Historiography

Migration forms an indispensable part of Venezuela’s national story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, for example, Venezuela received Corsican and German migrants in addition to its vast population of Spaniards and enslaved people from Africa. A substantial body of research, especially in Spanish-language scholarship, contributes to our understanding of this transatlantic migration. While the emphasis to date has been placed on European migration, scholars have also noted the presence of minority groups, including Indians, Chinese and Arabs, among others. Nicolás Perazzo, in his two-volume masterpiece, notes how Chinese and Indian people were encouraged to come to Venezuela as part of the initiative to jumpstart national agricultural production.Footnote ² Adela Pellegrino similarly writes about perceptions of Chinese migrants as part of the new workforce.Footnote ³ More recently, Juan Carlos Rey González discusses the Chinese, particularly the discrimination they encountered and the significant industries they worked in, in his comprehensive study of the history of migration to Venezuela.Footnote ⁴ Also, Norbert Molina Medina, in addition to authoring a major work on Sino-Venezuelan diplomatic history, provides an informative overview of Chinese migration to Venezuela as a prelude to establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.Footnote ⁵ Each of these publications constitutes an exemplary work of primary research, enriching our knowledge about migration to this south American country.Footnote ⁶

This paper builds on the above research by emphasising a transnational approach, focusing on the problems and threats the Chinese themselves encountered and the solutions they identified. Based on material written in Spanish, Chinese and English, a transnational perspective can explain critical issues concerning migratory phenomena in Venezuela and beyond. By examining events abroad, one can better appreciate the unique nature of the Chinese migrants in Venezuela, anti-Chinese sentiment in Venezuela, and the gradually improving situation for Chinese Venezuelans in the 1940s.

In this work, I highlight two separate immigration periods. The first was the coolie period up until 1882. Following this, the second period involved free migration after the last coolie contracts expired in both Cuba and Peru. The coolie trade provided the basis on which the second phase took a much more complex turn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during which Venezuela was one of many destinations.

Early Chinese Migration to Latin America: The Coolie Trade

Mass Chinese migration to Latin America began in 1847, when planters began responding to the fall in the number of African slaves by increasing their reliance on Chinese indentured labour.Footnote ⁷ The abolitionist movement made purchasing African slaves increasingly difficult, expensive, and ultimately illegal, but the ‘Asian colonists’ – los colonos asiáticos – were abundant, affordable and technically lawful. Managers of plantations in Cuba and Peru were the first to try using ‘coolies’, as the Chinese migrants came to be known, but their employment soon extended to other labour-intensive industries, including the guano mines in Peru, railway construction in Costa Rica, and the cotton fields in Chile. Cuba and Peru, however, received by far the highest number of Chinese indentured labourers – more than 250,000 between 1847 and 1874.Footnote ⁸

The international outcry caused by the maltreatment of these Chinese labourers eventually led to diplomatic negotiations in early 1874. They resulted in the swiftly agreed Sino-Peruvian (1874) treaty and the Sino-Spanish treaty (1877), prohibiting the coolie trade altogether.Footnote ⁹ But the new agreements did not stop Chinese emigration to Latin America. Instead, they paved the way for voluntary migration. Despite this positive change, a range of anti-Chinese legislation and movements emerged across the Americas. Perhaps the most notorious legislation was the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in the US Congress in 1882. Reports of occasional murders across Latin America were plentiful, but large-scale killings of Chinese migrants also took place.Footnote ¹⁰ For instance, more than 500 Chinese men were murdered in Peru’s Cañete Massacre of 1881 at the height of the War of the Pacific (1879–83) between Peru and Chile.Footnote ¹¹ Stereotyping contributed to violence; as the Mexican revolutionary army entered Torreόn on 13 May 1911, 303 Chinese and five Japanese were killed. The victims were accused of, amongst other things, monopolising certain businesses, making exorbitant amounts of money in Mexico, and stealing Mexican women.Footnote ¹²

Not all Chinese people, however, experienced the same level of discrimination and maltreatment. Following their arrival in the 1870s, the Chinese in Venezuela, although encountering legal restrictions on immigration and occupation, never endured the hardships faced by those in Cuba, Peru and northern Mexico. No massacres took place in Venezuela. The Chinese were, however, targeted because of their ethnicity, above all during the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship (1908–35) and the subsequent Eleazar López Contreras government (1936–41). Yet Chinese Venezuelans overcame these challenges by leveraging their economic and political influence within a global diasporic network spanning the Pacific. Continuing to migrate to Venezuela and even expanding their communities during the twentieth century, their stories differed markedly from the horrors suffered by the Chinese elsewhere in the Americas.

Initial Plans for Chinese Migration to Venezuela

Ever since gaining independence in 1811, Venezuela has faced a significant demographic challenge: underpopulation. By the 1850s, politicians, intellectuals and business leaders all agreed that Venezuela needed new migrants, especially to work in agriculture. The agricultural sector had declined since the 1820s, mainly due to disruptions caused by the wars of independence, the collapse of Spanish export markets, and ongoing labour shortages. Although slavery was not officially abolished until the 1854,Footnote ¹³ the gradual decline of the slave labour system during this time further exacerbated these challenges.Footnote ¹⁴ The newly independent nation was vast, with most land – 68 per cent – unclaimed and uncultivated.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition to this chronic shortage of labourers, other factors such as a lack of infrastructure and the regional nature of Venezuela’s agriculture also challenged the country’s long-term dynamic and sustainability.Footnote ¹⁶ Repeated attempts to recruit European migrants did not produce the desired number of workers.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the consequences was untapped agricultural potential in the country. To prosper as a new country, from the perspective of the elite, Venezuela needed to expand its population, particularly in its farming and rural communities.Footnote ¹⁸ In this context, the Chinese came to be seen as a possible solution to Venezuela’s underpopulation problem.

