When most people in the United States think of Asian immigrants coming to the Americas, they often think of immigrants who came from China in the 1800s. However, the story is much more complex and interesting.
As assistant professor of history Diego Javier Ruiz explains in his new book, “The First Asians in the Americas,” the whole story begins in the mid-1500s, when Spanish galleons sailed from Acapulco, Mexico, to Manila, Philippines and back. , it started from the place where trade was carried out. silver from the Americas and silk and other trade goods from Asia.
But it wasn’t just the products. From the Indian state of Gujarat to the Philippines, people from Asia, including China and Japan, came to colonial Mexico, many enslaved and some free. They were the first Asians in the Americas and slowly spread across the continent.
He dug deep into archives held in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States to uncover the stories of those individuals and groups. After college, he learned Mandarin while working for several years in Xi’an, China, and then Spanish as an adult. These languages helped him in his studies.
In some ways, this story was personal to Lewis, who grew up in Nashville. His paternal grandfather is Chinese with Afro-Cuban and Ashkenazi Jewish roots.
Tufts Now recently spoke with Lewis to learn more about his personal connection to his research and how, as a historian, he finds sources about people usually hidden in archives. .
How has your family history influenced your interest in the first Asian experiences in the Americas?
My father’s family is originally from China, West Africa, the Canary Islands and Spain. A meeting of these three families was held in Cuba.
“This is a Latin American story. You can’t understand what the experience is like for diaspora Asian Americans and Latinos in the United States without thinking about Latin America,” said Diego. Javier Ruiz says. “Everything is interconnected.” Photo: Jodi Hilton
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“This is a Latin American story. You can’t understand what the experience is like for diaspora Asian Americans and Latinos in the United States without thinking about Latin America,” said Diego. Javier Ruiz says. “Everything is interconnected.” Photo: Jodi Hilton
My Chinese grandfather came to Cuba directly in the early 20th century. I don’t know the exact time, but probably the 1920s or 1930s. It is also known that his grandfather had already traveled back and forth to Cuba. There is a long history of Chinese indentured servitude in Cuba, beginning with the end of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1800s.
Massive numbers of people came to work in the Caribbean and South America. In Cuba, they will work alongside enslaved and recently freed Afro-Caribbean people. Between 1847 and 1874, 120,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba as indentured laborers, and my grandfather’s grandfather was probably one of them.
Where is your paternal grandmother from?
She is the daughter of a gregarious black man named Ventura Santos Santos, who immigrated to Havana from a small town called Caibarien, a man who fought during the War of Independence against Spain. My grandparents met in Havana, and then my Chinese grandfather convinced my grandmother to come with him to New York City, on the Lower East Side near Canal Street in Chinatown. There was a laundromat there, and my father and his brother were there.
It’s a very global story, but it’s complicated because growing up in Nashville I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that I looked different from the rest of my classmates, and they didn’t know how to categorize me either. To the people in that environment, I was pretty much just “Mexican.”
After that, I lived in China for a while and traveled to Cuba, and being someone who has connections to those places, even if those connections go back more to my ancestors than anything I’ve lived through in my own life, It took me a while to really understand what I meant.
And then there’s my mother’s side of the family. Originally from Vermont, I have roots in the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora through Lithuania. That’s a completely different thing to come to terms with.
Why did you decide to focus your doctoral research and this new book on the first Asians in the Americas?
Part of it was not really knowing what it meant to have a family history that tied these places together, to create some kind of coherence from something so fragmented. It was coming from this personal journey. I think a lot of mixed people realize that there’s really no way to get everything in perfect harmony. We have to accept that it is fragmented.
