Coping with Discrimination and Exclusion

This essay takes an Inter-American and transpacific look at historical processes of discrimination and exclusion of migrants in the Americas and in the Spanish colonial Philippines that were based on racist and xenophobic prejudices. It will focus on pertinent migration policies and conjunctures of negotiation in various societies of the Americas while highlighting discriminatory dynamics in their diachronic dimension. Because Chinese immigrants were the first to experience these exclusionary practices and policies, the focus will be on this group in particular, keeping in mind that these dynamics affected other groups as well. By highlighting the correlation between mobility, liberalism, and ethnicity or ethnic adscription, the aim is to get a better understanding of the conjunctures of discrimination that immigrants who are considered ‘non-white’ suffered and continue to suffer from today in what we might term the Asian century. Contents Introduction .................................................................................. 1 1. Migration, Exclusion, and Strategies of Resistance ............. 6 2. The Period of the Manila Galleon: Chinese and Spaniards in the Philippines ............................. 11 2.1. The Philippines as an Axis of Global Trade and Space of Conflict, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries ........................................... 16 2.2. Transpacific Asian Migration to Continental New Spain ............................................ 25 2.3. The Philippines of the Eighteenth Century: Consolidation, Miscegenation and the Regulation of Migration ......................................... 27 3. Forced Migration and Voluntary Migration in the Modern Age ................................................................ 35 3.1. From the Age of Revolution to the Great Migrations ................................................ 35 3.2. The Coolie Trade – an Intermediate Step toward Voluntary Labor? ............................................. 38 3.3. What is Free Migration? .............................................. 46 3.4. Asian Immigration as a Part of the Free Migration to the Americas ............................................................ 50 4. Free Migration of Chinese to the United States ................... 53 4.1. In Search of the Gold Mountain .................................. 53 4.2. The First Phase of Discrimination of Chinese Immigrants (1848–c. 1865) ....................... 61 4.3. Building the Transcontinental Railroad and a Time of Hope during the Reconstruction Era ........... 77 4.4. The 1870s: A Time of Change ..................................... 87 5. Inter-American Entanglements: Spreading Xenophobia? .... 95 5.1. Transregional Exclusion: USA and Latin America ..... 95 5.2. Transpacific Cooperation between Asia and Latin America and Resistance in the Late Nineteenth Century .................................... 101 5.3. Circular Migration and Transnational Networks ......... 104 5.4. Hegemonic Power and the Proliferation of Policies of Exclusion in the Americas ....................................... 105 Conclusions .................................................................................. 115 Works Cited ................................................................................. 121