In 1847 and 1849 Chinese coolies started to work in Cuba and Peru respectively.Footnote ¹⁹ Serving as the Venezuelan envoy to Peru in 1853, Antonio Leocadio Guzmán witnessed first-hand how Chinese indentured labourers were playing an important role in incredibly lucrative Peruvian guano mining and essential railroad construction businesses.Footnote ²⁰ Chinese labourers were cheap, reliable, abundant and fully legal. They produced tangible results. Upon Guzmán’s return to Venezuela in 1855, he became the country’s foreign minister. He drafted proposals aiming to replicate this Peruvian economic success story in Venezuela. In 1855, President José Tadeo Monagas accepted the proposals; the government enacted new immigration laws encouraging Chinese migration.Footnote ²¹ Guzmán was personally awarded the right to recruit Chinese workers for four years, for which the government was to pay him a commission of 25 pesos per head. He created a ‘coolie-trading’ company between China and Venezuela and submitted a series of documents to the Venezuelan government, including a draft contract to be signed between his company and all Chinese workers.Footnote ²² Nevertheless, because of the high price Guzmán charged and opposition to Asian immigration by some in the Venezuelan elite, the plan never came to fruition.Footnote ²³

While anecdotes to the effect that some Chinese workers came to Venezuela before the 1870s may be true, Chinese migration on a larger scale likely occurred in the 1870s, because that was the time when most Chinese in Cuba and Peru regained control over their mobility upon dissolution of the coolie trade and contract termination.Footnote ²⁴ This wave of Chinese migration to Venezuela was, in fact, part of a second migration process to Latin America. Now, the Chinese were travelling to Venezuela from neighbouring countries, such as Cuba, where they had previously settled as coolies. The first documented entry of Chinese individuals occurred in 1875 when the arrival of two Chinese among a total 3,060 immigrants was recorded.Footnote ²⁵ In the meantime, the Venezuelan government made attempts to attract Chinese migrants en masse in 1884.Footnote ²⁶ This occurred under the tenure of Interior Minister José María Manrique, who was tasked with ensuring compliance with the contract terms between the Chinese labourers and their Venezuelan employers to avoid the diplomatic quagmire that Spain and Peru had earlier experienced.Footnote ²⁷

By the 1870s, however, the Chinese coolie trade to Latin America was already becoming notorious internationally. Recruitment of Chinese people from southern China became increasingly difficult, even if it was not forbidden by the local Chinese authorities. Coupled with domestic opposition in Venezuela and limited profit margins accruing from the trade, no significant migration schemes materialised. On top of that, in 1891, the Venezuelan Congress passed its first legislation prohibiting Asian and Black immigration.Footnote ²⁸ This legislation reflected concerns about the presence of Chinese migrants and, in the case of Black Venezuelans, reiterated anxieties over a population already long established through the history of African slavery. Less than a year later, however, Joaquín Crespo, the new president, revised the legal code and, under pressure from agricultural interests, allowed Chinese workers to arrive in the country while continuing to prohibit the immigration of people of African descent.Footnote ²⁹ In 1892, oral accounts suggest that more than 1,000 Chinese came to Venezuela.Footnote ³⁰ In 1893, plans advanced for recruitment by the Ministerio de Fomento (Ministry of Development) claimed that los chinos were ‘completely suited’ to endure hardship in the fields and would be satisfied with minimal financial rewards.Footnote ³¹

The 1892 group did not arrive from China, however. Rather, these Chinese migrated to Venezuela from other Latin American countries, notably Cuba. This contrasted fundamentally with the earlier generation of Chinese migrants, who had come directly from China, spoke no Spanish, and had no cultural or social understanding of Latin America. Most Chinese coolies who went to Cuba and Peru followed the dream of other overseas Chinese in southeast Asia. They would go abroad for a few years, work hard, earn good money and return home rich. These coolies harboured no intention of remaining abroad indefinitely; becoming Chinese Cubans or Chinese Peruvians was not in their minds as they signed the coolie contract back in China.

The case of Chinese migrants to Venezuela, however, involved a different group. They were much more prepared to stay in Latin America than the first-generation indentured labourers. They spoke Spanish, had become acquainted with Western society, and had joined the transpacific Chinese network. Many examples of this acculturation exist. One such was José Peña, who migrated from Cuba to Venezuela in the 1880s.Footnote ³² Peña was not his original name; he may have renamed himself or, more likely, his Hispanicised name was given to him either by his employer at the start of his contract or by a Catholic priest during his baptism in Cuba:Footnote ³³ employers and the Church were powerful forces in the lives of indentured workers. Contemporary reports documented how they could significantly shield coolies from harm, even freeing them from indenture.Footnote ³⁴ Conversion to the Catholic faith was a strategy that could help Chinese migrants stay in Cuba and Latin America.Footnote ³⁵ Having survived the coolie contract in Cuba, Peña could use what he had learned there culturally, commercially and linguistically to improve his life in Venezuela.

Locals in Caracas recalled that Peña first set up a tobacco shop, El Fénix, on the block between La Torre and Las Madrices, a prime location close to Plaza Bolívar, the city’s main square.Footnote ³⁶ Peña almost certainly achieved this thanks to his prior business knowledge and personal contacts in Cuba, where tobacco was widely and cheaply produced. With his business going well, Peña expanded his commercial endeavours. He brought in three Chinese relatives, taught them Spanish, then embarked on another commercial initiative nearby: the first Chinese laundry shop in Caracas, situated between Angelitos and Quebrado in the western part of the historic centre.Footnote ³⁷ During the week, the Chinese collected, washed and ironed clothes, returning them to their clients at the weekend.

Carmen Clemente Travieso (1900–83), a Caracas-born journalist and women’s rights activist, wrote about this service provided by the Chinese in the capital at the turn of the century, all for the modest price of 5 pesos.Footnote ³⁸ She recounts a famous anecdote: one day, a young man from Cumana arrived at a boarding house; although he was always short of money, he got into the habit of using Chinese laundry services. One afternoon, the landlady told him, ‘Young man, the Chinese man is here with your clothes …’ He replied: ‘Wait, ma’am; I’m going to hide …’ The Chinese laundryman, in response to the young man’s plea through the landlady, replied laconically: ‘Si no hay leal, no hay lopa.’Footnote ³⁹

In today’s Venezuela, this phrase has become a common way of denying credit. Peña and his compatriots from China are in this way still obliquely alluded to with this local Venezuelan expression which, although it could be seen as endearing, also mocks the Chinese who could not pronounce the Spanish ‘r’, a sound non-existent in the Chinese language.

The excellent service offered by the Chinese laundrymen at a low price posed a severe challenge to their competitors. Indeed, Rudolf Dolge, the American owner of the ‘Lavandería Americana’ laundry in the capital, hoped to go to China to learn more about the secrets of Chinese laundry.Footnote ⁴⁰ Until the 1910s, there was no visible anti-Chinese sentiment from the government or the public. A small population, probably fewer than 2,000 in a country of more than 2 million, helped the Chinese keep a low profile.Footnote ⁴¹ There was no Chinatown or barrio chino in Venezuela. Scattered across the country, they gave little reason for Venezuelans to feel alarmed or threatened by their presence. But in the years after 1910, this relatively peaceful period for the Chinese would suddenly change.

Expansion, 1912–37

Legal discrimination against non-European migrants began as early as 1891 with a law restricting the immigration of people of Asian nationalities, individuals from the British and Dutch Antilles, and those over 60 unless they had family in Venezuela.Footnote ⁴² In 1912, another law – the Ley de Inmigración y Colonización – was passed in the Venezuelan Congress, preventing ‘individuals not of the European race’, amongst others, from immigrating to the country.Footnote ⁴³ This anti-Chinese sentiment was further emphasised in a later iteration of immigration legislation in 1918: ‘The following shall not be accepted as immigrants nor shall they be entitled to the benefits granted by the present law: Individuals who are not of the European race, or islanders of the yellow race from the northern hemisphere [Chinese coming from the Caribbean islands].’Footnote ⁴⁴ Given the minimal presence of Japanese and Koreans in Venezuela,Footnote ⁴⁵ this modification to the law seemed aimed at Chinese migrants.

As it turned out, however, immigration law and reality were not the same. Despite the legal restrictions, Chinese migrants who originated from elsewhere in the Americas continued to re-migrate to Venezuela via legal or illegal means.Footnote ⁴⁶ Most came from nearby countries and territories such as Aruba, Curaçao, British Guiana, Cuba, Colombia and Trinidad, many of which had been involved in the nineteenth-century Chinese coolie trade (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁴⁷ The Chinese who survived the coolie trade, and the second generation who were born in the Americas, along with the Chinese whom they invited from China, were all looking for better economic opportunities elsewhere. In the 1910s and 1920s, Venezuela represented one such opportunity. This was the result of a new discovery in the country: oil.Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 1.

Possible Migratory Routes of Chinese to Venezuela in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lower left inset: origins of Chinese registered in Venezuela, 1947; upper right inset: number of registered Chinese in Venezuela, 1941

Source: Author’s elaboration based on data in Pan Chuji 潘楚基 to MOFA, 25 Dec. 1947, AH, 020-990600-2608 (origins of Chinese in Venezuela); Chen Zehua 陳澤華 to MOFA, 8 Aug. 1948, AH, 020-061700-0017 (countries/territories from which Chinese remigrated to Venezuela); Memoria y cuenta que el Ministro de Relaciones Interiores presenta al Congreso Nacional en sus sesiones ordinarias del año de 1943 (Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1943), pp. 174–202 (distribution of Chinese in Venezuela).

In April 1914, exploration in Mene Grande revealed tremendous oil reserves in the state of Zulia, especially beneath Lake Maracaibo. Both individual and institutional newcomers quickly arrived to share a piece of this lucrative pie. During the Gómez dictatorship, the president’s friends and allies obtained licences to explore and extract oil, and these concessions were transferred to several European and US conglomerates. These companies brought many American and European expatriates to Venezuela, some with their families. They could not, however, do everything. Newly set-up petroleum companies, with their oil wells and big ports, required many reliable and affordable labourers, especially semi-skilled workers. Some of these positions were directly related to the oil business, such as workers at the drilling sites, seamen on board oil tankers, or clerical staff in the offices. Others were auxiliary positions, such as bakers, tailors, cooks and laundrymen servicing the expatriate and local communities. Some Chinese workers occupied both the key and the auxiliary positions.

