Content area
Full text
Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii, 1900-1936. By Adam McKeown. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. x, 350. Illustrations, maps, tables, index, bibliography. Cloth, $45.00, paper, $18.00).
Not surprisingly, most studies of Asian American history focus on the West Coast, with New York City as the exception that proves the rule. This one is different. In a revision and expansion of his 1997 University of Chicago dissertation, Adam McKeown ambitiously broadens the frame. Deploying his findings from multi-archival research in three languages, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change portrays the global context of Chinese migrations across the Pacific in the early twentieth century, with glimpses of a process that preceded the California Gold Rush of 1849 and continues to the present day.
McKeown's argument is complex, often at a fairly high level of abstraction, and not easily summarized in a brief review. Put simply, he contends that no single global or local factor can explain why migrants leaving from the same south Chinese counties and villages at about the same time, presumably carrying the same values and embedded in similar networks connecting them with the homeland, would create distinctive hybrid cultures in Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii.
The Chinese who headed to all three destinations hailed mainly from the rural counties of the Pearl River...