Rebel Coolies, Citizen Warriors, and Sworn Brothers: The Chinese Loyalty Oath and Alliance with Chile in the War of the Pacific
This essay interprets Chilean accounts of a loyalty oath by Chinese coolies to the Chilean army during the War of the Pacific against a broader social history of Chinese agrarian resistance in Peru and military experience in China. The essay argues that masculinity and labor were central to articulating divergent political agendas and defining national differences as racial differences. Chilean tales about emancipating Chinese slaves affirmed Chile’s superiority over despotic Peruvians. Moreover, in stories about a Chinese oath, Chileans affirmed their civilizing mission by recognizing Chinese men as similar to themselves: brave warriors prepared to die for freedom and nation. For Chinese men, the oath was not about loyalty to Chile but loyalty to each other in an ongoing fight against bondage on Peruvian plantations. The ceremony enacted a Chinese fraternity of mutual protection and hierarchy that helped leverage Chile’s invasion to replace coolie arrangements with Chinese-controlled subcontracting and free peonage. O n January 11, 1881, hundreds of Chinese men swore a solemn oath to join with the Chilean army as it invaded and occupied Peru during the War of the Pacific (1879–84). Chile had already seized large swaths of western Bolivia and southern Peru in a conflict begun over the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert. By January 1881, Chile had amassed 25,000 troops in the Lurı́n Valley, just 15 miles south of Lima, and was preparing for a final attack on Peru’s capital.1 According to numerous Chilean accounts, Chinese men pledged fidelity in gratitude for Chile having freed them from slavery. Since 1849, over 100,000 Chinese men had been trafficked from southern China through the coolie trade to work as indentured contract laborers on Peruvian plantations and guano mines.2 Chinese workers replaced African-descendant slaves, emancipated in 1854, but the brutal conditions of coolie labor were regularly likened to chattel I am deeply grateful to Jason Oliver Chang, Yong Chen, Ray Craib, Qitao Guo, Patricio Ibarra Cifuentes, Jeff Gould, Tom Klubock, Erik Kongshaug, Ulrike Strasser, Steven Topik, Jeff Wasserstrom, and the two anonymous readers at HAHR for their guidance and comments on this article. 1. Barros Arana, Historia de la Guerra del Pacı́fico, 2:189–90. 2. Meagher, Coolie Trade, 222. Hispanic American Historical Review 98:3 doi 10.1215/00182168-6933556 2018 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-pdf/98/3/439/536090/439tinsman.pdf by guest on 28 May 2019 slavery. Reports of a “Chinese loyalty oath” ( juramento de los chinos) to the Chilean army in 1881 all emphasized that the participants were coolies seeking to avenge their cruel bondage to Peruvian masters. A well-heeled Chinese merchant named Quintı́n Quintana officiated the event and served as the Chinese men’s erudite leader. But even Quintana had originally arrived in Peru as a coolie.3 According to Chileans, the ceremony took place at noon in a makeshift Chinese temple on Hacienda San Pedro. Chinese men gathered before an altar to the Chinese god of war, Kuongkong, in a room adorned with colorful paper lanterns and numerous flags of the Celestial Empire: yellow and red pennants emblazoned with a dragon. According to one account, the altar also displayed the Chilean flag. Quintı́n Quintana addressed the assembly and pledged to liberate his brothers from bondage. A rooster was decapitated and its blood gathered in a special goblet, from which all men drank and swore to likewise drink the blood of any man who betrayed the cause. The men then offered their services to Chile’s commanding officer, General Manuel Baquedano, and organized into auxiliary brigades of ambulance workers, bomb detonators, ammunition loaders, and supply carriers.4 In the following days, some 2,000 Chinese men participated in the pitched battles at Chorrillos and Miraflores that killed a staggering 15,000 men in two days, inaugurated Chile’s three-year occupation of Lima, and paved the way for Chile’s permanent annexation of Tarapacá (from Peru) and Antofagasta (from Bolivia).5 After the war, Chinese men appeared regularly in Chilean veteran parades in Santiago and the newly acquired city of Iquique. Several men received medals of commendation and pensions from the Chilean state.6 The extraordinary image of Chinese coolies tendering their lives and service to the Chilean army and being heralded as Chilean patriots opens a new window on the racialized and gendered violence that reshaped national borders 3. This essay analyzes four eyewitness accounts of a Chinese oath: “Juramento de los chinos” (by journalist Daniel Riquelme), in Ahumada Moreno, Guerra del Pacı́fico, 4:407–9; “Batalla de Chorrillos” (by an unnamed journalist for La Patria, most likely Ricardo Gonzálo y Gonzálo), in Ahumada Moreno, Guerra del Pacı́fico, 5:149–63; “Diario de la campaña a Lima” (by army captain Elı́as Casas C.), in Ahumada Moreno, Guerra del Pacı́fico, 7:38; and the war memoir Urquieta, Recuerdos de la vida, 159–66. Pascual Ahumada Moreno’s eight-volume Guerra del Pacı́fico (1884–91) collects military documents and periodical sources from all sides of the war. 4. “Juramento de los chinos,” in Ahumada Moreno, Guerra del Pacı́fico, 4:407–9. Chinese volunteers were formally received by Baquedano’s deputy, Domingo Sarratea. 5. Sater, Andean Tragedy, 348–49. 6. Chou, Chile y China, 150–54. 440 HAHR / August / Tinsman Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-pdf/98/3/439/536090/439tinsman.pdf by guest on 28 May 2019 and political cultures in nineteenth-century South America. Most histories of the War of the Pacific stage the conflict as contending factions of Peruvian and Bolivian elites, with their overwhelmingly indigenous armies, going up against a united and vaguely Europeanized Chilean invader; stories of subaltern resistance emphasize the tenacious guerrilla warfare (and betrayal) of Andean communities in Peru’s highlands.7 But there was also constant rebellion on the Peruvian coast by black and mestizo peasants as well as by Chinese workers. By the 1870s, Chinese men were the backbone of Peru’s export economies, including its still profitable guano mines and, in far more massive numbers, sugar and cotton estates, where they comprised over 70 percent of workers.8 During the war, Chinese men engaged in a variety of shifting alliances on multiple sides. Some actively fought in guerrilla groups against Chileans or were impressed into the Peruvian army; most tried to stay neutral and survive as best as possible. Where Chinese men teamed up with Chile, Chileans were not always reliable allies. Chinese shopkeepers suffered horrendous property loss from the Chilean army’s uncontrolled looting and war taxes. At other times, Chinese communities were brutally slaughtered by Peruvians in retaliatory and racially charged massacres that Chileans were in a position to prevent.9 Histories of Asians in Latin America reshape national narratives and the very idea of Latin America as a region. Latin America has long figured as part of an Atlantic world but more rarely as part of a Pacific world. Despite early, pathbreaking scholarship on Chinese and Japanese workers in several countries, the broader field of Latin American studies has treated Asians as minor side stories and been complicit in articulations of Latin American nation that excluded Asians from the mix.10 Happily this has begun to change, thanks to a more robust Latin Americanist scholarship on racial formation and the transnational turn’s emphasis on thinking across area fields. A number of superb monographs now trace the long-standing connections between Latin America and Asia and the centrality of Chinese communities, in particular, to struggles 7. Bonilla, “War of the Pacific”; Mallon, Peasant and Nation; Manrique, Las guerrillas indı́genas. 8. Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 84–85; Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers,