Evelyn Hu-Dehart

This book project adds a new chapter to the long and continuous history of the Chinese diaspora: the largely missing narratives of Chinese migration and settlement in Spain and the Spanish empire. Yet the first permanent Chinese diasporic community arose in the late sixteenth century in Spanish Manila, which was an intercolonial transpacific extension of New Spain. Another transpacific moment in the transatlantic was located on Cuban sugar plantations in the mid-nineteenth century, where the Chinese diaspora confronted the African diaspora when Chinese contract laborers worked alongside African slaves. Finally, the project looks at the sudden arrival of new Chinese immigrants playing out in Spain today, which is part of the Chinese state-led policy to blanket Europe, Africa, and Latin America with massive investment followed by people.