But how did they come to Venezuela while an official ban was in place? Many arrived legally, with the support of the oil conglomerates. The deference of the Gómez and subsequent governments to foreign petroleum interests was no secret.Footnote ⁴⁹ Oil companies contributed to the national coffer; for this income stream to continue, they needed a reliable and affordable workforce. Since non-Venezuelans provided essential services, often at a low cost, American and European conglomerates regularly provided them with political protection, allowing them to skirt exclusionary legislation.

Correspondence between foreign companies and local governments in Venezuela records many instances of Chinese labourers employed by the oil companies and details of exemptions from the immigration bans for Chinese employees.Footnote ⁵⁰ While officially Chinese seamen from the oil tankers could not come on shore in Venezuela, all they required was a letter from the state, which the company obtained on their behalf.Footnote ⁵¹ Similarly, oil companies vouched for other Chinese in their employ. For instance, Chan Fai worked as ‘First Cook’ for the Caribbean Petroleum Company’s oil refinery in San Lorenzo; Kenneth Afoon worked in the kitchen of the company’s Cabimas oil field; and Ton Con Mo was a laundry worker for the Lago Petroleum Corporation.Footnote ⁵² They were all allowed to come and stay in the country.

Even Chinese workers who were not directly hired by foreign companies managed to find ways to evade the obstacles to immigration. As with Chinese migrants elsewhere, those who had already settled in Venezuela would recruit kinsmen in the Americas or China. They would write a letter to the state vouching for their kinsman’s exemplary character and requesting exemption from the prohibitions. Alternatively, they asked the Chinese Consulate-General in Caracas to assist. Either way, the Chinese Consulate-General reported that these applications were regularly granted.Footnote ⁵³ The result was general prosperity for many Chinese in Venezuela in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The consulate reports, the reports submitted by the Asociación China de Caracas 委京中華總會館, and plenty of family stories and regional archives all attest to this.Footnote ⁵⁴ For instance, in 1927, the oil boom in Venezuela attracted Alfonso Joa, a Chinese man in Haiti, to re-migrate. Proficient in French, Spanish, Cantonese and English, Joa set up a successful laundry business and a grocery store that catered to the US expatriates in Ciudad Ojeda, most clients being the employees of American oil companies. Joa’s business and private life were going well; after a few years, he met Ernestina Pérez, a Venezuelan woman. Despite her family’s opposition, they married; he bought her a sizeable house in Ciudad Ojeda for the large sum of 50,000 bolívares.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Lagunillas, Andrés Fan Fung owned a grocery store, and Emilio Yo managed the Half Moon tailors. Vicente Ching ran a popular laundry, which earned him a letter of support from the París family of Maracaibo.Footnote ⁵⁶

Anti-Foreigner Sentiment

Nevertheless, anti-foreigner, and specifically anti-Chinese, sentiment never dissipated. Granting exemptions to the Chinese was a difficult balancing act for the Gómez dictatorship. During the 1920s and 30s, the Venezuelan intelligentsia unequivocally supported the ‘whitening’ (blanqueamiento) of the country’s population. They argued for ‘new blood and new ideas’, recognising the country’s underpopulation.Footnote ⁵⁷ This concept was deeply rooted in positivism, a philosophical framework emphasising scientific progress and rational order as pathways to national development.Footnote ⁵⁸ Positivist ideals, widely influential in Latin America, promoted the belief that European immigration would elevate Venezuela’s social, economic and intellectual level. At the same time non-white groups, including the Chinese, were seen as obstacles to this vision.

A prominent intellectual and politician, Alberto Adriani (1898–1936), reasoned in 1930 that white migrants were the only people who could advance the country.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such ideas were hardly indigenous to Venezuela. Like many of his fellow intellectuals, Adriani had encountered them during his education in Europe and later work in the United States; he cited, in particular, the work of American sociologists Edward Alsworth Ross and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, who had argued that there was a positive correlation between the number of white people in a country and its level of development.Footnote ⁶⁰ In short, the whiter a country’s population, the wealthier and more powerful it would become.

In Adriani’s social Darwinist view, European immigrants, who enjoyed a higher standard of living, would contribute not only to the economic progress of Venezuela but also to its intellectual and social advancement.Footnote ⁶¹ Asian migration, on the other hand, ought to be restricted or prohibited outright: ‘Yellow and Indian immigration should be banned, and Black immigration should be restricted as much as possible, with a preference for European immigration, even though such a preference may be costly, to begin with.’Footnote ⁶² Although Adriani recognised the potential economic downsides of such exclusionary policies, in the long run he believed that white-only migration would pay for itself, arguing, ‘The Chinese and Hindus are unassimilable immigrants, whose standard of living is inferior to ours, and whose institutions and customs are alien to our people.’Footnote ⁶³

Adriani was further concerned with the geopolitical implications of Asian immigration. Pointing out that it had already been banned in the United States, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,Footnote ⁶⁴ he wondered what these countries would think of Venezuela if Caracas allowed Chinese and Indian immigrants. Adriani was especially concerned with the image of Venezuela in the United States. In likely reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and other anti-Black legislation there,Footnote ⁶⁵ he recalled how Americans treated their non-white population:

If the United States treated Asians, Blacks and Native Americans with disdain and perhaps perceived them even as enemies, how would they treat Venezuela if it were full of these non-white immigrants? It was, therefore, in Venezuela’s political interest to promote white and restrict non-white immigration.

