Identity, Rebellion, and Social Justice Among Chinese Contract Workers in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract

Wealth in nineteenth-century Cuba centered on the labor of black slaves and the managerial skills of the whites who owned them. Imperial politics deemed all other social groups less important if not superfluous. Despite their contributions to the rural labor force and the urban service sector, free persons of African descent, indigenas from Yucatan, and Asians from South China were deemed expendable, but the workings of their expendability differed from one group to the next. Some were clearly defined; others were defined as more undesirable than expendable; still others were ill-defined but functioned well as such. Yucatecos fell into the first division, free blacks and mulattoes into the second, and Chinese contract labor into the third. Contradictions in Spanish discourses allowed Asians to cross the great racial divide while maintaining them as exploitable subalterns. This essay demonstrates how the social economy of late-nineteenth-century Cuba constructed Chinese identity in expendable terms through law, labor, and sexuality, how several hundred Chinese responded to those terms, and the outcomes of their responses as dictated by the Spanish imperial justice system.