A Chinatown on the banks of the Riachuelo? Port Territory and Asian Migration in Buenos Aires, early 20th Century

Abstract

This article explores the presence and imaginaries linked to Chinese migration in the port neighbourhood of La Boca in the city of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the crossroads of social and cultural history and migration studies, with a connected perspective, the paper studies new articulations and subjects of a heterogeneous port community, which built stereotypes and stigmatisations around certain groups in that world of work. Based on a documentary corpus made up of censuses, neighbourhood and commercial press, illustrated magazines and literature, this work shows other threads and experiences in the so-called port Babel, the centre of a narrative of Buenos Aires and national identity. The history and the labour and neighbourhood presence of Chinese migrants in the port of Buenos Aires, associated with specific jobs such as laundries and opium dens, unfolds here, together with the imaginary around Chinatown, full of fears and meanings attributed early on to these migrants, in dialogue with imaginaries of great global relevance, which connected fin-de-siecle Buenos Aires with the experience of other Latin American port cities in the first decades of the twentieth century.