Similar sentiments against non-whites were often echoed in newspaper editorials around the country. For instance, an editorial in El Venezolano commented:

Partly in response to such rhetoric against non-Europeans, the Gómez dictatorship issued decrees banning the entry of all Blacks and Chinese into Venezuela. For instance, a decree from 23 July 1930 stated that non-Europeans would not be welcome.Footnote ⁶⁸ In a letter from the Interior Ministry to the state of Zulia, the federal government instructed local officials not to allow any Chinese to disembark in that state, even if they were naturalised citizens of other nations,Footnote ⁶⁹ again suggesting that some Chinese persisted in re-migrating to Venezuela via third countries.

Nevertheless, public support for these actions was questionable. The excerpt from El Venezolano demonstrates some perceptual differentiation between various groups of non-whites in Venezuelan society. The Chinese appear to occupy a particular category within the foreign population: not equal to Europeans, but not held in the same contempt as the Blacks and Arabs. The Chinese were often, as in the editorial above, described as ‘poor people’ (pobre gente), perhaps deserving some compassion and acceptance. This positive sentiment in a culture hostile toward non-whites in general may have had to do with public awareness of the suffering of Chinese coolies in Latin America and, in the late 1930s, of the depredations of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), during which the Venezuelan press kept its readership informed about destructive actions by Japan such as the bombing of Hankou and the broader devastation, including strategic actions like the Yellow River flood.Footnote ⁷⁰

Moreover, the decrees were not effectively implemented. In the state of Sucre, the governor informed the federal government on 1 June 1931 that six Chinese had been detained for clandestine entry into the country and could not produce official papers proving their status in Venezuela.Footnote ⁷¹ It is likely, however, that few such cases were reported. A widely known system of bribery facilitated illegal entry into the country and led to foreigners gaining a Venezuelan passport.Footnote ⁷² Requests made by foreign conglomerates were not ignored, and the Chinese continued to obtain entry permits with the assistance of oil interests. For instance, in November 1929, the Venezuela Gulf Oil Company asked the state of Zulia to permit its Chinese employees aboard its oil tankers to disembark at Zulian ports; permission was initially rejected but eventually granted.Footnote ⁷³ This tug-of-war between ‘ideal’ migration to Venezuela and more pragmatic economic and political considerations continued. The Chinese could navigate the circumstances to their advantage despite these significant challenges.

Exclusion, 1937–41

While the Gómez dictatorship’s laws were not minority-friendly, the Chinese communities in Venezuela had sufficient room to manoeuvre via legal or illegal means. However, when Gómez died in office in December 1935, his successor, López Contreras, left the Chinese Venezuelans with almost nowhere to turn. Their fundamental economic and legal existence was threatened, as López Contreras embarked on a series of ambitious socio-political programmes to reform and improve the general well-being of Venezuela.Footnote ⁷⁴ His signature policy package included the ‘Programa de Febrero’ (February Programme) of 1936 and the ‘Plan Trienal’ (Triennial Plan) of 1939, both of which prioritised immigration as a means to achieve a revitalised Venezuela.Footnote ⁷⁵ Pro-white ideas were ingrained in the immigration directives,Footnote ⁷⁶ and specific actions were taken to target non-white ethnic groups, including prohibiting Chinese immigration to Venezuela and removing Chinese from major cities, if not from the country altogether.

In the eyes of the Venezuelan authorities, there were ample reasons to expel the Chinese, not explicitly anchored in the notion of racial ‘whitening’. First, most of these Chinese had entered the country illegally.Footnote ⁷⁷ Second, they engaged in transnational organised crime, such as human trafficking, and profited from smuggling their compatriots into Venezuela.Footnote ⁷⁸ The third, and most frequently cited, reason was that the Chinese posed health and social problems for the Venezuelan population. Perhaps the most frequent complaint made by the authorities was about the poor hygiene standards of the Chinese-operated bars and restaurants.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, the ‘Chinese problem’ went beyond poor sanitation: two particular ‘ills’ were often discussed in the press, alcohol sales and itinerant peddling.

In the 1930s, Chinese merchants dominated the alcohol retail trade in parts of Venezuela, particularly in urban centres and working-class neighbourhoods. Contemporary Venezuelan newspapers, Chinese diplomatic dispatches and letters written by Chinese merchants attested to their prominence in this sector.Footnote ⁸⁰ These Chinese entrepreneurs typically operated within trusted, closed networks, benefiting from access to expertise and credit unavailable to most Venezuelan competitors. While the Venezuelan elite and expatriates from the United States and Europe controlled large-scale alcohol production, especially the manufacture of rum and aguardiente derived from sugarcane, Chinese merchants focused on the small-scale alcohol retail trade and informal, localised production aimed at working-class consumers.

