When East meets West: An examination of the poetry of the Asian diaspora in Spanish America

The study of Latin American literature and culture has, within the last 20 years, begun to be opened to the notion of minority literature and the study of minority discourse. A trend that academically locates its roots in the Academies of the United States, the study of marginalized groups such as the African Diaspora and the indigenous groups has been undertaken by critics of Latin American literature and culture who recognize the legitimacy of the ideas that these voices that have gone virtually unrecognized by the literary canon of Latin America represent. The purpose of this dissertation is to add yet another unrecognized group to this undertaking: the Asian presence in Latin America.; The chapters in this dissertation represent the historical presence of the Chinese and Japanese in the beginning stages of their migration to Latin American countries, primarily Cuba and Peru. Chapter One presents the methodological framework which stems from a postcolonial perspective, i.e. viewing the Chinese and Japanese as colonized citizens. Chapter Two explains the specifics of each group's arrival to the Americas and the social and economic climate in which they were entering. In addition, the subsequent chapters focus on a writer who is a member of these communities: Chapter Three---Pedro Shimose (Bolivia), Chapter Four---Jose Watanabe (Peru), and Chapter Five---Regino Pedroso (Cuba). Each chapter demonstrates how each body of poetry represents the colonized subjectivity of the poet and how he works through this quandary of signification through poetry. The last chapter concludes the study.