Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007 - (Page 51)

or six decades straddling the turn of the 20th century, one of the very few Chinatowns in the South anchored members of New Orleans’ Chinese-ancestry community. The enclave attested not only to this port city’s ties to the Pacific Rim but also to its position at the apogee of the Caribbean region. New Orleans shared many common traits with Caribbean societies, but one in particular led to the emergence of Chinatown: the sugar cane industry and its post-emancipation labor shortage. F makers, hispanicized them to “Will Dias” or “José Martín,” usually indicating a prior stint in Cuba. Most were family men; some married Caucasians; all were classified as white. Chinese in the Caribbean Basin As emancipation spread throughout the Caribbean region and plantation tropics in the early- to mid-1800s, planters looked westward to the East for alternative labor sources. Starting in 1845, Chinese indentures arrived in Cuba, Peru, Hawaii, Trinidad, Sumatra, Jamaica, and elsewhere to replace the enslaved. In the 80 years after the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire, more than a quarter-million Chinese and South-Asian Indians were brought to British Guiana. To Cuba arrived 800 Chinese “coolies” in 1847, followed by 124,835 more from 1853 to 1874. Conditions under the indentured labor system were so close to the traditional bondage of Africans, in economics as well as brutality, that many Cuban plantations smoothly transitioned from one system to the other. Southern planters took note of the phenomena in the 1850s and pondered it as a way to supplant slave labor with lower-cost contractors. But such a policy could undermine slavery at a time when “the peculiar institution” ranked as the most divisive issue in the nation. The idea died — until the defeat of the Confederacy deprived the planters of the luxury of the choice. After the war, Louisiana sugar planters looked to their Caribbean peers for guidance, particularly in Cuba, the world’s greatest sugar producer, which had profited with contracted Chinese laborers. Prominent men encouraged Fall 2007/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 51 Chinese in Antebellum New Orleans Little is known of the few Asians who lived in Louisiana prior to the Civil War. The Quong Sun Company operated a shrimp-drying platform on Bayou Defond in 1840, and one Chin Su Lee was recorded in St. Bernard Parish marriage records in 1857 — this in a region where, it is believed, the first Asian (that is, Filipino “Manilamen”) settlement in the present-day United States was founded near Lake Borgne in the 1760s. An 1843 Daily Picayune article mentioned a tiny Chinese enclave in New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: The natives of China are located in the neighborhood of Congo Square, where you may see, any day that the wind is high enough, Hong-Kong, Choo-Loo, Pom-Poo, and several other Celestials, flying pretty, parti-colored paper kites. The 1860 census recorded around 30 people of Chinese birth residing in New Orleans. Some worked as cigar makers, stewards, kite makers, cotton mill workers, merchants, and mariners; others may have been guests of Christian missionaries. Some anglicized their names (“John Robinson,” “John Young”); others, particularly the cigar

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

Contents Friends & Letters Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Big Charity: A History of New Orleans’ Public Hospital Historic New Orleans Collection Making Groceries: A History of New Orleans Markets New Orleans’ Faubourg Tremé: Rooted in Tradition Jazz Notes Louisiana Association of Museums Chinatown New Orleans Louisiana Foodways A Question of Secession Louisiana Architecture Louisiana State Museum The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish Terra Incognita Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2007

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