As José Ángel Rodríguez demonstrates, aguardiente production during this period remained firmly in Venezuelan hands, tied to established regional producers and to the sugarcane economy’s modernisation efforts from the early twentieth century onwards.Footnote ⁸¹ Rodríguez emphasises that these production circuits were controlled by Venezuelan distillers and subject to increasing state regulation from the 1930s through to the 1950s. Major brands of spirits, whether consumed domestically or exported, remained entirely owned and operated by Venezuelan companies.Footnote ⁸² Chinese merchants did not participate in these larger production networks. Rather, they operated on the margins of the alcohol economy, running taverns and small outlets where they sold cheap, sometimes informally produced spirits, targeting a clientele overlooked by larger producers.Footnote ⁸³ This market segmentation helps explain why Chinese merchants were perceived as dominating alcohol sales at the retail level, even if they had no control over mainstream production. Their success in this lower-end sector provoked anxieties among Venezuelan officials and segments of the press, who portrayed Chinese merchants as harmful to public health and national well-being.Footnote ⁸⁴

Beyond engaging in liquor sales, some Chinese became itinerant peddlers, selling small items at inflated prices. The Chinese travelled from town to town, offering all kinds of products that were popular among the Venezuelan population, especially lower-income consumers. In addition to alcoholic beverages, the Chinese sold tobacco, clothing, household goods, consumer items and foodstuffs, all tailored to local needs. The Chinese peddlers were especially popular in rural areas, where these articles were not regularly nor abundantly supplied.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, in the government’s view, that effectively constituted profiteering. A report in El Universal suggests that the peddlers often doubled or tripled the price of the article. The innocent Venezuelan public bought their items without knowing their true cost. This, according to the report, was damaging to the Venezuelan economy and especially so to petty merchants in the country.Footnote ⁸⁶

Such a narrative amplified Adriani’s ideas, especially after 1936 when López Contreras appointed him minister of agriculture and later treasury minister, allowing him to implement his ideas on immigration. One of his first initiatives was to establish a new office, the Instituto Tecnológico de Inmigración y Colonización (Technological Institute for Immigration and Colonisation), through which the Venezuelan government could actively screen, select and encourage white immigrants while rejecting all non-white candidates. In general, Adriani’s policies targeted many ethnic groups; Chinese, Arabs, Indians and Africans were all affected. Other policies, however, were explicitly aimed at los chinos. Adriani did not witness the full consequences of all these policies, as he died in August 1936. However, the López Contreras government carried them out, and the policies would not be officially abandoned until 1966.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Chinese-specific measures were implemented from 1937 to 1941. They included an immigration ban, mass registration, business closures, forced relocation and, ultimately, expulsion. In July 1937, the Venezuelan Congress enacted the Ley de Extranjeros (Foreigners’ Law). This was the first comprehensive and systematic immigration legislation in Venezuela, moving beyond the ad hoc directives of 1891, 1912 and 1918. The 1937 law, which implicitly enabled the exclusion of non-European immigrants through broad discretionary powers ceded to the government, established formal bureaucracy for the admission, registration and control of foreigners in Venezuela. It prohibited the entry of foreigners involved in alcohol sales, itinerant peddling or speculative trading. The legal text also granted the executive branch significant authority to punish and expel foreigners engaged in these activities.Footnote ⁸⁸

The press made it clear that the Chinese were the targets of the new law,Footnote ⁸⁹ and anecdotal evidence shows that restrictions on Chinese migrants entering the country were being more strictly enforced.Footnote ⁹⁰ In September 1937, Caracas began registering all Chinese immigrants living in Venezuela and required them to carry an official certificate whenever they went out.Footnote ⁹¹ Then, in July the following year, the López Contreras administration ordered all Chinese-operated bars and liquor stores to be closed down and that the Chinese in these businesses to be expelled from the country by 1 August 1938.Footnote ⁹²

This increasingly hostile environment was so alarming that the Asociación China de Caracas appealed directly to the Chinese government, asking for its official intervention on their behalf.Footnote ⁹³ Despite being deeply mired in the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in Chongqing and Chinese diplomats in the Americas demonstrated readiness to assist the Chinese in Venezuela. The root cause of the challenges facing Chinese immigrants in Venezuela was the absence of formal treaty relations between the two countries. Without diplomatic ties, China had no consular missions in Venezuela to protect its nationals’ interests abroad.Footnote ⁹⁴

However, establishing diplomatic relations required time, and the Chinese in Venezuela needed urgent action. Therefore the Chinese ambassador to the United States, his Venezuelan counterpart in Washington, and the US envoy to Venezuela collectively intervened on their behalf. Antonio Gonzalez, representing the United States in Venezuela,Footnote ⁹⁵ successfully negotiated a stay of execution with the López Contreras government. Those who had married Venezuelan women could continue operating their alcohol-selling businesses, albeit in the knowledge that this was a reprieve.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, some 280 other bars and liquor stores managed by the Chinese were shut down, and the Chinese merchants incurred considerable losses.Footnote ⁹⁷ They were still allowed to work in the agricultural sector or to sell coffee, tea and milk instead of alcohol.Footnote ⁹⁸ Most Chinese who lost their liquor establishments eventually switched to operating cafés instead.Footnote ⁹⁹

Some editorials supported Caracas’s actions against the Chinese.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For example, an editorial in El Heraldo on 4 July 1938 compared the Chinese selling alcohol to locals to ‘poisoning the Venezuelan race’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The editorial also mentioned the rise of the Chinese mafia and issues related to Chinese human trafficking into Venezuela and argued that the government’s anti-Chinese measures were therefore justified. Contrary to this anti-Chinese stance, other newspapers, such as the Caracas-based titles Ahora, El Universal and La Esfera, openly opposed the government’s expulsion order and called for alternative solutions to the ‘Chinese Question’.Footnote ¹⁰²

