The Forgotten Asian Histories of Latin America

Mimian Hsu’s early works developed from investigations into personal identity and research into the history of Chinese immigration and railroad construction in Costa Rica. In the National Archive, she found intersections between the Asian and Black communities, who worked side by side under brutal conditions on the construction of the Atlantic Railroad in late 19th and early 20th-centuries. In the site-specific photograph Colonia china (2014), Hsu trains our eyes on Limón Province’s main cemetery located on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. The artist visually places us in a specific section of the cemetery where the work’s title is emblazoned across a white tile wall in bold typography, indicating the ethnic make-up of those buried. Set against lush palm trees and dark green tropical foliage that loom in the background, their vibrancy striking a contrast with the austere setting of the cemetery devoid of visible human life, the photograph leaves us with more questions than answers: Who were these people? How did they get here? What lives did they leave and lead? What has nature and the landscape borne witness to? Colonia china does not so much offer a corrective to the elision of racialized histories in Costa Rica but raises urgent questions regarding the nation’s erasure of the same communities who toiled to build infrastructure projects vaunted as symbols of modern progress. Hsu’s photographic gaze also urges us to contend with histories of discrimination, segregation, and socioeconomic disparities against Afro-Caribbean populations that lie outside the frame. Limón, home to the country’s largest Black population, remains the poorest province in Costa Rica, and laws restricting the mobility of Black populations beyond the Atlantic Coast were not abolished until 1949.

Similarly to Hsu, Caroline Ricca Lee queries into how the construction of race and ethnicity in Brazil are informed by questions of identity, history, and location. “In my research, I am trying to position myself and my body in the complexity of Brazilian society,” which for them is inescapable from Brazil’s history of race, slavery, and settler colonialism, said the artist in our conversation. In the sculpture Miragem (2023), the vicissitudes of time, history, and memory impose upon familial memorabilia yet meet a loving hand, as Ricca Lee reconstructs a humanoid form with a small face and large, broad shoulders from a hand-molded ceramic mask and torn, ancestral clothing. Making a new body from the vestiges of personal memories, cultural symbols, and historical absences and silences as a diasporic practice of assemblage—the artist raises the haunting presence of the Asian immigrant ancestor while challenging stereotyped representations of Asianness, creating a figure at once disquieting, ludic, and confrontational.

Based in São Paulo, Ricca Lee has observed the effects of heightened capitalist development with alarm: they began reclaiming ancestral furniture as sources of wooden material after noticing that most of the wood in the local markets was sourced from the Amazon and contributed to deforestation and the displacement of indigenous communities. Turning to Miragem’s back, we see broken porcelain shards which pierce into the jacket fabric, and the sculpture’s exposed steel rod and wooden frame. Starting from the gaps and longings that condition Asian diasporic memory, Miragem charts global circuits of trade through time and space that connect the proliferating circulation of commodities with the displacement and extraction of value from enslaved, indentured bodies and the environment, while insisting on survival in the diasporic in-between.

Responding to historical erasure, cultural othering, and national contexts of anti-Blackness, indigenous dispossession, and anti-Asian racism, contemporary Asian diasporic artists in Latin America and the Caribbean have developed intensive, research-based practices and complex, interdisciplinary works that interrogate history and memory as a critical artistic practice. Alongside recent exhibitions such as everything slackens in a wreck (2022), curated by Andil Gosine at the Ford Foundation Gallery and The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean (2024), curated by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael at Americas Society, these artists open a path forward to approach Asian diasporic art beyond the hegemonic frameworks of identity and representation. Their works make critical interventions within global histories of labor exploitation, colonialism, and empire, drawing our attention to enduring racial and social injustices and asking us to demand and co-create futures otherwise.

Lee Xie is a Provostial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at New York University. She researches and writes on feminist and anticolonial aesthetic practices in contemporary Asian diasporic art and culture.