Between Heritage and Hate
For Latino Asians, waves of coronavirus-fueled hate and violence present a seemingly unending threat. They’re also reminders of a strong, but complicated heritage
Editor’s Note: Look up “Mongolian stain” or “Mongolian blue spot” in medical encyclopedias and you’ll see that they are birthmarks “common among people who are of Asian, Native American, Hispanic, East Indian, and African descent.” For many Latinos, they’re also proof of genetic bonds that defy borders. The blood connections are easily seen in the Latino community’s rich collection of races -- more reason why anti-Asian violence strikes close to many Latinos.
Ahki Hasegawa is glad the COVID-19 pandemic has everyone wearing masks, and not just to protect against the virus.
“The only Asian part about me is my face,” the 34-year-old nurse told palabra. “So if I were to just slap on some sunglasses, and then wear my mask, there’s no way anybody would assume that I’m Asian at all.”
As an American citizen of Mexican and Japanese descent, Hasegawa said she trembled when she ran into a recent “White Lives Matter” rally in Huntington Beach, California, while walking her dog. “I'm glad I have a dog. And I haven't been going out unless I’m with the dog. I don’t own a gun, but I definitely thought about it for self defense.”
Hasegawa is part of an often-overlooked community of Latinos of Asian heritage who have endured the waves of anti-Asian hate spreading across the United States.
Believing the Latino community to be a homogenous group is an almost routine mistake in American society. The image of a light-skinned mestizo floods the media as the only face of Latinidad. But it bears repeating: Latino is an ethnicity that stems from many combinations of races.
Recent U.S. Census data showed there were more than 200,000 Hispanics who classified their race as only Asian. Another 3 million identified themselves as multiracial – which includes many Latinos who have Asian ancestry mixed with other races.
Fabiana Chiu-Rinaldi, a Peruvian-born museum curator in New York, is part Asian.
“I call myself a multiracial Latino, although I shouldn’t have to because my assumption is that the majority of Latinos are multiracial,” said Chiu-Rinaldi, who has Chinese, indigenous Andean and European ancestry. “But it’s just to remind people that Latinos can be of any number of races, not just one. … It can be two, three races.”
Chiu-Rinaldi and others said anti-Asian hate crimes are also affecting Latinos. The Latinos of Asian ancestry say they feel they may be targeted because of how they look. But further complicating things is Latin America’s troubled history of racism towards Asians and Latinos of Asian ancestry that dates back centuries.
A Brief History of Asian-Latino Relations
The Asia-Latin America relationship is tens of thousands of years old. Cultural exchange blossomed with the colonial trade routes between Mexico and the Philippines established by Spain. Since then, Asian migration to Latin America has followed different routes and reasons, with each wave adding new dimensions to Latino identity.
Today, for example, Asia is evident in the hundreds of Peruvian chifas – the name for Chinese-Peruvian restaurants, which saw the birth of the country’s staple dish lomo saltado. Or in Brazil’s Japanese community, which is the largest in the world outside of Japan. Or in Mexico’s China Poblana – the iconic dress style inspired by an Asian woman in Puebla. These are just a few of an almost endless stream of examples of the Asian beat in the Latin American heart.
Economic opportunity was a driver in Asian migration to the Americas in the 19th century. As slavery declined, cheap labor was in high demand. Many Asian immigrants started as contract workers in agriculture. Some then started their own businesses.
But as Asians began to prosper in Latin America, anti-Asian sentiment erupted.
Jason Chang, associate professor of history in Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut, explored the issue in his book “Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940.”
According to Chang, while the U.S. banned Chinese immigration under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexico was welcoming foreigners, including Chinese citizens who soon became the second largest immigrant group in Mexico, with their population peaking in 1920. At the same time, Mexico was extremely polarized between rich and poor, and Asian immigrants became targets of hatred.
Chang wrote that two prominent anti-chinista (anti-Chinese) politicians in post-revolutionary Mexico -- former President Plutarco Elias Calles and former Baja California Governor Abelardo Rodríguez -- built the country’s once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on an interstate network of anti-chinistas.
“Anti-Chinese politics was a thread of connectivity for elite revolutionaries,” Chang said.
Chinese immigrants in Mexico were victims of violence, including lynchings, stonings and mass murders. The tide of violence included the 1911 Chinese Massacre in Torreon during the Mexican Revolution, in which 303 Chinese men, women and children were killed by Mexican soldiers and civilians.
Chinese weren’t the only people targeted in the Americas in the last century. During World War II, the U.S. installed concentration camps for people of Japanese descent. President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded the expulsion of Japanese people in Latin America. Countries like Mexico and Brazil didn’t issue mass deportations, but kept tabs on the Japanese. Brazilian authorities raided Japanese homes and banned the language. Mexican authorities forced Japanese people to move to urban areas where they could be more closely monitored.
This is no comprehensive history of the Asian diaspora in Latin America, just a snapshot of a long and complicated relationship too often left out of history books.
