Chinky Nosh in Tapachula

The traditional ‘local’ food of Chiapas features as many Chinese dishes as more familiar favourites like tacos (Mesomamerican-Levantine).

Much of it is sold buffet-style around the centre of Tapachula in the form of a choice of guisados (this one cochinillo) served with rice, for less than $5.

Chinese migration and settlement in this state, particularly 1870-1940, followed a well-trodden route. Most came originally to provide cheap labour for the railroad and coffee plantations, but soon upscaled into retail and regional commerce and thereafter shifted into politics.

A major bump in the road came with the Revolution, which came packaged somewhat explicitly with ‘Mexicanisation’, which in practice meant a good deal of xenophobia and sinophobia in particular. Chinese properties were ransacked or stolen; massacres occurred, the kind of pogroms that Jews have regrettably often had to factor in as the price of doing business this way.

Like others, the Chinese had found a niche which was lucrative, but vulnerable. Societies like Mexico lacked a robust middle: there was a pronounced gap between the wealthy and the impoverished, which an organised group of determined ‘middle men’ might fill to pretty much everyone’s benefit.

These gaps may not always be purely economic. When I first arrived in Belize it was obvious that the Afro-Caribbean and Hispanic populations disliked each other intensely. Another chasm that needed spanning? Cantonese migrants have certainly assumed control of much of the country’s retail and other trading industries.

When I first shipped up in Antigua too, when there were only a handful of restaurants and ‘general stores’ in the town centre, and roughly half of these seemed to be Chinese-owned, the significance of this community was a little more salient than it is now.

The Chinese story in these parts has a less well-known earlier component, for they first came as facilitators of the great transfer of treasure from Asia to Spain, via Manila, an overland crossing of New Spain (Mexico) and then onward across the Atlantic after a rendezvous in Havana with other galleons.