Press release 01-2020
Four of the researchers from the Project for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of Chinese Migrations to Costa Rica –Alonso Rodríguez Chaves and Francisco Li González (UNED), Ronald Soto-Quirós (UMB) and Ricardo Martínez Esquivel (UCR) - have published articles on Chinese migration in Costa Rica in an English-language book edited by the Argentine researcher Pablo Baisotti and released by Cambridge Scholar Publishing on September 1, 2020.
The book Chinese Immigration in Latin America: Some Cultural Contributions includes the chapters “Self-organization and Association Solidarities of the Chinese established on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica between the 19th and 20th Centuries”, by Rodríguez Chaves and Li González; “Projects of the Arrival of Chinese to Costa Rica in the Coolie Era”, by Soto-Quirós, and “Playing with Identities. The National Stadium and the Chinatown of San José in Re-establishing Relations Between China and Costa Rica , by Martínez Esquivel.
On the other hand, another one of our researchers, the American scholar Benjamín N. Narváez, professor at the University of Minnesota in Morris—whose earlier work particularly centered on Chinese migration in Cuba and Peru—has published an interesting article on Chinese immigrants in Costa Rica, the patronage of some people belonging to the Costa Rican political class, and the American diplomatic collaboration with members of the Chinese community in the Journal of Migration History (6, 2020). It is titled “The Power and Pitfalls of Patronage: Chinese Immigrants in Costa Rica during the Era of Exclusion, 1897-1943”.
Other research and publication efforts came to full fruition in the works of scholar Alonso Rodríguez Chaves, recently released online. On the one hand, the article “Chinese spirituality on the other side of the sea. Chinese on the Costa Rican Pacific Coast at the end of the 19th century ”was published in the journal Anales del Museo de América (XXVI / 2018)—edition 2019—a publication of the Ministry of Culture and Sports at Spain and; on the other, the article "Stigmatization of people of Chinese origin in Costa Rica between the 19th and 20th centuries" was published in the magazine Clío & Crimen (16, 2019), a dissemination organ of the Center for the History of Crime of Durango (Municipality of Vizcaya, Basque Country, Spain).
Along the same line of thought, last March the researcher and coordinator of PREMEHCHI, Lai Sai Acón Chan, published an article in a bilingual edition –Spanish and English– on Chinese immigrants in the Nicoya peninsula, their integration and relationship. This research was published in the international journal Dialogues (vol. 24, no. 1) at the history department of the Maringá State University [UEM] (Paraná, Brazil): “Inmigrantes chinos en la bajura guanacasteca de Costa Rica: Historias de inserción social y parentesco de algunos clanes familiares de Puntarenas, Abangares y Nicoya”/“Chinese Immigrants in the Guanacastecan Peninsula Lowlands of Costa Rica: Chronicles of Social Integration and Kinship of some Family Clans of Puntarenas, Abangares and Nicoya”. The article is part of a groundbreaking bilingual dossier on international, transcontinental and intraregional human mobility edited by Acón Chan herself and by the other PREMEHCHI coordinator, Ronald Soto-Quirós.
Finally, the book Encounters with the Chinese world: Readings from contemporary Latin American Sinology from the collection "Studies on the Chinese World" is expected to be released by the Editorial de la Sede del Pacífico, University of Costa Rica, in 2020. This work, whose editors are Acón and Martínez, also has articles written by various members of PREMEHCHI, among which are Giselle Chang Vargas and Luis Diego Chaves Chang, Susan Chen Mok, Setsuko Sonoda, Iris Lam Chen, and Martínez himself.