For instance, La Esfera, a prominent newspaper that typically aligned with the country’s political and economic elite, strongly opposed the government’s justification for the Chinese expulsion. It praised the work ethic of the Chinese in Venezuela and their daily contributions to the lives of the Venezuelan people.Footnote ¹⁰³ Opposing the López Contreras administration’s plans to remove the Chinese was also partly due to humanitarian concerns. El Universal’s editorial on 3 July 1938 argued that sending Chinese Venezuelans back to war-torn China would be wrong and pointed out that, since most Latin American countries had closed their borders, they had nowhere else to go.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The call for the Chinese to be allowed to stay was also based on the fact that the overwhelming majority of them were men who had married Venezuelan women. The rate of Sino-Venezuelan marriages was high in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These unions produced children who had never lived outside Venezuela. They did not even speak Chinese.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To return the Chinese along with their families to China was felt to be unconscionable. The editorial on 28 July 1938 in El Universal interviewed Francisco Hon, the president of the Asociación China de Caracas, who described the plight of these Sino-Venezuelan couples, targets of the latest round of Chinese exclusion. Accompanying the interview and editorial was a printed list of the children born of these marriages, with their names and ages. The article thus sought to appeal to the compassion of the wider readership in the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

As a solution to the ‘Chinese question’, some newspapers suggested that the Chinese should be moved from cities to the interior, where a lack of workers was increasingly becoming a national problem. There the Chinese could contribute to agricultural production as skilled farmers. The Caracas government soon accepted this proposal as a partial solution.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless, in May 1940, the Venezuelan Congress passed the Ley de Naturalización (Naturalisation Law), prohibiting ineligible individuals from acquiring Venezuelan nationality; the Chinese would therefore not be able to become Venezuelans.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Shortly afterwards, the government informed all shipmasters approaching Venezuela that any crew member of ‘Negro’ or ‘Yellow’ race would not be permitted to take leave on shore.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In July, the Venezuelan Interior Ministry required re-registration of all Chinese in the country;Footnote ¹¹¹ the new paperwork asked for their names, fingerprints, photographs, addresses and state of residence. Anyone who failed to register, and anyone found to be of illegal status, was to be sent to work in Venezuela’s interior.Footnote ¹¹² In September, some 60 Chinese were rounded up and sent to an unspecified island for agricultural work.Footnote ¹¹³ Effectively, the registration scheme led to a sudden loss of mobility for the Chinese, who were now restricted to the home state listed on their registration paperwork. For instance, a Chinese person registered in Zulia could not travel to Caracas for business or leisure purposes. Extortion and harassment by local officials reportedly compounded their difficulties.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Plans to expel the Chinese went even further. Some rumoured that López Contreras intended to remove them in four phases: October 1940, January 1941, March 1941 and July 1941.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Chinese community panicked and renewed its appeals to Chinese envoys in the United States and elsewhere in Latin America, and to the Chinese government in Chongqing, which was itself in a dire situation fighting the Japanese. ‘January 1941 is almost here, and we don’t know which of us will be taken next. Everyone is frightened for his life. Our only hope lies in the rescue attempt made by Ambassadors Hu [Shi] and Li [Dijun]!’ Thus read the appeal of the Asociación China de Caracas to the MOFA in Chongqing.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The Asociación China also astutely presented an emotional petition to the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, the wartime leader of China, ensuring that it would reach the notice of the MOFA. The petition listed the discriminatory actions the Chinese had encountered in Venezuela. A deadline had been given to all Chinese to pack up and leave the country, including those who had married Venezuelans. They, and their Venezuelan-born children, were to be sent ‘back’ to China. The Asociación China de Caracas also dispatched telegrams to Li Dijun 李迪俊, the Chinese minister to Cuba, pleading for urgent assistance.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Li, in turn, sought help from his colleague Hu Shi 胡適, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, who requested the US State Department’s intervention in the plight of the Chinese in Venezuela. Li also contacted Venezuela’s foreign and interior ministers in order to try to avert the worst outcomes.Footnote ¹¹⁸

This time, the Venezuelan government’s official response was more resolute. Together with other non-white individuals, it stated, the Chinese should not have been allowed entry in the first place, although they had been permitted to stay on compassionate and humanitarian grounds. The registration scheme was intended to give proper status to the Chinese already in the country, but some had abused the system by transferring the paperwork to Chinese who had entered illegally. To protect the legal rights of those already settled, there was, so the claim went, a need to re-issue the identification paperwork, with fingerprints and photographs, to distinguish legal from illegal residents.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Fortunately for the Chinese, the expulsion threats never materialised. There were several reasons for this. The Venezuelan government, in addition to local opposition, also faced substantial pressure that had been brought to bear by the US public. When Caracas instructed the captains of US vessels not to allow crew members of Chinese or African descent to take shore leave in Venezuela, the captains complained to the shipping union. The union, in turn, forwarded these messages to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, in November 1940, condemned the Venezuelan policy and subsequently asked Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, to ‘persuade’ Caracas to lift the restriction.Footnote ¹²⁰ Frank Corrigan, US ambassador to Venezuela from 1939 to 1947,Footnote ¹²¹ negotiated a second stay of expulsion on behalf of the Chinese; the authorities again relented.Footnote ¹²² On 5 May 1941, López Contreras’s presidential term ended. Although continuing his predecessor’s economic and social programmes, the new president, Isaías Medina Angarita, did not pursue the same measures against the Chinese. In the first month of his presidency, China sent its envoy in Cuba, Dai Baoliu 戴葆鎏, to Venezuela; he, in turn, obtained a promise from the office of Tulio Chiossone, the new interior minister, that all forcibly relocated Chinese people would be returned to their original home states, and that the Chinese would be allowed to resume their original line of work. No further threats against the Chinese in Venezuela were ever again instituted. Nonetheless, the Chinese communities in Venezuela continued to call for the creation of a permanent diplomatic mission to better protect their interests in the country.Footnote ¹²³