Asian and Latino
In 2021, racially motivated killings of Asians and discriminatory rhetoric are increasing around the world, fueled by the racist belief that they are to blame for the coronavirus pandemic. The first reported cases of COVID-19 emerged from China. Anti-Asian hate crimes across the U.S. have skyrocketed. They doubled between 2019 and 2020 in some major cities, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Those are numbers that keep Hasegawa up at night, especially when she thinks about her 70-year-old Japanese father who lives by himself in a predominantly Asian neighborhood in Southern California.
“I started having anxiety. On top of COVID concerns, because of his age, now I’m having violence concerns, but thankfully, he does live in a mostly Asian community,” Hasegawa said. “However, if somebody was going to go look for Asians to harm, it’s well-known for being an Asian community.”
Across the country, in New York, Jesús Ian Kumamoto can relate to Hasegawa’s concerns. The 24-year-old journalist said he’s been the target of mockery since his childhood in Mexico. “I remember everyone getting a [playtime] girlfriend or boyfriend and I was like ‘why isn’t anyone pairing up with me?’ I remember the kids around me, they just would tell me I was weird-looking. Little by little, I figured out that it was a thing that was inherent about me and had to do with the fact that I was Chinese,” he said.
Kumamoto’s mother was born and raised in China, but she was fascinated by the Spanish language so she studied it in college and then moved to Mexico. There she met Kumamoto’s father, who is Mexican of Japanese ancestry. When Kumamoto was 8 years old, his family immigrated to Texas and he lived there until he moved to New York for college.
“When I moved to Texas, people put me on the label of Asian American, and I didn’t really know what that meant because, in my mind, I was Mexican,” Kumamoto said. “It was like another layer of understanding this whole other identity and learning how to fit into it. And eventually, I stopped trying to explain my background to people because it gets really exhausting,” Kumamoto said. “Sometimes, it’s just easier to just be like ‘Oh, sure, I’m Asian American,’ even though that’s not the complete truth of who I am. It’s easier to just identify what people can process.”
Chiu-Rinaldi echoed Kumamoto’s experience in a life of mixed identity.
“One of the things that my non-Asian Latino friends often assume, and I wasn’t sure where that was coming from, was that because of my appearance, it immediately meant that I spoke Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese. Spanish is my first language,” Chiu-Rinaldi said. “It gets tiring to have to explain yourself all the time. I’m a fourth-generation Chinese-Peruvian. That means that my family, my Chinese family, has been in Peru longer than many Peruvian families that I know.”
Kumamoto believes Asians are often overlooked in Latin American historical accounts because it would require people to think differently about Latino identity. “Why is it so mind-blowing that Asian people would come (to Mexico)? It’s because of the narrative that’s been created around what Mexico is, and Mexico is a country that wants to be white and wants to move away from its indigenous roots.”
Asian Latinos are further othered in Latino communities through the use of the infamous Spanish nickname for all Asians, no matter their origin: chino, or the more derogatory chinito. “It’s time for us to say ‘don't call me chino,’ ‘don’t call me china.’ I have a name, my name is Fabiana. We all have names, and it’s just cruel and inhumane to reduce people to one racial label,” Chiu-Rinaldi said.
Hasegawa and Kumamoto also condemned the nicknames. They tell Latino relatives and others not to call them that. “It makes me feel almost like a stranger because [my Mexican relatives] like calling me by my race. And they would always gaslight me a little and be like ‘oh, it’s out of love, why are you so offended?’ And they would get offended that I was getting offended because I was calling them racist,” Kumamoto said. “It just came to a point where I think just to protect my own energy, I just don’t hang around them that much.”
Chang said he believes Asians in Latin America are seen as “perpetual foreigners,” which in turn, further marginalizes them and engenders violence and hate. “Asians are never domestic, they never belong. And so I think that is a part of what enables the xenophobic violence. The sense that you can be here for generations and never be considered a true patriot or a true citizen,” he said.
Hasegawa, Kumamoto and Chiu-Rinaldi are working to increase awareness. As a museum curator, Chiu-Rinaldi collects and archives oral histories of Asian Latinos, like the interview she did with fellow Chinese-Peruvian immigrants for the Center for Brooklyn History. Kumamoto uses Tiktok to share his experiences as an immigrant and a queer Mexican of Asian descent. He has more than 15,000 followers. Meanwhile, Hasegawa routinely engages her immigrant patients in Los Angeles in conversation about the Asian diaspora in Latin America.
Beyond their individual efforts, the three said, there must be a fundamental change in how mainstream media perpetuates a negative narrative about Asians and the Asian diaspora.
“In Latino media, I've seen everything. I’ve seen yellow face. I’ve seen Latinos dressed up as grotesque-looking Manchu Kung Fu-type people and they think it’s funny,” Chiu-Rinaldi said. “But for those of us who have 170 years of struggle (as Latino and Asian) it’s not funny, it’s just downright offensive.”
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Alejandra Arevalo is a Peruvian multimedia journalist who graduated in May from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.