When thinking of Asians in America, you may know about the legions of Chinese men who worked the mines of California and the West; they also built the transcontinental railroad that connected the entire United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Many of you may also know that thousands of Japanese-American families were interned in American camps during World War II in the mid-twentieth century. But few are probably aware of the even larger numbers of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, East Indians, Koreans, and other Asians that have immigrated to Latin America and the Caribbean.

In this lecture, Dr. Evelyn Hu-Dehart will sketch a panorama of this long and colorful history:  How did these communities come to the Americas, why did they come, and how did they integrate into local societies and become part of the cultural landscape all across Latin America and the Caribbean, producing the art that awaits your attention and appreciation in SAMA’s exhibition, No Ocean Between Us?

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Evelyn Hu-DeHart is a Professor of History, American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. She was Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown from 2002–2014, and Director of the Consortium on Advanced Studies in Cuba during the 2014–2015 academic year, and again in spring 2019. From June 2015 to June 2016, she was Visiting Professor in the History Programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She received her BA in Political Science from Stanford University and her PhD in Latin American/Caribbean history from the University of Texas at Austin, and has received two Fulbright fellowships, to Brazil and Peru. She has written, edited, and published eleven books, on three main topics, in four languages on five continents: indigenous peoples on the U.S.-Mexico border; the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean; and race relations and minority politics in the U.S.

Lectures and Artist Conversations are made possible by generous support from the Louis A. and Frances B. Wagner lecture fund.