Latin America and Asia
Fall 2018 | Volume XVIII, Number 1
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
First Takes
What Connects Two Worlds Apart?
For much of my academic career, I’d focused on the faraway lands of Europe. But then, about eight years ago, I acted on an impulse to expand my research horizons to the even farther away…
From Extraction to Construction
I began to study China and Latin America in 2008, quite by accident. While working as a research professor in Peru, I was invited by the Andean office of Oxfam to prepare an exploratory…
Bridging Asia and Latin America
Academics, journalists and popular authors are writing more and more in recent years on the interconnections between Asia and Latin America. Asia specialists, Latin America specialists and…
The Diasporas
From Vendedor to Fashion Designer
English + Español
Korean immigrants in Latin America are shaping and developing fashion economies there. Upon arrival, Korean immigrants to Argentina and Brazil may have been lonely, isolated and confused…
The Migrant Photography of Haruo Ohara
Japanese began migrating to Brazil 110 years ago, becoming probably the most prosperous minority group in Latin America and certainly the largest Nikkei community in the globe. In 2008,
Japanese Peruvians
Like many Americans, I knew that 120,000 ethnic Japanese had been held in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. But I had no idea about a secret program that had kidnapped…
Revisiting Circles and Circuits
Chinese migration within the Caribbean began in 1565 with the Spanish Manila galleons, or La Nao de China—which sailed from Manila to Acapulco and created an imagined China within…
Fried Rice and Plátanos
In November 1968, two food critics for New York magazine enthusiastically announced the arrival of a new cuisine in town: “Probably the only benefit that has been derived from the U.S.-
Growing Up Chinese in Uruguay
When the Dutch liner S.S. Boissevan docked in the port of Montevideo in March 1953, it brought my family all the way from Hong Kong to settle in Uruguay. There were eight of us, my father…
The Japanese Brazilian Community
The large community of Japanese Brazilians is often seen as a model minority. Indeed, many Brazilians without any Japanese heritage are now taking pride in Japanese martial arts, food…
One Day We Arrived in Japan
In 2003, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, I started studying the fascinating history of Japanese migration to Brazil and the more recent Brazilian migration to Japan. Brazil has the…
Nikkei Latin America
Japanese people and their descendants have been part of the Latin American ethnoscape for more than a hundred years. People of Japanese descent whose “home” countries are elsewhere…
Trade Ties and Beyond
Dragon Mart Cancún
The anti-Chinese rhetoric was unmistak-able: “[The Chinese] are a dirty people…They come and they bring their whole family…They occupy the area and it ends up being an invasion because
Waves of Asian Investments in Brazil
China, Japan and South Korea are the most critical economic and political powers in the East Asian region. Latin America represents an important destination of foreign direct investment…
Understanding the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative
The Belt and Road Initiative is an example of how the Chinese invoke their millenary history in their current strategies. In 2013, President Xi Jinping called upon the spirit of the Silk Road, a…
Chinese Development Finance and the Andean Amazon Infrastructure Boom
While diplomatic tensions simmer between the U.S. government and its counterparts in Latin America and in China, the South Americans have been growing closer to the Chinese…
New Pirates in the Caribbean?
English pirates trolled the Caribbean five hundred years ago seeking the best plunder for the British Crown. Spanish colonizers of the Americas shipped the gold and silver from this region…
China-Venezuela Relations
In the spring of 2012 researchers from China’s biggest Latin America-focused think tank, the Beijing-based Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) at the Chinese Academy of Social…
China and Latin America Relations
After more than three decades of high rates of economic growth making China the world’s second-largest economy, its government continues to emphasize its status as a developing…
Made in China 2025
English + Español
“Made in China 2025” (MIC 2025) is a national strategy announced by the Chinese State Council in 2015 to develop and consolidate China’s manufacturing industry to convert it into a world power
Filling the Infrastructure Gap
English + Español
Much has been made of China’s remarkable inroads into Latin America over the past two decades, and with good reason. In 2017 alone, China exported $140 billion in goods, spent about…
Development in Northeast Asia
English + Español
I’ve been studying northeast Asia—mainly China, Japan and South Korea—for the past four decades, and I’d like to share with ReVista readers what I consider to be the principal differences…
A Commercial Hit That’s a Product of Censorship
English + Español
How do you picture “alpaca” in Chinese characters? With the December 2017 inauguration of the official store of the Peruvian Alpaca brand in a prestigious Beijing mall, and the launching a…
Cross Currents
Shared Sentiments Inspire New Cultural Centers
English + Español
In the early afternoon of January 3, 2018, in the mountainous village of Shicang, Zhejiang Province, China, firecrackers burst into the air and flags waved in the wind as a parade of Clan…
How to Think Globally
The Hollywood action film Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro and released in 2013, features the Pacific as an abyssal gateway through which alien monsters from another…
Transoceanic Traveling Trash
Objects with Chinese characters float up on beaches in Mexico and Peruvian bottle caps land in distant Australian sands. Since 2014, the Mexican art-based research group TRES has been…
K-dramas Flow into Latin America
I was at Chile’s Santiago airport some months ago when I heard a group of young ladies chanting and cheering. I couldn’t really understand what they were saying, while running with…
Telluric Connections, Bodies in Transit
On a summery morning in Santiago,Chile—January 20, 2016—my mother and I decided to go to the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center. My mother was returning to Brazil the next day, and I was…
Living Between Distant Shores
Esta mecánica, [la de depender del estado] de alguna manera, desoreja a los escritores mexicanos. Los vuelve locos. Algunos, por ejemplo, se ponen a traducir poesía japonesa sin…
Building Bridges
Energy Innovation Ecosystems in Rural Mexico
Renewable Energies Program is making a difference in rural Mexico by engaging universities and local indigenous communities throughout the country to focus on the challenges of…
Book Talk
Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century
A Review of Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century Contemporary Human Rights and Latin America On September 5, 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Hollywood’s then best-paid star, attended a party in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, drank...
Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition
What happens when young people must simultaneously grapple with an uncertain future burdened with the legacy of conflict, violence, and impunity? Michelle Bellino provides some answers to a question that echoes throughout many conflict-affected areas, Guatemala in…
Social Policy Expansion in Latin America
The welfare state emerged in middle-income countries in Latin America during the first half of the 20th century when health care services and pensions were granted to workers with formal sector jobs…