Ana Maria CANDELA

Intimate Others recovers the translocal practices and imaginaries of two generations of Cantonese elites who migrated and settled in Peru between the 1880s and 1940s, while also maintaining social, economic and political connections to their native places. In the wake of the coolie labor trade (1849-1974), Cantonese migrated freely from the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province to Peru’s northern coastal agricultural provinces. At a time when Peruvian liberal elites began to regard Asians as potential settler colonists who could take up state-orchestrated plans to bring more land into production and natural commodities into circulation, Cantonese compradors became commercial intermediaries linking coastal, Andean and Amazonian regions to national and global commercial circuits. Some also became sugar and cotton plantation owners producing natural materials that fed the global capitalist economy and overseeing complex race-labor regimes. In the process, Cantonese built one of the largest Chinese commercial circuits in the Americas. Moving beyond transnational approaches that situate migrants between nations, Intimate Others adopts translocal, world historical and Third World frameworks to situate Cantonese migrations to Peru within a translocal diasporic world easily obscured by the fragmenting of the globe into bordered nation states, that of the Cantonese Pacific.