Thus, one of the worst discriminatory initiatives against the Chinese migrants in Latin America was averted. In the late 1930s, the López Contreras administration had been serious about expelling the Chinese, even though twice these orders had been stayed. This was not, however, primarily out of sympathy for the Chinese on the part of the Venezuelan elite. The intellectual class had been arguing for prohibiting Chinese entry for decades, and the president and his ministers would have faced little opposition to their removal from Venezuela’s political establishment. However, the Chinese in Venezuela strategically made enough noise in Venezuelan society and in the diplomatic community to persuade Caracas to reverse its decision. The State Department under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted partially out of humanitarian concerns but also out of Realpolitik considerations; in the 1930s, US relations with Tokyo had deteriorated, first over Japanese encroachment into Manchuria and then over China in general. The United States was thus more than happy to assist in the relatively insignificant issue of the Chinese in Venezuela, thereby alleviating the concerns of its wartime allies in Asia about ‘Chinese problems’ in Latin America.

Recovery, 1941–8

The wishes of the Chinese communities were finally granted in 1942 when the Chongqing government designated its first minister to Venezuela.Footnote ¹²⁴ Li Dijun, a career diplomat based in Cuba, arrived in Caracas on 13 April 1943 and presented his credentials to President Medina in a cordial meeting at the Palacio de Miraflores.Footnote ¹²⁵ He would continue to raise concerns about inherently racist immigration policies, and although his efforts would not see results during his tenure, his mission in Caracas did improve the immigration and other rights of the Chinese in Venezuela.Footnote ¹²⁶ Numerous contemporary reports indicate that the Chinese were routinely exempted from the immigration bans, usually with the assistance of the Chinese Legation in Caracas.Footnote ¹²⁷ The Chinese in Venezuela, too, formed a united front to deal with the collective challenges they faced in the country. In particular, the Asociación China de Caracas, in coordination with the Chinese diplomatic mission in Caracas, acted as the umbrella organisation for all the Chinese in the country.Footnote ¹²⁸ The same body, under a different name, remains active today. No significant anti-Chinese measures were ever again reported. Instead, Chinese Venezuelans reported to the Chinese Consulate-General in Caracas about their fair treatment by Venezuelans and the sense of cariño (affection) that they perceived Venezuelans felt towards them.Footnote ¹²⁹

In the 1940s, the domestic political climate in Venezuela was conducive to improving the welfare of Chinese Venezuelans. An increasing number of political figures in Venezuela agreed that the country should accept the Chinese as full citizens and change the anti-Chinese Ley de Extranjeros passed in 1937. The first major political party advocating for these changes was Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD). Chinese diplomats contacted AD politicians to advance changes in the law.Footnote ¹³⁰ In June 1943, an AD legislator in the lower house, José Antonio Marturet Álvarez, proposed a set of modifications to the immigration rules that would allow Asians to enter Venezuela as resident immigrants. The Chinese could receive citizenship more easily, and those fleeing China would find Venezuela a haven from the war. Marturet further stated that Chinese people should be welcomed, since Venezuela, an underpopulated country, needed more immigrants, especially those ‘hardworking and heroic sons of China’, to sustain its ‘hybrid’ population.Footnote ¹³¹

In contrast to earlier anti-Chinese rhetoric during the López Contreras administration, the congressional committee tasked in 1943 with examining Marturet’s recommendations reported the following positive views. First, los chinos had shown themselves to be upright and responsible members of society. Second, the Chinese in Venezuela were guaranteed full citizen-level rights by the State, as enjoyed by all other foreigners in the country. And third, they could expect to enjoy a secure future since Venezuela had no racial discrimination, unlike other parts of the world. In a nutshell, the general intention of the political class was to recognise both the Chinese contribution to Venezuela’s development and their near equality, and to reassure the Chinese of a safe and prosperous future in the country.Footnote ¹³² It would have been an exaggeration to say that the earlier, anti-immigrant sentiments were gone. Still, the anti-Chinese stance of the 1930s and early 1940s was no longer domestically necessary or internationally acceptable. After the United States repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, most nations in the Americas followed. For instance, Nicaragua repealed its anti-Chinese immigration ban in September 1944, with Canada following suit in May 1947.Footnote ¹³³

Undoubtedly, some AD politicians shared genuinely progressive ideas about including the Chinese in Venezuelan society. They and the public shared a sympathy for China’s suffering in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War and, as noted above, the local press followed events in the Second Sino-Japanese War.Footnote ¹³⁴ The people of China were also seen as embattled partners in the global battle against tyranny and oppression: the Chinese and Venezuelans were allies in the struggle for democracy and freedom. Some Venezuelan politicians were happy to gain electoral support from a small but wealthy Chinese Venezuelan minority.Footnote ¹³⁵ At the same time, Chinese inclusion could be perceived as a way of projecting to the world the image of a modern nation-state with progressive social values.