fifty or more. The purchasers legally had contracted the labor of each man for eight years, after which he would return to China. The men worked in the guano fields, on the railroads, and in the sugar and cotton fields. On the plantations, housed in former slave barracks, they received meager food rations—a pound of rice and some vegetables once or twice a day. Ill-clothed and housed, the men lacked good medical care. Uric acid in the guano dust undoubtedly infected the lungs of many. Overwork also plagued the indentured men. Workdays were fourteen to sixteen hours long, and holidays were few and far between. Public officials rarely intervened between contract owners and contractees. Disease, poor nutrition, neglect, and overwork took their toll. One estimate places the death rate before 1865 in all venues at about 50 percent.

After 1860 the previously sluggish demand for indentured Chinese resumed when the market for cotton grew with the havoc wrought by the Civil War in the United States. Without legal recourse and not understanding Spanish, many men resisted indenture by fighting—often with one another in the barracks at night—attacking their overseers, fleeing, and in some cases committing suicide. Owners sought to dull resistance by distributing opium and cheap liquor in the barracks, to little avail. The guano mines, rail construction sites, and plantation fields were dangerous and volatile areas subjected to high security. Nevertheless, some men fled successfully, hiding in forests and no doubt aided on occasion by sympathetic local peasants despite offers of rewards. Those who were caught were returned to the work sites, where they underwent severe public whippings, time in the stocks, and other humiliations. They also were isolated from their fellow workers. Suicide occurred rarely enough among the con-tractees that there is reason to believe that their worldview was largely informed by Confucius, who celebrated the sanctity of all life, and perhaps they became fatalistic. They also may have realized that landlords in Peru were not much different from landlords in China. There is some speculation that suicides were prompted by the conviction that death would mean transportation of the soul back to China. But few of those who outlived indenture ever returned to their homeland.

By 1874 the reorganized Chinese government demanded the abolition of indenture in Peru. Peruvian leaders acceded to the demand with the proviso that the contracts for labor be resolved locally. This method allowed the contract owners to demand a resolution of debts incurred over the life of the contracts. Many men had incurred debts that plantation owners could document for days of work missed due to illness and flight, breakage of tools, personal loans at interest, unpaid purchases of clothing and "luxuries" (firecrackers and candles to celebrate religious holidays), and the like. In these cases contract owners could claim labor for years into the future. Indenture thus was prolonged in some cases into the 1890s, but the importation of new Chinese labor ended in 1874.

As indenture waned and agricultural labor remained scarce, itinerant Chinese plantation labor gangs bargained for wages along with other workers. Competition between ethnic work gangs became common, and by the end of the century indigenous Andean highlanders joined in. Fear of the Chinese may have stirred jealousies within the Afro-Peruvian and indigenous populations. Ethnically divided conflict occurred periodically on the coastal plantations until the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), when conflict between Asians and Peruvians reached new heights with massive attacks on Chinese peasants. After the war Chinese workers once more joined the ethnically mixed plantation labor force. By the early twentieth century a new wave of Chinese and Japanese immigrated voluntarily to Peru. Many were petty merchants and shopkeepers. A Chinese community arose in Lima, and gradually Chinese foods and cooking styles joined the indigenous and European influences in making up a diverse Peruvian cuisine.

See alsoAsians in Latin America; Plantations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peter Blanchard, The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883–1919 (1982), esp. pp. 123-125.

Michael Gonzáles, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933 (1985).

Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del celeste imperio en el Perú (1850–1900): Migración, agricultura, mentalidad y explotación (1989).

Additional Bibliography

Derpich, Wilma. El otro lado azul: 150 años de inmigración China al Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 1999.

McKeown, Adam. Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Rodríguez Pastor, Humberto. Herederos del dragón: Historia de la comunidad China en el Perú. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2000.

Trazegnies Granda, Fernando de. En el país de las colinas de arena: Reflexiones sobre la inmigración china en el Perú del S. XIX desde la perspectiva del derecho. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1994.

                                        Vincent Peloso